This paper has several aims. On the theoretical aspect, it consists in reassessing two perspectives often neglected in the public administration literature by focusing, first, on "history-made body", that's to say reform effects on administrators as individuals and social body, and, second, on the symbolic dimension of reforms including, beyond discourse, the symbolic value of administrative and reform practices. Those related perspectives help to shed a new light upon the resistance/acceptance of administrative reforms, and moreover upon their effect on the administrative power. To illustrate it, the empirical part of the paper consists in studying the effect of the managerial reform within the EU Commission. It assumes that this reform is related to a crisis of reproduction due, among other factors, to an important symbolic matter, which consists in a deconsecration process of the Commission's administrative body. In order to show it, the paper builds on revisiting the Weberian theory as well as a huge empirical material coming from several years of research. Beyond the EU Commission's case, this paper aims to think about the more general deconsecration effect produced by managerialism in western bureaucracies. Points for practitioners: This paper leads to a more reflexive approach on management and administrative reforms, an approach more sensitive to people making administration works rather than (too) many conceptual theories considering administration as a thing instead of a social body. In doing so, it reveals a hidden part of managerial effect, most of the time thought through the categories of cost, efficiency of procedures, etc: the social effect it produces in terms of power, re/devaluation of people concerned with. Practical dimensions of reforms, such as staff selection, core competences definition, training, assessment are consequently read with other glasses, which should lead to better understand why such tools fit or not with some type of organisations. Useful for European and international organisations considering their social histories and cultures, the findings are more over fruitful for western public services and administrations reforms. Bio: Didier Georgakakis is full professor in political science at Sciences-Po Strasbourg where he occupies the Jean Monnet chair of European political sociology and chairs the European Politics master program. Former director of the Centre for European Political Sociology (GSPE, CNRS), he is also a junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France and visiting Prof. at the College of Europe (Bruges). His current research focuses on the sociology of senior European officials and the reconfigurations of the EU