Organizations

The Organizations research group is led by Estelle PELLEGRIN-BOUCHER and Julien GRANATA. In the Organizations research group, we focus on organizations in all their diversity (private, public, and alternative), examining both intra-organizational dynamics (particularly issues related to work, skills, and innovation) and inter-organizational dynamics (ranging from deeply rooted local ecosystems to global value chains). Beyond organizations composed of individuals, we are also interested in meta-organizations whose normative outputs can shape behavior across broader institutional fields.

The social and societal implications of management practices are of particular interest to the group, which focuses on the purposes of organizations and their integration into institutional and political contexts that are currently undergoing significant change. This reflects the desire to generate knowledge that is useful to management actors—understood in the broadest sense to include a variety of stakeholders—sometimes by supporting existing systems, and sometimes by challenging them in favor of more innovative and unexpected management approaches.

The research group focuses on organizational dynamics from the perspective of the interrelationships, balances, and imbalances between change and stability, sustainability and innovation, social order and emancipation, across a variety of entrepreneurial contexts linked to major contemporary societal challenges, such as new social and environmental standards, global value chains, alternative organizations, corporate social responsibility policies, and the management of labor and the environment. The Organizations group is affiliated with Labex Axis 2, Program 1: Standards, Innovation, and Responsible Management

Organization is understood in a way that is both multi-scalar and dynamic—as a social, political, and economic process that fosters social cohesion and empowerment, but also gives rise to violence and domination. The theoretical frameworks drawn upon are rooted in organizational theory, as well as in the organization of markets, industries, and institutional fields, from a multidisciplinary perspective that respects the epistemological pluralism of the group’s members.

Research Topics

Three themes form the basis of our research areas:

The development of technical , managerial, social, and environmental standards through the following questions: Who creates the standards? To what extent do organizations determine them? Are they instruments of organization/stabilization and evolution/transformation? How does the process of disseminating and solidifying a standard operate? How does it become a regulatory instrument? How do established standards evolve, and how do potential substitution effects occur? Do these processes operate differently depending on the nature of the standards in question, the actors promoting them, or their objectives?

The balance between sustainability and innovationraises the following questions: How are organizational skills, knowledge, and practices passed down over time? What roles do they play in innovation processes? What changes occur—and in what ways do they build on the past—in relation to the economic, social, societal, and environmental challenges that organizations face and help address? Are there organizational and managerial innovations that promote sustainability?

Finally, the issue of structuring and deploying alternative organizations, which raises numerous questions at both the micro- and macro-organizational levels: on the one hand, what tensions are observed in these organizations as they seek to establish new balances between social, economic, and environmental dimensions—within their production methods and/or in the products and services they offer? How can these tensions be managed to bring about societal transformation? How do these dissonances enable the pursuit of multiple objectives? On the other hand, how do these organizational and social experiments contribute to broader counter-hegemonic processes capable of generating systemic change? In the context of globalization and within global value chains, what roles do hybrid spaces (government/business/civil society) play in driving and supporting transformative processes aimed at emancipation?