Organizations

The Organization group is headed by Anne MIONE and Florence PALPACUER. In the Organizations research group, we are interested in organizations in all their diversity (private, public, alternative), according to a dynamic that is both intra-organizational (particularly on issues relating to work, skills and innovation) and inter-organizational (from territorially-anchored ecosystems to global value chains). In addition to organizations made up of individuals, we are also interested in meta-organizations, whose normative productions can shape behaviors in broader institutional fields.

The social and societal implications of management practices are of particular concern to the group, which is interested in the purposes of organizations and their insertion in today's rapidly changing institutional and political contexts. It echoes the desire to produce useful knowledge for those involved in management - understood in the broadest sense as including a variety of stakeholders, sometimes supporting existing systems, sometimes countering them in favor of more innovative and unexpected management methods.

The research group is interested in organizational dynamics from the point of view of articulations, balances and imbalances between change and stability, sustainability and innovation, social order and emancipation, in a variety of entrepreneurial contexts linked to major contemporary societal issues, such as new social and environmental standards, global value chains, alternative organizations, corporate social responsibility policies, labor and environmental management. The Organizations group is part of the Labex Axe 2 Program 1: Standards, Innovation and Responsible Management.

Organization is approached in a multi-scalar and dynamic way, as a social, political and economic process that brings about social cohesion and emancipation, but also violence and domination. The frames of reference used draw on theories of organization, but also on the organization of markets, industries or institutional fields, in a multidisciplinary perspective and with respect for the epistemological pluralism of the group's members.

Research topics

Three themes structure our fields of research:

The construction of technical, managerial, social and environmental standards through the following questions: Who creates standards? To what extent do organizations decide on them? Are they instruments of organization/stabilization and evolution/transformation? How is a standard disseminated and crystallized? How does it become an instrument of regulation? How do established norms evolve, and how are any substitution effects brought about? Do these processes operate in different ways, depending on the nature of the standards in question, the actors behind them, or their purpose?

The harmony between sustainability and innovation, leading to the following questions: How are skills, memories and organizational practices transmitted over time? What role do they play in innovation processes? How do they evolve in relation to the economic, social, societal and environmental challenges faced by organizations? Are organizational and managerial innovations sustainable?

Lastly, the structuring and deployment of alternative organizations raises a host of questions at both micro- and macro-organizational levels: on the one hand, what are the tensions observed in these organizations as they seek to build new balances between social, economic and environmental dimensions, within their modes of production and/or in the products and services they offer? How can these tensions be managed to produce societal transformation? How can dissonance enable the pursuit of multiple objectives? And how do these organizational and social experiments contribute to broader counter-hegemonic processes, capable of generating systemic change? In a context of globalization and global value chains, what role do hybrid spaces (state/corporate/civil society) play in driving and supporting emancipatory transformation processes?