Organizations

The Organizations 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, alternative), according to both intra-organizational dynamics (particularly on issues related to work, skills, and innovation) and inter-organizational dynamics (from highly localized ecosystems to global value chains). Beyond organizations composed of individuals, we are also interested in meta-organizations whose normative productions can shape behavior in broader institutional fields.

The social and societal impact of management practices is of particular interest to the group, which focuses on the objectives of organizations and their integration into institutional and political contexts that are currently undergoing significant change. This echoes the desire to produce knowledge that is useful for management actors—broadly defined as including a variety of stakeholders, sometimes supporting existing systems, sometimes taking the opposite approach in favor of more innovative and unexpected management methods.

The research group focuses on organizational dynamics from the perspective of the relationships, balances, and imbalances between change and stability, sustainability and innovation, social order and emancipation, in a variety of entrepreneurial contexts related to major contemporary societal issues, such as new social and environmental standards, global value chains, alternative organizations, corporate social responsibility policies, work management, and environmental management. The Organizations group is supported by Labex Axis 2 Program 1: Standards, Innovation, and Responsible Management.

The organization is approached in a multi-scalar and dynamic manner, as a social, political, and economic process that promotes social cohesion and emancipation, but also violence and domination. The reference frameworks used draw on organizational theories, but also on the organization of markets, industries, and institutional fields, from 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 development of technical , managerial, social, and environmental standards through the following questions: Who creates standards? To what extent do organizations decide on them? Are they a tool for organization/stabilization and evolution/transformation? How does the process of disseminating and crystallizing a standard work? How does it become an instrument of regulation? How do established standards evolve and how do any substitution effects work? Do these processes operate in different ways depending on the nature of the standards in question, the actors involved, or their purposes?

The harmony between sustainability and innovationraises questions: How are skills, memories, and organizational practices passed on over time? What roles do they play in innovation processes? How do they evolve in relation to the economic, social, societal, and environmental challenges that organizations face and promote? Are there organizational and managerial innovations that promote sustainability?

Finally, there is the issue of structuring and deploying alternative organizations, which raises many questions at both the micro and macro organizational levels: on the one hand, what tensions can be observed in these organizations as they seek to strike a new balance between social, economic, and environmental dimensions in their production methods and/or in the products and services they offer? How can these tensions be managed in order 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 (state/business/civil society) play in driving and supporting transformative processes aimed at emancipation?