Toward a knowledge of action in the managerial sciences: The case of polar expeditions

Pascal Lièvre

Might knowledge in the managerial sciences take the form of a model including both the scientific knowledge that can be decisive for solving problems and the practical, taken-for-granted know-how of persons in the field? Such a model’s scientific value would be related to both the researcher’s ability to explain the work of construction itself and the model’s capacity for enabling those in the field to plan their actions. Recently used for an expedition along Greenland’s western coast, the model for designing a nutritionist strategy illustrates this sort of knowledge of action.
 

TESTIFYING

Sociocultural changes and modernity

An interview conducted with Alain de Vulpian by Bernard Colasse and Francis Pavé

What to do to keep our societies from wasting the opportunities open to them and taking the wrong direction? This question has guided Alain de Vulpian during a career that has led him from the University of Political Sciences via the top management of COFREMCA in 1959 to the Club Jean Moulin today. Inspired by American sociopsychology and cultural anthropology, he and his colleagues, as both witnesses of and actors in the irruption of modernity in contemporary Western societies, have invented a genuine “ethnology of change”.

Managerial education: The firm in works of fiction, as seen through a few recent publications

Hervé Laroche

Organizations, firms and management have been fundamental aspects of our world for a long time now and will probably  remain so. How do works of literature depict them? Although novels provide insight into contemporary society, writers of fiction have not yet explored these three topics. In this respect, research in management is in advance !
 
 
 
 
 

MOSAICS

Laurent Hua: Artificial intelligence and culture: On Denis Berthier’s Le Savoir et l’Ordinateur.

Bernard Buisson and Philippe Silberzahn: Resurrection handbook for firms: On Jim Collins’ Good to great — De la performance à l’excellence: devenir une entreprise leader.
Claude Riveline: Everything about consultants: On Michel Villette’s Sociologie du conseil en management.
Frédérique Pallez: Work, family… leisure? On Dominique Méda’s Le travail.
 

The international standardization of bookkeeping practices: On the resistible rise of IASC/IASB

Bernard Colasse

The International Accounting Standards Board and International Association for Statistical Computing produce information for investors. These private international organizations draw legitimacy for establishing bookkeeping standards from the English-speaking world but have no power for seeing to it that the standards they approve are put into practice. They have to constantly prove their legitimacy and seek support from more powerful organizations, such as the International Institute for Facilitation and Consensus (IFAC), the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) or the European Union. In matters of accountancy, the EU is divided between a shareholders’ model as in English-speaking lands and a partnership model as on the European mainland. The recent rejection of standards 32 and 39 suggests that the supporters of the continental model are impugning the reference to an English-speaking one.
 

The governance of air transportation and the rise of computer reservation systems

Laurence SAGLIETTO

Air transportation exemplifies a successful, gradual opening of a network toward competition. This opening has led to deep organizational changes and new forms of regulation. The momentum in this sector can be assessed from various angles. Lawyers, for example, tackle the question by debating the alternative between deregulation and liberalization, thus leaving the supporters of public management with the choice between competition and government interventions. Economists focus on new forms of competition and networked marketplaces. Approaches via strategic management to air transportation are more cautious, and reorganization in this sector has hinged on airlines’ strategies. 
 

Keeping law and order as an organizational arrangement

Arnaud Lacaze

Created by an 18 November 1810 Napoleonic decree, the Imperial Corps of Mining Engineers has received special attention because of the underground resources that it turns into wealth and, too, because of the specific managerial methods necessary for working mines. But for years now, it costs less to mine ore far from France, in South Africa for instance. As a consequence, the Mining Corps is undergoing a crisis. Miners regularly assemble in front of prefectures to petition public authorities. Since an end might soon be put to mining, such impromptu assemblies — paroxysms for prefectural authorities — are not without consequences on law and order. What happens behind the scenes in this process for keeping the social peace?
 

A sociology of interventions, a plastic, mestizo sociology

Gilles HERREROS

An illustration is used to suggest that a sociology focused on the social uses made of it within firms and organizations would be better off if it avoided being restricted to a single type of theoretical model. Interrelating disciplines, approaches, notions, methods… this is the program of what might be called a sociology of interventions, that would be both plastic and mestizo