LOLF, a mere management tool or a grueling dogma ?

Arnaud LACAZE

How to explain why the French Police and Gendarmerie are so attached to using an array of statistical indicators in order to uphold the rule of law and defend the general interest? How to assess the performance of security services given that they achieve their purpose whenever certain actions are thwarted and nothing happens? Following a criticism of how the Organic Budgetary Act (Loi Organique relative aux Lois de Finances, LOLF) has been adapted to managing police forces, questions are raised about the relevance of a managerial approach that sets objectives for public services and about the legitimacy of a tool that has gradually been imposed as being self-evident and a matter of consensus. Might this tool not be a doctrine or a powerful dogma that should arouse the critical spirit of managers in the public administration ?

TRIAL BY FACT

Managing researchers in firms: Careers, project assignments and the management of skills and qualifications

François FORT and Daniel FIXARI

How are the careers of researchers managed? How does career mobility work for them, especially for researchers in the public sector in France who put in stints in private firms? Do they have more interest in imagining themselves as being part of a scientific community and thus as being nomadic, or in pursuing an in-house career by adapting to the requirements related to the organization’s projects? Where will their quest for an identity lead? What psychological contract to work out between the organization and researchers? A comparative study conducted by the authors in three big groups sheds light on these organizations’ needs for developing and managing rare skills and qualifications, on the way researchers are assigned to projects and on the overall management of both careers and the structure of qualifications. We thus catch glimpse of the differentiation of needs in the private sector with respect to mobility between the public and private sectors. This raises, in turn, question about motivations in the public sector.
 

 OVERLOOKED…

The shop’s window or the back room! The role of Territorial Operation Contracts in Guadeloupe

Eduardo CHIA and Michel DULCIRE

Applying the Farming Orientation Act (Loi d'Orientation Agricole, LOA) in Guadeloupe via Territorial Operation Contracts has run up against a pattern of behavior whereby the large majority of institutions still defend a productivistic model turned toward exportation. According to exhaustive surveys of farmers who have signed up under this program, these contracts have reinforced existing situations. They have been financial props or stimulants for trends already way; they have never helped a new project emerge, nor new practices in local development. The “old” way of managing this new sort of incentives for rural areas has skewed the social contract being proposed. This might turn out to be beneficial by making the productivistic model compatible with the one laid down in the Farming Act. Analyzing the reasons for this lack of coherence between this Act’s objectives and the implementation of the Territorial Operation Contracts on the island sheds light on significant cases of organizational learning. This lead us to expect that professionals and institutions will more satisfactorily control the next generation of contracts to be signed.

Socializing bookkeeping professionals in Quebec

Marie Andrée CARON

Accountancy, an ancestral knowledge, is acquiring more powers granted by firms. It is trying to be reassuring so as to enable managers to act from a distance in a redefined space-time continuum, even as “risk society” — characterized by a time of turmoil, opportunities and risks — is turning the profession into a threat. To clearly discern the stakes in the exercise of the bookkeeping profession, it is of utmost importance to look beyond the purely technical aspects of accountancy and try to understand the meaning that accountants give to their actions during interactions with personnel who are not bookkeepers. Having conducted more than thirty interviews with professional accountants in Quebec, the author’s account has adopted an original literary approach…

OTHER TIMES, OTHER PLACES

 Being a “damned Frenchman” in management in Quebec

Jean-Pierre DUPUIS

 
MOSAICS

François VALÉRIAN, Success, between merit and negotiation ? On Michel Villette and Catherine Vuillermot’s Portrait de l’homme d’affaires en prédateur.

Blanche SEGRESTIN, A different governance ? On M. Aglietta and A. Rébérioux’s Dérives du capitalisme financier.

Sébastien GAND, Managing one’s self in a firm, or the dangers of “psychologizing” management: On Valérie Brunel’s Les managers de l’âme: Le développement personnel en entreprise, nouvelle pratique du pouvoir ?

DEBATES

 Understanding innovation: The missing link

H. DUMEZ

The CONDOR seminar devoted its 10 January 2005 session to the presentation by Richard Lester, professor at MIT, of the book on innovation that he has written with his colleague at MIT, Michael Piore. According to them, innovation combines two irreconcilable processes that have to be brought under control in actual practice: an analytic approach based on problem-solving techniques, which firms have learned; and a less well understood and controlled interpretative approach. Paul Duguid (Berkeley and Copenhagen Business School) and Antonio Strati (University of Trento, Italy) discussed Lester’s intervention.

 
TRIAL BY FACT

 Financing quality hospital care: Up to what point ?

Dr. Etienne MINVIELLE

The French medical insurance system seeks to guarantee a homogeneous level of quality in all health establishments instead of turning quality into a factor of discrimination as in the competitive North American system. But this intention has a noticeable limit: what cost load is society willing to bear to pay for quality? An analysis of the situations wherein regulators are led to balance quality with accessibility and cost shows that, with the introduction of financing for quality care, they will be able to make better informed choices but, too, will have to cope with increasing complexity and greater social pressure for ever more quality. This trend might be inevitable. Regulating quality means formulating a public health imperative, in particular about reducing risks. Becoming more accountable out of a concern for improving quality means responding to the strong demands voiced by citizens and by professionals.

 
Quality! We want top-notch barbers!

Francis PAVÉ

Francis Pavé, who reviewed this article when it was submitted, expressed his scepticism about the ideas it defends. Nonetheless, the editorial board opted for publication but, as it has often done, decided to allow the critical reviewer to formulate his opinions and the author to reply. Ideas thrive in a climate of debate.

 Reply to Francis Pavé
Dr. Etienne MINVIELLE