OVERLOOKED…

The strategic behavior of sugar-manufacturers faced with the reconfiguration of the world’s sugar industry
Mohamed Akli Achabou

To identify the changes taking place in the world’s sugar industry and the strategies chosen by producers to adapt to them, an approach in terms of the global chain of value-creation has proven advantageous. As the results show, a trend is under way toward investments in producing biofuels. The decline in sugary-making and the favorable context for renewable energy sources accounts for this strategic choice.

Collaboration between competitors for managing the common good: The firms that collect and store cereals in Alsace
Mourad Hannachi, François-Christophe Coleno and Christophe Assens

How to develop, in a given geographical area, a competitive advantage such that it cannot be transferred or moved elsewhere? What aptitudes and qualifications distinguish the area? How to preserve the local resources at the source of the area’s growth? These questions are tackled by focusing on the firms that collect and store cereals in Alsace, France. Faced with a crisis, these companies, which compete with each other, have worked out a joint response beyond their rivalry and purely individual goals. As a consequence, the geographical area has become a common good with a strategic importance, for all local firms, as great as the “market’s logic”.

 
PGI labels and mass distribution: A network analysis of Agen prunes
Marie Carpenter and Stéphanie Petzold

The marketing success of protected geographical indications (PGI) in the French mass retail industry is analyzed through the network approach developed by the International Marketing and Purchasing Group. A detailed case study of the operation of the network of producers, processors and packagers that supply “Agen” prunes to French retail chains brings to light the potential advantages — opposite the powerful forces of mass distribution — of adopting a label for authenticating the origin of produce. A careful description of how this supplier network is mobilized upstream in the marketing process brings to light the stakes in the field of sales.

 
Relations between producers and distributers: Sharing added value in the French dairy industry
Olivier Mevel

The European dairy industry is painfully undergoing an accelerated transition from an overregulated economic haven toward a market economy exposed to fluctuations of all sorts. In this context, does the disjunction observed between the prices paid to producers and those charged to consumers result from a lack of transparency in the pricing practiced by mass retail chains? This question is approached from two angles: a) by setting in perspective the concomitant emergence of the World Trade Organization and of a new business model that, based on low-cost production, is evidence of the power wielded by mass retail chains over the world economy; b) by trying to understand the operations up- and downstream in the dairy industry (in order to form an opinion about how distribution margins are established) and by designing technical solutions for returning, in this industry, to a fair sharing of the added value.

 
Making regulations
Patrice Devos, Daniel Fixari and Michel Nakhla

Criticism is often directed at the pile of more or less applicable legal decisions that several generations of reforms have spawned. The regulation-producing process has seldom been described and analyzed at the operational level of ministerial decrees and service instructions. Two experts on ministerial operations explain their concrete actions for drafting regulations of a “reasonable” degree of complication. Once again, the devil is in the details: it is difficult to foresee all the effects that a text will have on stakeholders and to organize the necessary degree of cooperation.

TRIAL BY FACT

The investment climate in Egypt: The conditions for a sustainable reform — institutions or relations?
Hèla Yousfi

The so-called developing countries are exhorted to reform their “investment climate”. They will, according to sponsors, find a place in the global economy thanks to bold reforms based on good institutional practices that have been well proven elsewhere. As experience shows however, importing “good” institutions does not suffice for them to mechanically produce their blessings. A case study in Egypt, based on an ethnographic method, shows that improving the investment climate — in particular, the confidence between private investors and public authorities — is, indeed, a matter of institutions; but those who implement such measures must believe in them and deem them legitimate enough so that they not try to circumvent them.

 
IN QUEST OF THEORIES

Prescribing safety, negotiating expertise
Grégory Rolina

Owing to their presumed impact on the safety of high-risk installations, the interactions between regulators and the regulated are a major but seldom explored subject of research in risk management. A study by experts on human and organizational factors in nuclear safety sheds light on the various phases (and their effects) of the process whereby experts produce assessments. Light is shed on a “negotiated expertise” typical of the French style of safety regulations in nuclear installations. It is based on an ongoing technical dialog between experts and operators (“French cooking” for Anglo-Saxons). This analysis of “expertise” and thus of the “logics of action” implemented by experts proposes a typology of actions that can be transposed to other sorts of risk or other fields of activity. It hands us the keys for understanding a very contemporary activity.

MOSAICS

 
Emmanuel Coblence: Modest museums, modern museums? On Robert R. Janes’ Museums in a troubled world: Renewal, irrelevance or collapse?

Dominique Jacquet: Finance, a servant or a trickster? On Paul Dembinski’s Finance servante ou finance trompeuse?

Pascale de Rozario: Management in an intercultural context: On Eduardo Davel, Jean-Pierre Dupuis and Jean-François Chanlat’s La gestion en contexte interculturel: Approches, problématiques, pratiques et plongées.