LES ANNALES DES MINES
Gérer & Comprendre n°107 March 2012
FOR OUR ENGLISH-SPEAKING READERS
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OVERLOOKED Bodies
do not lie: An ethical journey into surveillance technology Through
EU framework programs on research and development, the status and
responsibility of the “human sciences” have evolved. The latter used to
occupy
an outside position as the expertise for evaluating R&D policies or
assessing the legal, social, economic or ethical impact of techniques.
Nowadays, they are invited to participate in designing innovations, the
social
acceptability of technological choices being the grounds for this
invitation.
This review, in the form of a narration, examines the situated,
pragmatic
intervention by a team of social scientists in a European project for
developing
a smart multimodal surveillance system. Managing
“good practices” in a multinational firm: The case of Lafarge The
management of “good practices” between the 57 organizational units
of
Lafarge, a multinational firm, is examined. This codified knowledge,
accessible
through a data base (Lotus Notes), has enabled employees to consult and
propose
innovative practices for improving the quality of production and
relations with
clients. An analysis of a transfer involving the “emitters
and receivers of good practices” brings to
light three key factors in this management, in particular the
predominant role
played by the coordinator inside the firm. The skills necessary for
playing
this role are discussed.
The
economic context of farms has changed significantly in recent years, as
farmers
have been forced to develop new skills and managerial methods. This
trend
should have led to new research in this field. An examination of
bibliographical references from three French databases of studies
conducted by
a research institute (INRA) has served to draw up an inventory of the
output of
French research on farm management from 1990 to TRIAL BY FACT Work
is not play, and other stereotypes in management: An educational
experience The
analysis of an educational experience over ten years involving
86 groups
of students in a course on human resources has brought to light the
stereotypes
that students with an education in management formed about the relation
to
work, the staff’s role and the motivations of the persons they will
eventually
manage. We thus see the extent to which these students have
interiorized a
“liberal mode of subjectivity” that thoroughly colors how they
understand work
situations. This analysis relates the difficulties and issues of
education in
management to the ability to develop practices that reckon with the
real world
of work.
Several
countries have chosen to take up the fight against joblessness by
fostering
entrepreneurialism and thus stimulating the creation of businesses. The
approach adopted in France has led to lifting the administrative and
regulatory
obstacles to becoming an entrepreneur. The advantages have been praised
of
“self-entrepreneurship”, a recurrent theme in recent public policies.
This
article juxtaposes the viewpoints of a jurist and a manager.
“Self-entrepreneurship” raises serious questions about how to stimulate
the
creation of businesses and thus of jobs. First of all, it concerns a
variety of
persons and needs, only part of which, strictly speaking, have to do
with
setting up a business. Secondly, far from “freeing” private initiative
and
propelling an entrepreneurial dynamics, the legislative framework
deters and
restricts initiatives. Finally, this public policy leads to the
quantitative
development of a “forced” form of entrepreneurship — business
creation by
necessity — that, as a few recent studies have shown, has little
potential
for creating lasting employment and ensuring the survival of these
young
organizations. The conclusion formulates suggestions for reconsidering
how
France can foster entrepreneurial behaviors, even among job-seekers.
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IN QUEST
OF THEORIES The
collective development of intercultural competence in a binational
organization: The case of Arte Christoph
Barmeyer and Eric Davoine Research
on intercultural management has often focused on critical incidents in
intercultural interactions. It has seldom drawn attention to the
constructive
aspect of these interactions, which help develop “intercultural
competence”.
Intercultural skills, defined variously, figure at the center of
several
models, which are often restricted to an individualistic approach even
though
the skills in question are observable mainly during contextualized
social
interactions. Intercultural skills might come out of group learning
processes,
which certain contexts favor. The exemplary case of Arte, a European TV
channel
located in Strasbourg, is presented as a “laboratory of
interculturalism”.
Projects
that end nowhere after having consumed a large quantity of resources
are not,
unfortunately, so hard to find. Science is a field where such projects
have
flourished, because an aura surrounds them that hides failure from the
authorities exercising oversight. During the French Revolution, one
such
project, with the objective of calculating logarithms with a very high
degree
of precision, thrived for eleven years under Gaspard de Prony’s
leadership.
Despite the mobilization of about a hundred persons, the Bureau du
Cadastre
came up with nothing. Prony cleverly hid the failure in his reports and
accounts. They omitted saying anything about his own shortcomings in
handling
numbers and blamed higher-ups at the level of the government for
shutting down
the project.
DEBATED Is
“intercultural competence” a useful concept? Although
intercultural contacts, exchanges and transactions are increasing owing
to
globalization, the lessons usually drawn from “intercultural
management” must
be critically examined since they are ever less connected to reality.
The idea
that “intercultural competence” is an indispensable precondition for
success in
international affairs is reviewed. For one thing, this concept assigns
too much
importance to individual communications and is underlaid by a
hypothesis of
mutual comprehension that is hard to apply in reality. It overlooks the
political and institutional context of international negotiations, and
slights
the collective dimension. For another, the supposedly needed “know-how”
(openness, adaptability, patience…) is the opposite of the current
characteristics
of the internal management of big firms (standardization, focus on
short-term
results, constraints). Finally, these intercultural skills are not at
all a
condition for success — for the phenomenal development of international
firms
from emergent countries, India and China in particular. The current
phase of
globalization calls for revising “intercultural” hypotheses, which
mainly took
shape while international firms from countries in the North were
growing during
the 1980s.
MOSAICS
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