September 2006
abstract
Gérer & Comprendre
Issue 85
Editorial
By Francis LEFEBVRE
TESTIFYING
See far, act fast
Entretien avec Xavier Fontanet, Président d’Essilor International, mené par Frédérique Pallez et Francis Pavé, CSO-ENPC
How to head a company formed out of a merger between a workers’ cooperative and a family business? How to manage a world group with a single product whose executive staff has national roots? This is the story of Essilor. Negotiating with stockholders, selecting the best, managing different “cultures”… its leaders do not hesitate to be present on all fronts. Since time is now as precious as gold, the key strategic weapons for Essilor’s top officials are: the agenda for executive meetings, permanent anticipation and speedy reactions.
OTHER TIMES, OTHER PLACES
Logan in the tracks of the 2 Ch?
By Jean-Louis LOUBET
Professeur d'Histoire contemporaine à l'Université d'Evry -Val d'Essonne, Chercheur au LHEST (Evry) et à l'IDHE (CNRS)
How to head a company formed out of a merger between a workers’ cooperative and a family business? How to manage a world group with a single product whose executive staff has national roots? This is the story of Essilor. Negotiating with stockholders, selecting the best, managing different “cultures”… its leaders do not hesitate to be present on all fronts. Since time is now as precious as gold, the key strategic weapons for Essilor’s top officials are: the agenda for executive meetings, permanent anticipation and speedy reactions.
DEBATES
The value of incompetence: From the criminal to the academic mafia — a methodological approach
By Diego GAMBETTA
texte d’un débat transcrit par Hervé DUMEZ
For the mafia, regulating criminal marketplaces through violence is not a satisfying economic choice; it is better to do this through ties of dependence. Does the university mafia apply the same principle? Since a person owes even more to the extent that he is incompetent, the temptation is strong for a “mandarin” to choose only the incompetent so as to maintain his own control. Fidelity comes to count more than merit. Woe betide whoever is nearing retirement! They do not have enough time left to return favors, since they are on the way out and will soon be powerless. But what if someone is only feigning incompetence?
TESTIFYING
The Catholic Church and its bishops during an era of strategy and management
By François MAYAUX
Professeur à l'Ecole de Management de Lyon, Directeur de la Société ALTERIA
and Monseigneur Laurent ULRICH
Archevêque de Chambéry, Président du Conseil pour les affaires économiques, sociales et juridiques, de la Conférence des Evêques de France
Can a diocese be run like a firm? No, since a bishop has a spiritual role to fill. Beyond his temporal duties, he has to be accountable… to God! But how to revive a “business” that has experienced a drop in the number of baptisms, church marriages, practising Catholics and priestly callings? How can a bishop balance the books when church offerings are drying up and when a quarter of the diocese’s budget is devoted to expenditures related to real estate? The Church is going to have to make choices and professionalize operations. Is it going to sell its soul?
OVERLOOKED…
Coping with violence in the workplace: The shelf
By François GRIMA
Maître de conférences en gestion - Université Paris 12, IRG
and Renaud MULLER
Professeur à ESC Dijon, CEREN
The avowed intention to harm — a classical motive in detective movies — is also frequently part of the scenario in firms, which have no qualms about shelving employees. How to cope with this? Should the person remain and organize his defense so as to put up a fight, or should he leave? A shelf is not a cocoon. Harassment takes several forms; violence is graduated. The workplace becomes a place of suffering… and a vantage point for observers interested in violent practices inside organizations. What if all these methods were a flexible modality of employment that is less visible than the contingent workforce?
TRIAL BY FACT
Designing indicators out of knowledge stemming from multiple practices: The case of biodiversity
By Harold LEVREL
Attaché temporaire d'Enseignement et de recherche à l'Université de Bretagne Occidentale, doctorant des hautes études en sciences sociales , UMR 51-73, Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle
How to design indicators for a hard-to-define scientific phenomenon that very few scientists have observed? Doing this in the case of biodiversity is a wager. Nonetheless, CRBPO (Centre de Recherche sur la Biodiversité des Populations d’Oiseaux) has designed a system of indicators (Stoc, Suivi Temporel des Oiseaux Communs) for following up on the dynamics of bird populations. Developing this system meant, first of all, reckoning with the costs of transactions between local organizations of ornithologists, volunteer or professional, and proposing a common language for reducing these costs. It then entailed an inquiry into information needs in order to develop a sufficiently flexible tool that can evolve. Finally, it called for trusting users and taking the risk of entering into competition with other systems.
IN QUEST OF THEORIES
Did you say “human capital”?
By Fabienne AUTIER
Professeur associé GRH et Organisation, chercheur Institut français de gouvernement des entreprises EM Lyon
Wage-earners are not yet familiar with the phrase “human capital”. In the near future however, head offices might need to reconsider everything having to do with the firm’s “government” in relation to this sort of capital. Mostly immaterial and inseparable from its holder, human capital is going to shake up both human resource policies and control. Now as vital as financial capital, it should be the focus of investment programs and be reckoned with in terms of overhead and amortization. We might even imagine recruitment policies and a “knowledge economics” based solely on this criterion. Firms could be increasingly distinguished between the ones that try to minimize human capital and those that accept to pay a fair price for it.
Mosaics
Ideal workers in an ideal organization
On Marie-Anne Dujarier’s L'idéal au travail (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006).
By Jean-Baptiste SUQUET
Technical democracy
On Nicolas Chevassus-au-Louis’s Les briseurs de machines: De Ned Ludd à José Bové (Paris: Seuil, 2006).
By Jean-Marc WELLER
Changing the way of looking at unemployment
On Pierre Cahuc and André Zylberberg’s Le chômage, fatalité ou nécessité? (Paris: Flammarion, 2004).
By Arnaud TONNELE