December 2006
abstract
Gérer & Comprendre
Issue 86
Editorial
By Francis LEFEBVRE
TRIAL BY FACT
Time warfare
By Jean-Emmanuel RAY
Professeur à l'Université Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne)
Is this an article simply about how to manage time? No, it focuses on a philosophy for living. Is the goal of our existence merely to do several things and be in several places at once? Does modernity imply a preference for proliferating contacts rather than face-to-face meetings… perhaps with one’s self? What’s the purpose of all this agitation to “save” time? We risk losing those who are close and not doing what takes time — thinking, inventing or creating. Unaware of all this, the busy person tracks down whatever he can put to use to gain time and radically alters the relation between work and privacy.
WHILE READING
Egypt and the experts
By Michel Callon
Professeur à l'ENSMP
While reading Tim Mitchell’s abrasive Rule of experts, we are forced to change our way of looking at developmental policies, experts from international organizations, the social sciences, Egypt’s history following independence… Everything is related; nothing is neutral. Mosquitos are more dangerous than tanks; the system of land ownership is a war machine; cartography creates the economy; the CIA manipulates anthropology; “Egyptian peasants” are a pure invention for justifying the West’s “mission” in the Mid-East. To obtain a clearer view of the facts, we must decompartmentalize the social sciences and bring the natural sphere closer to the social one, technology closer to politics.
OVERLOOKED…
The paradox of “being behind” in the aerospace industry
By Victor DOS SANTOS PAULINO
Université de Nice, Sophia Antipolis, DEMOD/GREDEG
TRIAL BY FACT
Veolia Environnement: A model of hybrid organizational change
By Christophe PLOUVIER
Ecole Polytechnique
Mosaics
On the difficulty of referring to practices
On Michel Berry’s Managements de l'extrême (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 2006).
By Michel Villette
Foucault and management: How are they related?
On Armand Hatchuel, Éric Pezet, Ken Stackley and Olivier Lenay’s Gouvernement, organisation et gestion: L'héritage de Michel Foucault (Quebec: Presses de l'Université de Laval, 2005).
By Jean-Michel Saussois
Mythology of the “Moderns”
On Philippe d'Iribarne’s L'étrangeté française (Paris: Seuil, 2006).
By Alain Henry
Psychology at labor’s bedside
On Dominique Lhuilier’s Cliniques du travail (Paris: Éditions Érès, 2006).
By Marie-Anne Dujarier
OTHER TIMES, OTHER PLACES
The "joint adventures” of French small and medium-sized businesses in China: A case study, 1994-2004
By Michèle DUPRE
Sociologue, chercheur associé au GLYSI-SAFA, ISH-LYON
and Etienne de BANVILLE
Chercheur économiste CNRS au CRESAL, à Saint-Etienne
Reforming public research in Japan: An overhaul
By Hiroatsu NOHARA
Chargé de recherche au LEST-CNRS