June 2012
abstract
Gérer & Comprendre
Issue 108
Editorial
By Pascal LEFEBVRE
OVERLOOKED
The disenchantment of local management : the heads of temporary work agencies
By Mickaël NAULLEAU
Audencia Nantes - École de Management
and Bruno HENRIET
Institut d’Économie et de Management de Nantes – IAE
Besides the employment contract, wage-earnersand their employer organization are linked by a tacit, psychological bond. Some employees who hold positions as managers in close contact with wage-earners must adopt a more tactful stance. Since they have ties with both “higher-ups” and subordinates, they must ensure a degree of consistency between what they experience and what they make others experience. They must maintain a posture as leader while preserving satisfying contacts with their subordinates. When they feel that their own psychological contract with the organization has been breached, how do they manage to maintain the contract they are supposed to have with their work group? To answer this key question, the theory of a psychological contract is used to shed light on lower-level management’s difficulties. This article is grounded on in-depth fieldwork among the heads of temporary work agencies.
Islamic finance : a new step toward ethics in the finance industry ?
By Virginie MARTIN
Professeure Chercheure, Docteure en sciences politiques, HDR en sciences de gestion, Euromed Management
The principles of so-called Islamic banking are presented in order to see how they can help make the classical Western financial industry more ethical. To what extent do they bring something positive to capitalism? Although “halal” finance introduces an important ethical dimension in this industry’s dynamics, it is not free of shortcomings and limits, especially, but not only, with respect to equality between men and women or interference in corporate activities. France’s reluctance to open its doors to Islamic finance is pointed out.
Wage-earner's freedom of actin : mere theory or an unavoidable fate ?
By Isaac GETZ
Professeur à l’ESCP Europe, auteur de l’ouvrage Liberté & Cie, Paris, Fayard, 2012
Most of those who have given thought to management have, at least since Peter Drucker, criticized the traditional organization of firms with its hierarchical bureaucracy. Case studies are used to focus on firms that, for dozens of years now, have managed to set up a radically different form of organization where wage-earners are completely free to act for the corporate good. This research delves deeper by focusing on the leadership necessary to build this type of organization. Special attention is paid to the performance of these organizations during downturns in the business cycle.
TRIAL BY FACT
Pour en finir avec la génération Y…
Enquête sur une représentation managériale
By François PICHAULT
Professeur à HEC-École de gestion de l’Université de Liège et à ESCP-Europe
and Mathieu PLEYERS
Faut-il à tout prix adapter les dispositifs de gestion aux caractéristiques des nouveaux entrants sur le marché du travail que l’on qualifie généralement de génération Y ? Pour répondre à cette question, nous tenterons d’abord de cerner par le biais d’une analyse de la littérature disponible en gestion les contours de cette génération et de synthétiser les principales recommandations relatives aux politiques à mettre en oeuvre pour faire face aux particularités de la génération Y. Nous testerons ensuite ces caractéristiques supposées sur un échantillon de 851 personnes âgées de 20 à 59 ans. Nos résultats tendent à montrer que les particularités supposées de la génération Y sont minces, tout du moins en ce qui concerne les attitudes et les valeurs au travail de ses membres. En revanche, ils nous rappellent que les fondamentaux de la GRH restent des préoccupations partagées par l’ensemble des générations.
Internationalization and occupational stratification in business schools : professors of language and cultural studies
By Céline DAVESNE
Professeur associé, Rouen Business School
and Sébastien DUBOIS
Professeur associé, Rouen Business School, Chercheur associé au Centre de Sociologie des Organisations, Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, Professeur invité à l’Université Libre de Bruxelles
What changes have taken place in big business schools and in the careers of members of their teaching staffs? The professors of language and culture studies have been the most exposed to the new occupational stratification occurring in these establishments under pressure, in particular, from the system for accrediting and ranking institutions. The emphasis given to research has altered these professors’ expectations and the nature of their work. Not all of them have been capable of adapting to the new rules of the game. This new occupational stratification is also grounded on the social arrangements that are often brought forward to analyze careers.
IN QUEST OF THEORIES
A coproduction of services : the “ dyadic ” service relation of moutain guides
By Rozenn MARTINOIA
Maître de conférences (HDR, sciences économiques), Université Paris- Est Créteil, Pôle d’Histoire de l’Analyse et des Représentations Économiques, Observatoire des Pratiques de la Montagne et de l’Alpinisme
Does the coproduction of services yield qualitative advantages? A study of the services of mountain guides sheds light on the difficulty of determining the quality of a service in an uncertain environment with a potentially incompetent “partial clientemployee”. By using information from the literature, interviews and observations, and drawing on the “dyadic relations” theory, this analysis brings to light the problems of information, coordination and power that affect relations between guides and their clients, and threaten the quality of the services rendered. The pattern that ultimately emerges is unique in the management of the quality of services. For reasons related to time and socioeconomic trends, the work of mountain guides barely benefits from the organizational arrangements and forms of learning that are part of the service sector’s traditional toolbox.
DEBATED
Amnesia and the science of management
By Marie-Josèphe CARRIEU-COSTA
Ex-EDF-Études et Recherches, directrice d'Amble-Consultants
Mosaics
The economics of waste products: An institutionalist approach
On Sylvie Luton’s Économie des déchets. Une approche institutionnaliste, (Brussels: De Boeck, 2011).
By Christophe DEFEUILLEY
Bluebeard, or curiosity in matters of marketing
On Franck Cochoy’s De la curiosité. L’art de la séduction marchande (Paris, Armand Colin, 2011).57, 2009).
By Ambroisine DUMEZ
The managementof people in a quest for itself
On Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton’s, Faits et foutaises dans le management (translated by F. Vuibert, 2006).
By Arnaud TONNELÉ
The possibilities for a politics of happiness?
On The politics of happiness: What government can learn from the new research on wellbeing, by Derek Bok (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2010)
By Michel VILLETTE