September 2005
abstract
Gérer & Comprendre
Issue 81
Editorial
By Francis LEFEBVRE
Secrétaire général du Comité de rédaction
OVERLOOKED…
LOLF, a mere management tool or a grueling dogma ?
By Arnaud LACAZE,
Doctorant au centre de recherche en gestion de l’école Polytechnique
TRIAL BY FACT
Managing researchers in firms: Careers, project assignments and the management of skills and qualifications
Carrières, affectation aux projets et pilotage des compétences
By François FORT
Paris IX Dauphine
and Daniel FIXARI
Ecole des mines de Paris
How are the careers of researchers managed? How does career mobility work for them, especially for researchers in the public sector in France who put in stints in private firms? Do they have more interest in imagining themselves as being part of a scientific community and thus as being nomadic, or in pursuing an in-house career by adapting to the requirements related to the organization’s projects? Where will their quest for an identity lead? What psychological contract to work out between the organization and researchers? A comparative study conducted by the authors in three big groups sheds light on these organizations’ needs for developing and managing rare skills and qualifications, on the way researchers are assigned to projects and on the overall management of both careers and the structure of qualifications. We thus catch glimpse of the differentiation of needs in the private sector with respect to mobility between the public and private sectors. This raises, in turn, question about motivations in the public sector.
OVERLOOKED…
The shop’s window or the back room! The role of Territorial Operation Contracts in Guadeloupe
By Eduardo CHIA
INRA-SAD
and Michel DULCIRE
CIRAD-TERA
Applying the Farming Orientation Act (Loi d'Orientation Agricole, LOA) in Guadeloupe via Territorial Operation Contracts has run up against a pattern of behavior whereby the large majority of institutions still defend a productivistic model turned toward exportation. According to exhaustive surveys of farmers who have signed up under this program, these contracts have reinforced existing situations. They have been financial props or stimulants for trends already way; they have never helped a new project emerge, nor new practices in local development. The “old” way of managing this new sort of incentives for rural areas has skewed the social contract being proposed. This might turn out to be beneficial by making the productivistic model compatible with the one laid down in the Farming Act. Analyzing the reasons for this lack of coherence between this Act’s objectives and the implementation of the Territorial Operation Contracts on the island sheds light on significant cases of organizational learning. This lead us to expect that professionals and institutions will more satisfactorily control the next generation of contracts to be signed.
Socializing bookkeeping professionals in Quebec
By Marie-Andrée CARON
Professeur, Département des Sciences Comptables, chercheur-associée, ESG Montréal (QUĖBEC)
Accountancy, an ancestral knowledge, is acquiring more powers granted by firms. It is trying to be reassuring so as to enable managers to act from a distance in a redefined space-time continuum, even as “risk society” — characterized by a time of turmoil, opportunities and risks — is turning the profession into a threat. To clearly discern the stakes in the exercise of the bookkeeping profession, it is of utmost importance to look beyond the purely technical aspects of accountancy and try to understand the meaning that accountants give to their actions during interactions with personnel who are not bookkeepers. Having conducted more than thirty interviews with professional accountants in Quebec, the author’s account has adopted an original literary approach…
OTHER TIMES, OTHER PLACES
Being a “damned Frenchman” in management in Quebec
By Jean-Pierre DUPUIS
HEC
Nowadays, even as most anthropologists are seeing cultures as being dynamic and open in interaction with each other, intercultural management is having trouble incorporating this knowledge and opening toward interactionist approaches to culture. How, for instance, to explain the refusal of certain persons in Quebec to enter into business relations? Or the “confinement” that some French persons living in Quebec experience or choose — difficulties symbolized by the oft heard phrase “damned Frenchman”? To see more clearly into this, the author has inquired into the experiences of various persons and into the history of the relations between France and Quebec since New France was handed over to Great Britain.
Mosaics
La réussite, entre mérite et négociation ?
À propos du livre de Michel Villette & Catherine Vuillermot : « Portrait de l’homme d’affaires en prédateur »
By François Valérian
Rédacteur en chef des Annales des Mines
La gouvernance… autrement ?
À propos du livre de M. Aglietta et A. Rébérioux : « Dérives du capitalisme financier »
By Blanche Segrestin
centre de gestion scientifique - Ecole des Mines de Paris
La gestion du sol en entreprise
À propos du livre de Valérie Brunel : « Les managers de l’âme - Le développement en entreprise, nouvelle pratique du pouvoir ? »
By Sébastien Gand
centre de gestion scientifique - Ecole des Mines de Paris
DEBATES
Understanding innovation: The missing link
By Hervé DUMEZ
centre de recherche en gestion de l’école Polytechnique
The CONDOR seminar devoted its 10 January 2005 session to the presentation by Richard Lester, professor at MIT, of the book on innovation that he has written with his colleague at MIT, Michael Piore. According to them, innovation combines two irreconcilable processes that have to be brought under control in actual practice: an analytic approach based on problem-solving techniques, which firms have learned; and a less well understood and controlled interpretative approach. Paul Duguid (Berkeley and Copenhagen Business School) and Antonio Strati (University of Trento, Italy) discussed Lester’s intervention.
TRIAL BY FACT
Financing quality hospital care: Up to what point ?
By Dr. Etienne MINVIELLE
médecin chercheur au CNRS
The French medical insurance system seeks to guarantee a homogeneous level of quality in all health establishments instead of turning quality into a factor of discrimination as in the competitive North American system. But this intention has a noticeable limit: what cost load is society willing to bear to pay for quality? An analysis of the situations wherein regulators are led to balance quality with accessibility and cost shows that, with the introduction of financing for quality care, they will be able to make better informed choices but, too, will have to cope with increasing complexity and greater social pressure for ever more quality. This trend might be inevitable. Regulating quality means formulating a public health imperative, in particular about reducing risks. Becoming more accountable out of a concern for improving quality means responding to the strong demands voiced by citizens and by professionals.
Quality! We want top-notch barbers!
By Francis PAVE
centre de Sociologie des Organisations
and Reply to Francis Pavé
Francis Pavé, who reviewed this article when it was submitted, expressed his scepticism about the ideas it defends. Nonetheless, the editorial board opted for publication but, as it has often done, decided to allow the critical reviewer to formulate his opinions and the author to reply. Ideas thrive in a climate of debate.
Réponse à Francis PAVE
By Dr. Etienne MINVIELLE
médecin chercheur au CNRS