Anticiper ou temporiser : injonctions environnementales et recompositions des identités professionnelles en céréaliculture

Questions about the modernization of farming, given its environmental impact, are leading French farmers to rework their occupational identities. This is studied by comparing cereal growers who practice “integrated protection” — a form of agriculture that saves on input — with their “conventional” colleagues. Given the high degree of uncertainty about the standards that will be imposed, cereal farmers have adopted positions that contrast with regard to: the future (anticipating vs. stalling for time), “professional excellence” (whether or not to accept lower yields) and risks (whether to adopt strategies turned toward vigilance or toward insurance). The diffusion of innovative farming practices is limited owing to their lack of legitimacy, which leads farmers to explore the possibilities for obtaining legitimation from outside the profession.     

Deux définitions de la collégialité et leur articulation: le cas d’un diocèse catholique

Against the background of the conflict observed between managers and professionals, two definitions of collegiality are identified: on the one hand, as a specific organizational form (bottom up) and, on the other, as a procedure of bureaucratic management (top down). A study of networks of priests in a catholic diocese in France is used to explore how these two definitions are related. Questions are raised about the effects of a too narrow organizational rationalization that uses collegiality only as a top down, bureaucratic managerial procedure. This always entails the risk of making the work done by experts sterile because it overlooks the first type of collegiality, which is based on the nature of the nonroutine tasks that members perform jointly thanks to an endogenous organizational structure of a bottom up type.     

Le fan comme travailleur : les activités méconnues d’un coproducteur dévoué

We can no longer take fans to be mere consumers of art and entertainment. Given their wide range of involvement (fan clubs, street teams, digital communities…), they are producers as well. In this respect, fans are not just an economic resource but also a work force. Various forms of cooperation between fans and the “cultural industry” are examined. Attention is drawn to their limits and to the consequences in this branch of the economy, which is undergoing a crisis.     

The change process to agile public relations

Despite agility’s increased importance for public relations, the change process from traditional, hierarchically structured public relations to a dynamic agile entity has not yet been comprehensively investigated. This article tackles the research desideratum by discussing this change process from a structuration-theoretical perspective. The subsequent empirical analyses via two qualitative studies from the field of corporate communications focus on the perspective of consultants. These experts support the communication management in this change process with their expertise and neutrality, which the public relations departments themselves lack. Thus, consultants are key contacts for an explorative analysis of the change process toward more agility. In the first study, 39 consultants were interviewed about the change processes that they have guided in order to transform public relations into an agile department. The subsequent case study focuses on an internationally active medical technology manufacturer and analyzes their experience with consulting throughout the agile change process in their public relations department. The results show that the concept of recursiveness is central to the successful implementation of agility in public relations. Expressed in the language of structuration theory, consultants aim to develop rules and resources as modalities that describe an agile structure and then translate them directly into actions. These modalities are continuously developed via sprints, a dynamic process that results in the constant adaptation of the agile structures until the desired result is achieved. The results illustrate the advantages of a neutral, outside authority for the implementation of such a change process.     

Gouverner l’environnement dans les villes européennes: des configurations d’acteurs restructurées pour la production des politiques urbaines

This article focuses on the evolution of the actors involved in environmental decision-making at the urban scale covering a period from the early eighties up to the present. Through the cases of Manchester (United Kingdom) and Saint-Étienne (France), we aim at showing that the shift in discourse from “local environment” to “sustainable development” lead to a dramatic change in the actors involved in the production of urban environmental policies. This evolution will be explained by a transformation of the sources of legitimacy of local political elites (with the rise of output-oriented legitimacy) and a transformation of the political resources they mobilised. This evolution could be analysed as a stronger investment of urban political elites in the “policies” dimension of their work.     

Les pratiques d’enseignement dans l’université de masse : les premiers cycles universitaires se scolarisent-ils ?

The practices of faculty members who teach courses during the freshman and sophomore years in universities are described at a time when the French system of higher education is becoming more dualistic and when we increasingly hear that the indicators of academic failure—especially high during these 2 years—must be brought down. After presenting the concepts of a “scholastic” and an “academic” transmission of knowledge and teacher-student relationship, a survey in the field is used to test the hypothesis of a “scholarization” of the diploma (DEUG) obtained after these 2 years. There are, indeed, trends toward this “scholarization”, which is described: both its generalized expressions (for instance, the psychologization of practices) and its variations by discipline. However, they are still superficial and not very effective. They are superposed on a strong orientation toward research and the reproduction of researchers. Ultimately, members of the faculty teach while considering that the first 2 years of higher education correspond to a phase of latency.     

Interaktion des <Emphasis Type="Italic">als ob</Emphasis>: Privatanleger und Anlageberater

Since the late nineties, stock market investments have become an attractive option for many who want to secure or improve their standard of living, although ?stocks“ are an obscure subject for most of them. They have to rely on investment consultants in banks. Until the stock market crash, there was no reason to complain about the consulting process — shares kept going up in value.But it is remarkable that following the crash, which caused many investors to lose a large amount of money, the relationship between private investors and investment consultants does not seem to have been damaged.In our paper we first show the legal requirements for investment consulting and how these requirements are implemented by banks, and we identify considerable discrepancies between the theoretical and the actual fulfillment of these legal requirements.We then show that it is impossible to meet these requirements in reality because they rely on unrealistic assumptions regarding a consulting process that both adequately covers investment options and addresses the needs of investors. We argue that both sides are more or less satisfied with the situation because they operate on an as if basis: consultant and client talk and behave as if they understood each other.As if the consultant had really informed the client and as if the client had really understood the consultant. This as if which both parties are aware of but which is not openly discussed is the condition of a successful consultancy process and for making the business happen.     

Risk attitudes and risky behavior

In economic theory, risk aversion is a characteristic of the typical utility function of money. Observations of how people deal with risks in real life have cast some doubts on the prevalence of risk aversion. People buy insurance, but they also gamble and take investment risks. Many of the conclusions in the discussions of utility derive from experiments employing some kind of lottery choices. While the experiments have given interesting ideas for theory, there has been little testing of the extent to which the obtained measures of risk attitudes correlate with actual behavior. Data from the VSB panel were used to answer three questions: (1) Can hypothetical risky choice questions be meaningfully answered by ordinary survey respondents? (2) What are the relationships between different measures of risk attitudes and actual portfolio choices of risky assets? (3) What is the relationship between risk attitude and playing in lotteries, lotto, etc.?     

Maux du travail : dégradation, recomposition ou illusion ?

In recent years, the attention of French public opinion has been focused on the noxious effects of new ways of organizing work. Stress, “suffering”, burnout, psychosocial risks and suicides are topics that have brought experts, the media and politicians into action. What do the social sciences have to say about this? Among the several reactions presented, the principal contrast arises between those who analyze the ills of work as “social constructions” and those who see them as the implications of a trend toward intensifying job-related activities.     

Arbiters,Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of Business School Reputations1

How are organizational reputations established? Expanding on recent work that emphasizes the construction of reputations rather than their cultural content, we explore how forces in the organizational environment define organizational reputation. Specifically, we demonstrate how two types of mediators—reputational arbiters and reputational entrepreneurs—influence the development of reputations by organizing and managing the information on which reputations are built. Buttressing our theoretical claims with 30 interviews of business school administrators, we find that these mediators play a central role in determining organizational reputations by engaging in three processes of information manipulation: synthesis, selection, and simplification. In addition to specifying the key role that the manipulation of information by outsiders plays in the development of reputation, this approach suggests the importance of the interrelationships among these mediators in the determination of reputational standing.     

Reputation Work in Selling Film and Television: Life in the Hollywood Talent Industry

Reputation is an important feature in the interactional contexts of work in “culture industries” such as film and television production. But few accounts have examined how reputations are produced in the everyday worlds in which cultural producers live and work. This paper introduces the concept of “reputation work” to describe the front stage and back stage interactional processes through which cultural producers continuously strive to produce their reputations. Drawing on participant observation data gathered at a Hollywood talent management company and a business school course on the talent industry, this paper shows how Hollywood agents and managers perform four types of reputation work. These include how Hollywood talent representatives work to adhere to institutionalized conventions for reputable physical settings, group contexts, giftgiving practices, and selfhoods. Such reputation work performances are done for the sake of “impression management,” but show how this strategic interaction is governed by industry-wide institutions that govern legitimacy.

The ‘Towers of Silence’ Still Stand: Protecting the Perpetrator

This paper explores the idea that professionals in the arena of child sexual abuse can be induced to respond irrationally, through their wish to protect child victims. I examine why child victims of serious sexual assault are treated as the alleged perpetrator should be. That is, when the family unit cannot give the child a safe environment, the child (not the alleged perpetrator) is removed. I argue for a systems focus, examining how each section of the protective industry: lawyers, CSV protective workers, therapists and consultants can contribute to perpetuating and sustaining child abuse. The article is written in a style that plays on the boundaries between academic article and fiction to heighten the effect of my case material.     

Hybrid happening: Organizational reputations in corporate crises

Public relations professionals strive to develop mutually beneficial relationships among key publics that will result in favorable organizational reputations, but crises typically threaten those reputations. Much of public relations crisis research focuses on how to respond after a crisis, but drawing on Expectation Violation Theory (EVT), this research focuses on the expectations of stakeholders before a crisis and how they process information during a crisis. Drawing from reputation management research in marketing, it conceptualizes corporate reputations as encompassing associations related to corporate ability (CA) and corporate social responsibility (CSR). Reputation management research generally has investigated reputations as strong on either CA or CSR, but this research examines the effects of a “hybrid” reputation, which is strong in terms of both CA and CSR associations. The results of an experiment reveal that stakeholders’ responses during a crisis vary based on their expectations, how they perceive a hybrid reputation, and the crisis type. The study has theoretical implications regarding stakeholders’ information processing during a crisis, and it provides public relations professionals insights regarding how to cultivate and protect an organizational reputation.     

Fuites,droit et liberté d'expression: la loi peut‐elle promouvoir les dénonciations dans l'intérêt général?

Les auteurs examinent la différence entre fuites et alertes, ou dénonciations, notamment quant à la protection de leurs initiateurs. A ce propos, ils étudient les dispositions des conventions internationales sur les droits de l'homme et la corruption, ainsi que les textes en vigueur en Allemagne, aux Etats‐Unis, en France et au Royaume‐Uni. Leurs résultats mettent en évidence la complexité et les contradictions des questions en jeu: intérêt général et intérêts individuels, commerciaux et financiers; abus de pouvoir; sécurité et confidentialité face à la communication électronique; place de l'individu dans l'application de la loi; relations d'emploi.     

La dynamique de la vocation : les évolutions de la rationalisation de l’engagement au travail des danseurs de ballet

The commitment to one's work, with body and soul involvement is a key issue in the study of vocation-driven occupations. In such callings, the aspirations that are socially constructed and experienced as vocations have been shown to provide meaning and direction to one's commitment. However, this study of Paris Opera ballet dancers shows that realizing one's aspirations are impossible to achieve does not necessarily result in quitting, nor retraining. Changes in the way dancers relate to their work are studied using sequential analysis, to examine which social factors may explain how this involvement's meaning is maintained. The analysis identifies some processes of vocation recomposition. Thus revealing, behind the professional careers, the “moral careers” of the vocation.     

L'effet de l'éducation sur les disparités salariales dans le secteur informel: l'exemple du Cameroun

L'auteur analyse l'effet de l'éducation sur les disparités salariales dans le secteur informel au Cameroun. L'analyse s'appuie sur des régressions quantiles et des données de l'enquête EESI 2 (deuxième enquête sur l'emploi et le secteur informel au Cameroun, menée en 2010). Elle montre que, dans le secteur informel, le salaire augmente avec le niveau d'instruction, de même que les disparités salariales (qui se creusent notamment sous l'effet d'un diplôme du supérieur). Plusieurs recommandations de politique générale en découlent, en vue d'une formalisation de l'économie: créer plus d'emplois pour la main‐d'?uvre qualifiée, fournir des infrastructures adaptées aux activités informelles et développer la formation professionnelle.