Contenu du sommaire : Des organisations sous pression

The decline of business ecosystems: what lessons can be learned from the fall of the “three giants of Chicago”? The aim of this article is to contribute to a better understanding of the dynamic of Business Ecosystems and, more particularly, to identify mechanisms that contribute to their decline. We conduct an historical study of the pinball ecosystem, which experienced steady growth over sixty years driven by three firms from Chicago and then nearly disappeared. The analysis reveals two factors that explain the decline: the inability of keystones to change their business models and their substantial dependence on dominators.

It feels so good to be bad! The paradox of organizational illegitimacy in the context of investment banks. This study explores the relationship between organizational legitimacy and illegitimacy. It combines media content analysis and quantitative approaches to empirically investigate this link in the specific context of investment banks in the United States. Illegitimacy can paradoxically signal conformity to field level norms. Thus, the more banks are attacked by the print media, the more prestigious they are seen by their peers.

Purchasers as “Moderators” of financialization effects on buyer-seller relationships. Using social exchange to compensate for perceived injustices. This paper aims to examine the consequences of financialization on purchasers' work and on the management of buyer-seller relationships. We draw on organizational justice and social exchange theories to investigate how purchasers perceive and react to financialization tools, practices and philosophy while maintaining sustainable relationships with suppliers. The results of a qualitative study suggest that purchasers perceive financialization mechanisms as sources of organizational injustice (distributive, procedural and interactional) and that they use different behavioral strategies to attenuate its effects through initiating and expanding informal social exchange relationships with suppliers. In particular, we identify four types of behaviors displayed by purchasers: building informal links with and giving voice to suppliers, developing an alternative use of financial tools, increasing transparency and challenging top management financial practices and expectations.

Professional identity of pharmacists and organizational design of pharmacies. This work studies the relationship between a practice which creates a professional identity for the owner-director and the organizational design of their VSB (Very Small Business). The analysis focuses on the pharmacist who owns a pharmacy and constitutes an interesting object of investigation because of their double-faceted profession and the role tension this can entail. The theoretical framework mobilized fits the work on professional identity and hybridization of the roles. The objective is to understand how a professional group can meet, in diverse ways, the new constraints they have to manage.

Prudence as a moral origin of emerging-organizational practices. Risk management and sustainable development are two organizational functions that have developed and institutionalized in recent years. This article attempts to identify the cultural foundations of this simultaneous emergence mobilizing cultural theory of Mary Douglas. We show that the value of prudence can be understood as the common moral and social origin of risk management and sustainable development.

Emotional learning remote from the failure: the case of “la Cité mondiale du vin et des spiritueux”. This research studies the effect of a failure on the subsequent attitude of individuals engaged in a new project. We investigate the links over time between two projects dedicated to wine promotion in Bordeaux city. Our analysis shows the existence of an emotional learning from the failure. This is the result of heuristic approaches used by professional yet competent in their field. These simplified reasonings are related to their lack of involvement in the project that failed.

Purchasing segmentation in customer-supplier relationships. The article presents the results of a qualitative research on devices and tools dealing with purchasing segmentation processes at the heart of customer-supplier relationships. Since Kraljic (1983), the literature in strategy provides strategic matrices to the attention of business leaders. However it remains difficult to determine how these tools can support both the choice of a supplier and sustainable inter-organizational relationships. This paper attempts to fill this gap by specifying how purchasing segmentation devices are intertwined with dynamic capabilities. Choosing a partner is no longer reduced to a static strategic decision, but is designed as a dynamic assessment of the capabilities and resources' that have to be allocated to the control of industrial cooperations.

Overtrust as the original sin? The case study of a business and employment cooperative. If the benefits of trust within collaborative relationships are subject of numerous studies, few scholars focus on its undesirable side effects. Our case study attempts to fill this gap. It questions the institutionalisation process of trust, specifically the resulting mechanisms of trust self-reproduction. From semi-structured interviews and archives analysis, we describe the history of a business and employment cooperative, and highlight the construction process of overtrust. The context, in which the relationship emerges, is here characterised by the dominance of informal settings and strong ties between actors. The situation leads to cognitive biases affecting the institutionalisation process of trust and resulting in an overtrust.

Mechanisms of legitimacy rebuilding: the case of a fruit and vegetables wholesaler in France. Survival is a serious issue for companies whose legitimacy is challenged. This was the case for fruit and vegetables wholesalers after the disintermediation event of the 90's. With an analysis of the wholesaler “Orchade”, our results bring to light two mechanisms: “tinkering” and institutional leader's strategies, which offer a description of legitimization in a context of crisis which is a topic still under explored by new-institutionalism studies.

Discourse on CSR in the legitimacy process in the banking sector. This empirical article deals with how banks attempt to re-establish legitimacy through Corporate Social Responsibility. It is based on French bank reports from 2004 to 2011. There were two principal results: on one hand, banks have been better communicating their responsibilities since the sector-based crisis to re-establish their legitimacy. On the other hand, and more surprisingly, in this strongly institutionalized sector, we did not observe isomorphic comportment: the dynamics of legitimacy remain differentiated.