Contenu du sommaire : Le gestionnaire public en question

Sustainable transport in large retailing industry. For which consumer perceptions? This paper aims at grasping on consumer perceptions related to the adoption of sustainable transport practices by the French large retailing industry. Resorting to 20 semi-structured interviews and the semiotic square method, this research brings to light a classification of four individual perception types (belief; skepticism; utopia; decoy). Besides, it proposes a typology of four distinct consumer profiles (the convinced; the sceptic; the utopist; and the deceived), associated with these perceptions. At last, this paper discusses the strategies offered to the different large retailers to respond to the perceptions and expectations of their consumers. The results outline the importance of deploying a targeted communication, and of aligning sustainable transport practices in accordance with the identified consumer profiles.

The evolution of market and cooperative logics into the French agricultural cooperative field. Within fast growing cooperative organizations, two institutional logics are involved. Institutional logics driven by the market and financial rules of capitalism is challenging the founding institutional logics of organizations designed under cooperative rules and values. In this paper, we study how these two logics coevolve within one cooperative organization over time. Empirically we focus on a French vertically integrated and internationalized agricultural cooperative. The main result of this exploratory research is that the intraorganizational evolution of these two logics discloses an unstable equilibrium which could lead to the advent of the capitalist logics over the cooperative one.

Translation of a management control tool in the public sector. Introduction of the Balanced ScoreCard in the French Army. In this article, we study the translation of the Balanced ScoreCard by the French Land Army through the lens of Actor Network Theory. Our results show that: (1) the translation is chaotic and characterized by many returns to the initial phases of problematization and enrollment; (2) the translation is facilitated if the tool, besides fulfilling its primary functions, becomes a vehicle of the organizational identity; (3) the translation is not the result of one's actions but a social process based on collaboration and confrontation between different human and non-human actors.

Managerial phenomena to the test of standard economic thinking. Another perspective on Jean Tirole's works. This paper discusses in detail five articles of Jean Tirole, Nobel Prize in economic sciences that deal with managerial issues from an economic perspective. These works are interesting for management scholars since he develops very different arguments from management scholars studying the same phenomena. More generally, we identify the fabric of his articles, we question the relevance of his research results and study the reception of his works by decision makers. We provide a critical appraisal of the so-called “stylized facts” approach widely used by economists.

Do values play a role in the management of public services? Lessons from a research-action. In France, where current renewed interest in water public management is raising, the issue of values of public service is at the forefront of the scene. Based on the results of a survey derived from a research-action, we demonstrate that the use of the concept of public values offers innovative and creative solutions that restore the proper meaning of action and of the raison d'être of public entities. This calls into question the technical and economical dominant criteria that legitimate the performance of large technical system.

The hybrid manager: passing-actor or closure-actor at the institutional frontiers. The case of the Hospital clinical manager. Hybridization questions modes of conciliating pre-existent and new institutional logics. We analyse the ability of manager, who declares hybrid actor himself, and acts in such a manner to support his teams to act in a multi-institutional and controversial organizational context. Studying a hospital pole, and against the dominant work, we reveal that the clinical-manager succeeds in making accept the medico-economic logic, as a strategy of defense against the growing domination of the sole economic logic. We discuss the three abilities this actor deploys: 1) being novice, familiar and identified for sustaining institutional hybridation, 2) translator-actor and closure-actor, 3) actor characterized by a medico-economic logic sustained by one shared and hybrid leadership.

Enhancing city's creative potential. On the necessary transformation of public leadership. The new panacea of public policies rests on enhancing creative potential of urban environments. It leads to a necessary consideration on how a knowledge urban dynamics can set up and how public managers can stimulate it. In an action research context, according to the layers of the anatomy of the creative city and literature on new management, we suggest here a necessary transformation of public leadership to succeed in policies aiming at creativity stimulation in urban environments.

When the rationality of public managers saves the organization: “Mindful failure” of shared services at the French Ministry of Justice. Modernization requires public managers to engage collective learning. At the French Ministry of Justice, our observations showed that shared services are planned as rational changes. However, involved variables are interdependent: the future organization cannot be rationally designed. This research underlines the necessity to clarify what is expected of public managers: assuming the uncertainty of emerging changes, with the risk of no improvement, or, on the contrary, being mindful, and even stopping modernization projects if necessary.