Contenu du sommaire : Pouvoir et dynamique des organisations (2) Vers un renouvellement des approches ?

Power between Rite and Regard. Political Rites and Social Organization in the France of the "Ancien Régime" Political rites and symbols help powers and institutions to organize, and to appear better, more beautiful and mightier than they are. The study of the history of political rites helps one to understand that these rites give order, harmony and strength to the "social body". But political institutions also expect from their rites that they banish anomie and help them accede to an ideal dimension. The fact of being-looked-at is important for power. The looking at institutions, during the process of their rites, triggers a kind of fascination. Respect and allegiance are then impulsed to the social group by the "alchemy" of the rites performed.

Corporate communication and managerial power. This article is based on the points of view of the communication sciences. It studies the transformations of symbolic power in corporations. Participative management permits the organisation of a communication function from which develops a symbolic engineering. It is characterized by a system of intellectual technologies which aim at producing a managerial ideology and at symbolically integrating the workforce into managerial strategy.

The Procedure between Constraint and Subjectivity. A Linguistic Approach All the actors are obliged today to collaborate in the success of the organization that employs them. Having responsibilities, does the employee develop any aspirations to exercise power ? The word and the theme are absent from his language. But the standardisation of office work, practices, and procedures shows what resources of authority are implicit in the machinery of the written words and graphics, their creation, their transformation, and the management of their flow. A sort of power or feeling of power can be based on these flows of words and texts because they reinforce or manipulate an understanding of the organization, not without ambiguities.

The German Codetermination. Power Redistribution within the Firm. Codetermination is one of the most important elements of the german industrial relations system. By associating workers to the decisions, it leads to a redistribution of power within the firm. Two issues about codetermination are considered : the issue of its legitimity and that of its efficiency. These questions are analysed through a brief historical retrospective of its emergence, an analysis of the theoretical models proposed to account for it, and finally a presentation of a few empirical studies.

Decision making Aid Quantitative Tool. Reality of a Myth. The classical views of decision aid in operational research still keep alive the myth concerning the use of quantitative tools which hamper their usefulness. In this paper, we will reexamine this myth in a concrete setting. Our goal is to reach a better understanding of this myth and what is behind it. In order to do so, the use of a quantitative tool, Saaty's hierarchical method, within the context of the sharing out of a global budget between several public health institutions will be examined. The results of our empirical study clearly show the impossibility of dissociating the political from the rational dimension, the diversity in the forms of power while using the method and, finally, the vulnerability of the tool to strategic manipulations.

The Power of the Hospital to Adjust to the Local Sanitary Environment The analysis of the power between, on the one hand, the polymorphus French social and sanitary environment and on the other hand, the public hospital (which has changed over the years), shows three main types of relationship based on legal aspects, know-how and culture, and resources of control. However, under the strong pressures generated by its closed environment, the hospital can find opportunities which enable it to implement a suitable strategy.

Decision and Communication. The Case of the Public Hearings about the Environment in Quebec. In this article we try to analyse the complex relationships between communication and decision while taking into account such still badly defined notions as durable development or collective action via non-governmental bodies. We do this by examining a particular case, the Soligaz affair ; Soligaz being the name of a firm whose project was submitted, at the beginning of the 1990' s to the Quebec authorities responsible for the environment.

The Subject-Object Relation in the Theory of Knowledge. The Economist Faced to the Organizations. Starting from an example - the economic approach of organizations - and using a critical method this article shows that economics refuses to deal with a certain number of essential questions, and particularly the two questions of the object (the technique, the market) and of time. Now these two pose permanent questions for the theory of knowledge in economics. On the other hand, by positing the primacy of the subject, one completely reverses the method, thus opening the road to a theory of intersubjectivity which favours knowledge, to the detriment of implementation.

An economic history of science and technology. (3) Nature and development of the second industrial Revolution. Chronologically situated between the last third of the 19th century and the first of ours, the second industrial Revolution is assessed here in relation to the new materials, the new sources of energy, the new productive processes and the new products which it has generated. Its occurrence was made possible by the new relationships established, on the one hand, between technical and scientific progress, and on the other, by these two with the economic and social development of the most advanced countries. Analyses are made of the inventions and innovations which led to the new fabrication processes of steel, to the electrification of urban life and industrial production, to the civilisation of the automobile and fordism, as well as to the origins of technological research within the private sector's major enterprises.