Contenu du sommaire : Sciences, techniques et pratiques de gestion

The current article concerns the possibility for companies to adopt radical democratic practices. To that purpose, the authors build on the “reverse dominance hierarchy” concept, which applies to organizations in which a hierarchical structure paradoxically fosters equality and democracy. An ethnographic study of a worker co-operative is used to describe the egalitarian ethos, the mechanisms by which power is contained, and the atypical roles of managers that are characteristic of such organizations.

This research aims to understand the intermediate mechanisms that explain the relationship between Human Resources Management (HRM) and innovation. We examined the mediating effect of knowledge sharing. HRM is designed as a high performance work system (HPWS) conceived here like a whole of complementary HRM practices. We noted from a panel of 962 French enterprises that despite the positive impact of HPWS on innovation, this effect is not direct but mediated when the index of sharing knowledge is introduced in the regression models.

The article discusses corporate environmental challenges in a perspective of knowledge appropriation. The results of a qualitative study – in the retail sector – show that appropriation of an environmental strategy is an organisational learning process, which necessitates six individual competences. Five recommendations for developing these competences are also presented.

This article analyses the effect of the commonly used corporate governance practices in venture capital financing. More precisely, it studies how staged investment and syndication may impact the IPO performance (underpricing) of venture backed firms when going public. This empirical research relies on a unique dataset of 267 venture backed firms that went public on Euronext-Paris and Alternext between 1997 and 2013. The results show a lower underpricing for syndicated private equity-backed firms. In other words, the syndication of venture capital firms does impact the underpricing level at the IPO, as its size increases. This corporate governance mechanism minimizes the related-information asymmetry and agency costs of the IPO process. However, staged investment appears to have no significant effect.

Change produces uncertainty and paradoxes. Managers have for mission to manage them. Management manuals and articles recommend to reduce uncertainty and elucidate paradoxes, mobilizing a capability called positive. This article explores another way to manage change, through the underrated concept of negative capability, i.e. an ability to remain in doubts and uncertainty (Keats, 1970). From an ethnography, we identified two opposite cases of managers whom, facing a similar situation, in their attitudes and in their practices, mobilize different capabilities, positive or negative, in the context of a change project. We propose a grid of analysis to characterize these two types of capabilities. Through this concept of negative capability, we encourage to reconsider, to rehabilitate even, uncertainty in organizations, by showing that it is not necessarily to minimize, but rather to “manage”.

Although the interest of marketing in empowerment is relatively recent, the profusion and the diversity of research, as well as the absence of a consensual vision, require a clarification. This article proposes to report the main debates in literature and to specify the conceptual distinctions with related notions. In addition, considering the recent evolutions generated by participative web and new status of the consumer-citizen, this research suggests an enriched approach of empowerment in marketing, based on a multidisciplinary vision of the original concept.