Contenu du sommaire : Les stratégies de coopétition

Human resource management practices and commercial performance. The case of a French call center. In the French context, mobile telephony calls increasingly for new services and technology. It also requires to re-examine the content of the missions of custom advisers as well as the assesment of their performance. Testing a quality monitoring system in a leading operator's call centre brings out parts of an answer to two questions: what support in human resources management can make this tool efficient, how to link its use to the commercial performance of commercial teams ? We conducted an exploratory research in this center, considered as pilot for the implementation of this quality monitoring system. The results are presented and discussed.

The determinants of the value creation for the bidder. The mergers and acquisitions explored within the framework of our research show an engagement of the actors concerned in corporate acquisition strategies of the horizontal type, are of friendly nature and relate to the entirety of the target capital. Which are the intrinsic and extrinsic determinants of the shortterm value creation for the bidder and which is their nature? This question constitutes the central object of our research, realised on a sample of 58 operations of takeover carried out between 1997 and 2005 on the French market, which in addition asks another question, that of the relevance of the short-term value creation measurement.

Modernization of the organizations and control of behaviors. The idea that we defend in this article is that according to which the evolution of the organizations and the management tools, leads to a redefinition of the question of quality and validity of the behavior. This question arises in an increasingly complex way as autonomy and responsibility for the actor increase. It brings to wonder about the role of the new tools of control and evaluation, in particular when they translate a logic of management of competences. It also brings to wonder about the evolution of the social bond in the company.

Does research in the French-speaking world follow that of the English-speaking world? What differences are there? This article deals with the question in the field of Management Information Systems. Does research in the Frenchspeaking world deal with the same problematic as research in the Englishspeaking world? Do they deal with similar fields of application? Do they choose the same levels of analysis? Do they refer to the same epistemology? Do they use the same methodology? The first section covers the general results obtained from 25 years of MIS literature. The second part compares 763 research articles from a common 15-year period: an “engineering” perspective for the Englishspeaking world and subjects related to “MIS activities” for the French-speaking world. The third section then presents historical evolutions while separating the two samples: certainly we can discuss the “independence” of each community without speaking of systematic “tailgating”.

The objective of this article is to show that coopetition is neither an extension of competition theories, nor an extension of cooperation theories. Coopetition is defined as “a system of actors interacting on a basis of partially congruent interests and goals”. Coopetition is a singular research object which requires a specific theoretical examination. It is an entirely new field of exploration, which is very promising to advance future research and practices in strategic management.

The paper focuses on the issue of the role played by the client in coopetition. The selected industry is the American defense industry. The main interest of this industry is that the client is in a monopsony position and is able to play an architectural role. He can influence coopetitive strategies in different manners : creating a small group of providers, creating incentives for these firms to cooperate, creating situations where firms adopt self-restraining strategies etc. Strategic actions and reactions between the client and his providers are analyzed from the coopetitive perspective.

Recent litterature in management showed that firms conduct both competitive and cooperative strategies and that they must face paradoxical situations of co-opetition. Nevertheless, researchers rarely searched to understand how organizations and managers can combine these two antagonistic situations. Starting from the study of the mechanisms of alliances between competitors and from the analysis of the representations of the alliance managers in the ERP industry, our research project is to undesrtand the organizational mechanisms linked to this type of strategies.

Coopetitive configurations are becoming the dominant logic of many industrial sectors. Firms in such environments struggle to preserve their strategic independence and discretionary capabilities as they are forced to explore and exploit critical assets with competitors. We argue that the externalization of the innovation strategy formulation processes may provide unsuspected core advantages to firms by increasing strategic ruptures detection, and by “forging the iron cage” whilst strategizing.

Business Intelligence (BI) is generally associated with an aggressive conception of the relations between competitors. But, the purely aggressive strategies give way to strategies of coopetition. The question is thus the following one: are BI and coopetition opposed or complementary? To answer it, an empirical study is undertaken on a sample of 153 companies of high technologies area in Europe. Results show that the BI and coopetition are more opposite than complementary. On the other hand the activity of monitoring is related to the coopetition.

This article examines the structure of coopetition and its significance in R&D agreements. An original approach is proposed and used to account for coopetitive behaviours in six R&D consortia subsidized by the European Commission. The findings of this exploratory research show that in collective action in funded R&D, competitive behaviours concern specific objects, have forms that are both singular and weak, and have a dynamic that varies with the type of consortium.

The critical review of the literature presented in this article aims at linking a set of notions defining the management of competences in an inter-organizational context to the concept of coopetition. The intention is to provide theoretical insight relative to the latter. We propose a two-dimensional model. The first dimension defines the nature of coopetition (considered to be a situation where either co-operation or competition may predominate). The second dimension considers competences within the framework of a relationship (oriented either towards creating new competences or leveraging existing ones).

Similar to a bandage on a wooden leg, is sustainable development more than just a way of changing words for want of changing the situation or an excuse to continue with essentially unsustainable development with complete impunity? Is it not really just an opportunity in so far as it allows us not to question exactly what development should be? The purpose of this article is to criticise this unclear, all-purpose concept that sustainable development has become and to question that which is hidden behind it and is rarely queried: development.