Contenu du sommaire : Légitimité, déviance et délit

Capitalist workers and firm performance. This paper examines the impact of employee ownership on firm performance. In particular, the authors suggest that employee representation on the board of directors is likely to moderate negatively the positive effects of employee ownership on firm performance. Their results provide support for this hypothesis for directors representing employee shareholders. However, the presence of trade-unionist directors has no impact on the employee ownershipfirm performance relationship.

The psychological attractiveness of codes of “best practice” in France. In a pioneering research, Fanto (2002) explained the growing institutionalization of the Anglo-Saxon based discourse on the « best practices» of governance, in France, by the existence of psychological biases. These biases could be tracked in codes of corporate governance, such as the Viénot reports. Fanto's empirical results are interesting, albeit novel to the field. This article pursues two objectives: replicating Fanto's work to appreciate its robustness, and extending the study to a more recent code to see if the psychological factors unveiled by Fanto are just a fad, or contribute to a more continuous process of legitimating imported “best practices”.

Speculations on finance taking over strategy. This article argues that disciplinary corporate governance prescriptions have allowed a takeover bid by postive financial theories on the theoretical problem of exercising corporate control. According to us, especially – but not only – because emerging markets play a more and more important role in the economy, this takeover will be source of value destruction. For this reason, the article militates in favour of another logic, strategic and organizational, of exercising corporate control.

Governance and strategic management. A new moral and political science. The main stream on corporate governance, based on agency theory, seems to fail on its main target: the alignment of top management behavior on shareholders interests. But it gives support to the fallacious idea that the “enterprise” is the shareholders property. This paper gives a logical deconstruction of this idea and defends the necessary linkage between corporate governance and strategic management to guide a sustainable and responsible development of the enterprise. This field must become again a moral and political science which deals with ethics and pragmatism.

CEOs! Focusing on shareholders is not legitimate!. In this article, with the support of their recent studies, the authors argue that : 1) a firm is not viable if it is focused only on serving its shareholders; 2) many firms across the World are flourishing even though they are subjected to constraining societal rules, which generally engage them to look at shareholders as only one of the multiple legitimate stakeholders to satisfy; 3) the world of organizations cannot survive without resisting the ferocious individualism imposed by a focus on shareholders, and without balancing it with a more ethical and a more communitarian perspective; 4) shareholders will benefit in the longer run if they are not the only focus of attention; 5) managers should be freed of such a servitude to be able to put their strategic skills at work for the benefit of all.

Legitimacy, deviance and offense. A closer look at the Société Générale Affair. Interview with Peter Wirtz. In this interview, Peter Wirtz comments on the “Société Générale case”. He suggests that the sources of the default have less to do with the governance in itself than they have to do with internal control; that, whatever its sophistication, no system will ever totally prevent individual creativity; and that it would be wise to consider more seriously the role of incentives within the Trader Profession.

The influence of economic systems on social rating. b The paper examines the diversity of social and economic systems and its consequences on corporate social performance. Drawing upon Amable's (2005) typology, the authors identify five clusters of countries and examine the specificities of the Corporate Social Performance (CSP) in these countries. They predict that a firm's membership to one specific social and economic system influences the CSP. The question of legitimacy is then addressed. Their results show the significant impact of the specificities of social and economic systems on CSP, which corroborates the importance of this factor in explaining the differences of social ratings.

Legitimacy of public policies for the development of clusters. Measures favoring cluster development have become an important issue for public policies aiming at innovation and regional development. However, the legitimacy of public intervention and the capacity of public intervention to start, guide and control cluster development are highly disputed. The objective of this article is to develop propositions – based on the relational dynamics within clusters – regarding the role and the nature of public policies in the process of creation and development of firm clusters.

When organizations face organized crime. Should organizations care about organized crime ? The authors combine case studies and a press review to explore this unknown field. Their investigations lead to propose a model describing the types of crime perpetrated against companies and their impact on organizations. This research shows that we cannot speak anymore of two parallel worlds, the legal and the illegal one: organizations evolve in a business world which is nowadays invaded and threatened by mafias, cartels and other criminal groups.

Transgression: a forgotten dimension of organization. This theoretical paper argues for a strategic role of rule transgression in organization whereby transgression is understood as an element of normal functioning rather than as a pathology of organization. Following strategic analysis (Crozier and Frieberg) and joint regulation (Reynaud), we analyze rule breaking as a practical means to resolve organizational contradictions.

Why do managers add unfairness to unfairness? The antecedents of the Churchill Effect. Employees' cooperative and antagonistic behaviors at work relate strongly to their perceptions of interactional justice, both interpersonal (treatment with politeness, respect, and compassion) and informational (adequate, timely, and personalized explanations). Given the positive effects of interactional justice, it is puzzling that managers often, when they have to announce a decision that they know will have a negative and/or unfair impact on their subordinates, distance themselves and act in interactionally unjust ways. This article explores several facets of the Churchill Effect, as this phenomenon is referred to.

Legitimacy, deviance and offense. Issues for management scholars Interview with Pierre Cossette. In this interview, Pierre Cossette comments his survey on the perceptions of research integrity held by administrative science faculty members in Frenchlanguage universities in Québec. He reminds us that – among other findings – the respondents did not take lightly the issue of research integrity, and its antecedents and consequences; morever, only a weak consensus emerged on these topics. Therefore, the debate about legitimacy and integrity has to take place not only with and about the enterprise manager's practices but also with and about academic researchers'practices...