Françoise DANY

This essay discusses models of purpose governance to contribute to a fragmented literature, with some authors calling for repurposing business schools (BSs), whereas others consider purpose as too precarious to bring about substantial change. We reflect on our experience with a French BS that has become société à mission, a new legal structure for purpose-driven companies that commit to incorporate specific governance practices to avoid mission drift. This pioneering example illustrates that purpose enactment requires coping with tensions between normative prescriptions faced by BSs and a more school-based view of ‘good management education’. This leads us to outline two forms of purpose governance: in Mode I, ‘BS with purpose’, purpose is considered ‘an add on’—a new quality objective added to the existing ones without changing the logic of governance. In contrast, in Mode II—which emerges from our example—purpose acts as a transformative force affecting all objects of governmentality. It features purpose BSs as those with ‘purpose-driven governmentality’. We argue that the radical transformation of BSs requires Mode II, discussing its potential to respond to criticisms against BSs and deal with normative constraints, difficult challenges, and ambivalent requirements. We conclude that the legal obligations of the French société à mission offer critical conditions for operating in the Mode II paradigm.

The meaningfulness of the physical place within which resistance is nurtured and enacted has not been carefully considered in research on space and organizations. In this article, we offer two stories of middle managers developing resistance to managerial policies and decisions. We show that the appropriation and reconstruction of specific places by middle managers helps them to build autonomous resisting work thanks to the meanings that resisters attribute to the place in which they undertake resistance. We contribute to the literature on space and organizations by showing that resistance is a social experience through which individuals shape physical places and exploit the geographical blurring of organizations to develop political efforts that can be consequential. We also suggest the central role played by middle managers in the subversion of these meaningful places of resistance.

This paper aims to contribute to the emerging perspective on organizational entrepreneurship by outlining how resistance to managerial policies and decisions can give birth to alternative organizational styles. Drawing on an in-depth analysis of a personal narrative of an R&D team manager opposition to hierarchical decisions, we link studies on resistance and organizational entrepreneurship to suggest that active resistance, which we define as the capacity to live beyond managerial control to create spaces of creativity and solidarity and alternative modalities of work in an organizational context, can actually contribute to the entrepreneurial process.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to call for an integrative approach to career research aiming to avoid both fragmentation and closure of the field through the discussion of a wide range of perspectives on career or career situations. The paper discusses the specificity of this integrative approach vs others, like the traditional approach or the multi or transdisciplinary approaches. Design/methodology/approach – The work is based on a review of the career literature, and an analytic comparison of existing research approaches across this body of literature. Findings – The paper shows the tendency of career theory to stick to narrow views of a career. The paper highlights the importance of taking into account the wide variety of career situations, which results from the fact that careers are necessarily located in time and space. The paper provides examples that invite to better explore career differences and seek for alternative explanations to career experiences. Because career dynamics are marked both by individual agency and different levels of structures, a more integrative kind of career research should thus trigger richer conversations among researchers regarding the complexity of the inhabited world. Originality/value – The specific added value of the integrative approach suggested in this paper is to open new routes for a career theory that could become stronger and enhance its power to illuminate a wide range of issues.

Diversité des carrières, transitions professionnelles, influence des contextes… Cet ouvrage permet d'aborder tous les débats et les problématiques liés aux carrières contemporaines. Il vise à compléter les conseils habituellement donnés aux individus ou aux entreprises pour gérer les carrières par les résultats de la recherche. Il amène toutes les personnes soucieuses de la qualité des expériences et des vécus individuels à réfléchir sur les effets de certaines pratiques de gestion sur les organisations et, plus largement, les sociétés dans lesquelles les carrières se déroulent. Des dirigeants aux ouvriers en passant par les experts, les marins ou encore les intérimaires, l'ouvrage s'intéresse en dix chapitres à diverses populations de professionnels. Il aborde également des problématiques plus transversales, notamment les conflits de rôle ou le rebond, auxquelles sont confrontés les professionnels qui veulent s'engager syndicalement. Il s'agit enfin de comprendre comment agit leffet individu" pour expliquer les carrières objectives par des construits tels que les "mondes de la carrière". [4ème de couv.]

Research has recognized the transformative dimension of resistance in the workplace. Yet resistance is still seen as an adversarial and antagonistic process that management can accept or reject; thus, understanding how resistance can actually influence workplace change remains a challenge for research. In this paper, we offer an analysis of two situations of resistance wherein resisters, organized in temporary enclaves, are able to influence top management’s decisions and produce eventual change. Whether or not resistance becomes productive depends on the skillful work of resisters and the creation of powerful “objects of resistance” that enable resisters to modify temporarily the power configuration of a situation and oblige top management to listen to their claims and accommodate to the new configuration. This paper shows that resistance can be better explained by what resisters do to achieve their ends rather than by seeing resistance as a fixed opposition between irreconcilable adversaries.