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.

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.

Despite serious criticism, the boundaryless view of careers still heavily influences research. This article aims to do more than just challenge the claim that careers are becoming more boundaryless: our goal is to make clear that careers need to be thought of in alternative terms. To this end, we build on an analysis of academic careers to explain why regarding careers as either bounded or boundaryless is too simple and why more attention should be paid to the scripts that influence career choices. We draw from an empirical study carried out in two French universities that shows that promotion scripts operate under three conditions – credibility, legibility, and legitimacy of promotion models. We conclude that scripts are potentially very useful in understanding a wide range of careers.

En dépit du succès remporté par la notion de MSRH, la redéfinition de la GRH opérée au cours des années 1990 a soulevé de nombreuses réserves. Aujourd'hui encore, les auteurs s'affrontent quant aux priorités à donner à la GRH et à la recherche pour cette discipline. Cet article se fonde alors sur les prises de position récentes des auteurs qui revendiquent une approche critique du management pour dégager des pistes qui permettent de réorienter la recherche et d'échapper à ce qui a été qualifié de dérive managérialiste., Despite its sucess, the new approach to personnel management developed during the 90's under the HRM label has been challenged. Still now, scholars are debatting about priorities for HRM and reseach in this field. This article builds on recent development of the critical management studies literature to draw new routes for research and to get away from managerialism.

Cet article s'intéresse à une forme de résistance encore peu étudiée dans la litt.rature contemporaine puisqu'il met en scène des acteurs qui revendiquent ouvertement une transformation des pratiques de leur organisation, sans passer toutefois par les canaux traditionnels de la résistance tels que les syndicats ou autres mouvements sociaux. Malgré les pressions qui leur sont faites, et les pénalités qu'ils encourent si leur projet échoue, des cadres d'une multinationale vont en effet déroger aux principes de bonne gestion préconisés par leur entreprise et proposer le lancement d'un produit a priori moins profitable que d'autres. Le concept de résistance productive est mobilisé pour rendre compte de cette forme particulière de résistance, qui bien que mineure, va au-delà de la seule résistance subjective, c'est- à-dire de l'affirmation par les résistants de leur identité propre.