M@n@gement

Renault-Nissan as a Project of Projects: A Relational Approach to Strategic Alliances

Magali Ayache, Hervé Dumez — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 00:00:00 -0800

The study of strategic alliances has traditionally focused on their initial purpose and examined the complementarities in assets and competences that prompt two firms with aligned objectives to collaborate. More recently, research has shifted toward understanding the dynamic nature of these alliances. In alignment with Dyer and his colleagues (1998; 2018), this article seeks to investigate the Renault-Nissan strategic alliance as a relationship conceptualized as a project of projects. To achieve this, this study draws on the literature on alliances, relationships, and projects. Through the analysis of the Renault-Nissan Alliance, the study establishes that this collaboration is a dynamic, multilevel relationship that articulates an unfinished project (‘unfinished business’; Duck, 1990) and finished projects and that presents itself as a project of projects. Within this dynamic framework, the future takes precedence over the past (questioning the importance of relational capital). By examining the Renault-Nissan case through the lens of relational dynamics as a project of projects, this article makes thoughtful contributions to the theories of alliances, projects, and relationships.

‘Start-Up Nation’: The Making and Performativity of an Empty Signifier

Claire Champenois, Delphine Saurier, Élise Béliard — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 00:00:00 -0700

The article sheds light on the process of fabrication of a polysemous, ambiguous, and mocking French entrepreneurial expression – the ‘start-up nation’ – construed as an empty signifier. The fabrication of such empty signifiers in the discourses of entrepreneurship and management, what creates them and what they create, remains little explored questions. This article addresses the following question: how do repeated quotations of an empty signifier enable it to perform entrepreneurship? We trace the circulation of the expression from its first utterance in the political sphere by Emmanuel Macron, then French minister of the economy, through to the media and the scientific sphere, using a communicative analysis of Emmanuel Macron’s speeches (n = 4), press articles (n = 210) and academic productions (n = 30). We show the shifts in meaning and values that take place, in particular the way in which the ‘start-up nation’ takes on denunciatory and pejorative values, and is transformed from a political formula into a pejorative, decontextualized little phrase. Our results enrich the critical literature on management and entrepreneurship, particularly the analysis of the performativity of entrepreneurial discourse. By describing the manufacture of an empty signifier through its circulation in social space, the study reveals the counter-power potential of performativity. The results also highlight the surprising absence of an academic critical dimension.

Service Workers’ Sensemaking Process of Customer Misbehavior: The Case of French Rail Transport

Oriane Sitte de Longueval — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0700

Drawing on Weick’s sensemaking theory and based on an in-depth ethnography of a French public railway company, this article reveals the cognitive map that underlines the service worker’s interpretation of customer misbehavior. It appears that this process is ground on the sensemaking of the motive of customer misbehavior, of the service workers’ tolerance of the customer misbehavior, and of the customer misbehavior situations. This article also shows that this process is based on the adjustment of the meaning frame to the situation, on the construction of the framing by the service worker, on the negotiation of the framing between service workers, and on the competition between the framings in the organization. This research goes beyond a fragmented understanding of this sensemaking process, to give a more integrated understanding of it.

Equipping Organizational Reliability: Between Organization and Situated Activity, the Contribution of Situational Approaches

Stéphanie Gentil — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 10:22:34 -0800

Research on high-reliability organizations (HROs) studies how organizations subject to significant risks manage to maintain their reliability. In such work, reliability is not based exclusively on an organization’s ability to anticipate and prevent problems but is the product of interactions between actors adjusting to unexpected events every day. By focusing primarily on communicative and cognitive processes, HROs neglect the role of equipment in supporting the construction of organizational reliability. We argue that this pitfall arises from the unit of analysis considered by HRO literature, which led us to shift our focus from structure (rules, prevention systems) to situated interactions. We suggest that this should be complemented by a situational analysis framework exploring the theoretical potential of the ‘situation’ concept as an intermediate analysis unit between situated activity and organization. From in situ observation sequences in two operating rooms of a private clinic, we distinguished three types of situations. Here, the entwinement of human activities with equipment that builds reliability takes different forms: standard, bounded, and extended situations. Finally, our research highlights three contributions of a situational approach to thinking about organizational reliability: (1) as an intermediate notion between the given and the created, the situation enables us to study the tangible and intangible equipment supporting reliability; (2) as an intermediary notion between singularity and regularity, it allows us to highlight the influence of context on reliability maintenance activities; and (3) as an intermediary notion between instantaneity of action and permanence of the organization, it lets us identify reliability maintenance trajectories.