THE FRENCH-BELGIAN CMS CHAPTER

Created in 2012, the French-Belgian CMS group is co-chaired by Professors Isabelle Huault and Véronique Perret (Université Paris-Dauphine PSL, France), David Courpasson (EM Lyon Business School, France), Laurent Taskin (Université Catholique de Louvain) and Florence Palpacuer (Université de Montpellier, France). On an annual basis, this CMS group organizes a doctoral workshop in critical management studies, with the objective of offering a welcoming place for PhD students to get feedback on their scientific project, and to foster dialogue within the CMS community.

Critical perspectives on management attract a rising number of scholars in France and Belgium. These multidisciplinary approaches reintroduce power and control in the analysis of management theories and practices, with the objective of denaturalizing taken-for-granted managerial assumptions, questioning researchers’ role and reflexivity, and repositioning their intellectual activity within rather than above the social phenomena under study. CMS mobilize a variety of theoretical frameworks having in common to conceptualize management as a social and political construct, while encompassing a broad range of epistemological positions from post-modernism to pragmatic constructivism and critical realism. Such epistemological choices guide critical researchers towards specific methodologies favouring idiographic and comprehensive case studies. Rejecting instrumental or functionalist views, these research projects serve an emancipatory purpose and aim at accompanying or promoting social transformation.

Developing doctoral research in such heterodox perspectives involves a number of challenges, such as justifying the choice of a critical project, and confronting it to the dogma of managerial orthodoxy, that the community of critical management researchers may usefully address through constructive debate. Our annual doctoral workshops in CMS serve such purpose: about twenty PhD students and fifteen researchers (see the scientific committee below) gather from various locations in France, Belgium, but also the UK, Germany and other European countries, over a two-days period. During parallel sessions in French and English, doctoral students are given an opportunity to present a critical contribution in the form of an article, a thesis proposal, or a discussion of particular methodological, theoretical or epistemological issues raised by the adoption of a critical perspective. Plenary sessions and roundtables further steer informal discussion and debates; approaches and practices of attending researchers are confronted and discussed; the workshops are conducive to the emergence or consolidation of collective projects involving a critical perspective. Over the last five years, critters such as Bill Cooke, David Courpasson, Pierre-Yves Gomez, Chris Grey, Isabelle Huault, Martin Parker, Martyna Sliwa and Hugh Willmott have contributed to these debates.

The sixth meeting is to be held at the University of Paris Creteil on March 28-29, 2017.

The full pdf of this information can be found here

 

Biographies of co-Chairs:

Isabelle Huault

My research program belongs to the field of organization studies in a critical perspective. I am particularly interested in the question of financialization and commodification. My previous research has highlighted the issue of ‘discreet regulation’, whereby core capitalist institutions enact and perform control, thus engaging in subtle forms of regulation and naturalizing the discourse of financialization. More recently, my research interests also included Critical Management Education and the issue of resistance and emancipation at the workplace.

 

Isabelle Huault is a Professor of Organization Studies at Université Paris Dauphine-PSL. She is Head of the DRM Management Research Center. She has published her work in Organization Studies, Organization, Management Learning, M@n@gement, Technological Forecasting and Social Change … Her most recent book is Finance: The Discreet Regulator (Palgrave Mac Millan, 2012, with Chrystelle Richard).

 

Véronique Perret

Convinced that ‘management science’ is a social science, my practice as a researcher and a teacher is to promote and develop an anthropological approach of this discipline. I am especially interested in epistemological questions regarding knowledge production and knowledge reception. In order to promote alternatives forms of seeing and acting, my work is more focused today on Critical Management Education and on interactions between Art and Management.

Véronique Perret is Professor of Management Studies and responsible for the Phd Program in Management at Université Paris-Dauphine PSL. She is a member of the DRM Research Center and Head of the research team DRM-Most. The DRM-Most team project is  based on the critical analysis of the managerialisation of society. Its aim is to develop and promote research focused on the relationships between the ways organisations are governed and the markets and managerial technologies deployed to this end. It also aims to identify and propose alternative forms of organised action. Her current research focuses on the questions of change and emancipation. She has published several articles on these topics in edited books and in refereed academic journals such as Organization or M@n@gement.

 David Courpasson

Research in Social Sciences requests genuine and passionate commitment in understanding people’s lives at work. How do new organizations influence those lives? What are the mechanisms through which people cope with constraints and contradictions generated by new rules of/in the workplace? Do new forms of productive collective solidarities emerge in contemporary organizations? To serve which productive ethos? What are the effects of online communication on social relationships? Do social struggles have a future in “liberal” organizations, and to produce what sort of social change? These are some of the issues that I address in my research, and that I discuss in my teaching.

David Courpasson is Professor of Sociology at EMLYON Business School, and Professor at Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University. He is the Director of EMLYON-OCE Research Centre, focusing on political and critical research on organizations. He was Editor in Chief of Organization Studies from 2008 to 2013. His current research and writing interests are focused around the multiplicity of resisting processes and how they permit actors to engage with and modify power relationships. He is also interested in understanding how workplace changes affect occupational identities and social relationships within organizations and institutions. His work has been published in journals like Organization Science, Organization Studies, Entrepreneurship, Theory and Practice, Journal of Business Venturing, Journal of Management Studies and Organization.

Florence Palpacuer

Before joining the university, I worked as a researcher at the International Labour Organization and have since then kept an interest in the processes of globalization, financialization, and the ways in which they transform the nature of social relations within and between firms. Our research team at Montpellier Research in Management (MRM) combines social and environmental perspectives to produce critical analysis of global forces and situations of crisis where alternatives to global neoliberal management are being explored and promoted by resisting actors.

Florence Palpacuer is Professor of Management Studies at the University of Montpellier, France, where she is responsible for a Master Program in Sustainable Management and coordinates a research group on Altermanagement. Her two co-authored books, published in French, adopt a critical management perspective on the social consequences of globalization. She has published about 15 international articles and book contributions on these issues in journals such as Economy & Society, Human Relations, World Development, and the British Journal of Industrial Relations.

Laurent Taskin

 My goal is to contribute to bring back the “H” in HRM in order to develop a more responsible (or sustainable) and respectful management. To achieve this, I promote and conduct research in a critical perspective, investigating the limits and the non-questioned consequences of mainstream management practices and theories. This led me to explore ‘new ways of working’ and ‘knowledge transfer’ areas in depth, as well as to question the taken-for-granted foundations of management sciences and organization studies.

Laurent Taskin, PhD in Management, is Professor of Human Resource and Organisation Studies at Louvain School of Management, and President of the Institute for Labour Studies (Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium). He is Director of Master programmes in Labour Studies and Human Resource Management. His research focuses on HR-related issues in the study of new forms of work organization and knowledge sharing processes in a critical perspective. He has published numerous books, chapters and articles in international journals such as Organization Studies, Journal of Business Ethics, International Journal of Human Resource Management, New Technology, Work and Employment. He is also editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Work Innovation (Inderscience).

Members of the Scientific Committee for Doctoral Workshops:

Florence Allard-Poesi (Université Paris-Est Créteil, FR)

Nicolas Balas (Université Montpellier, FR)

David Courpasson (EM Lyon, FR)

Françoise Dany (EM Lyon, FR)

Matthieu de Nanteuil (Université catholique de Louvain, BE)

Pierre-Yves Gomez (EM Lyon, FR)

Chris Grey (Royal Holloway School of Management, London, UK)

Isabelle Huault (Paris-Dauphine, FR)

Frank Janssen (Université catholique de Louvain, BE)

Evelyne Léonard (Université catholique de Louvain, BE)

Maya Leroy (AgroParisTech, FR)

Gérald Naro (Université Montpellier, FR)

Jean Nizet (FUNDP, BE)

Florence Palpacuer (Univ. Montpellier, FR)

Martin Parker (University of Leicester, UK)

Véronique Perret (Paris-Dauphine, FR)

Anne Pezet (HEC Montréal, CA)

François Pichault (HEC-ULg, BE)

Benoit Raveleau (UCO, FR)

Géraldine Schmidt (IAE Paris, FR)

Amélie Seignour (Université Montpellier, FR)

Laurent Taskin (Université catholique de Louvain, BE)

Corinne Vercher (Université Paris 13, FR)

Hugh Willmott (Cardiff Business School, UK)

Patrizia Zanoni (Hasselt University, BE)