H. Letiche & J.-L. Moriceau (eds) with R. Earhart & R. Jardat, 2019, Turn to Film. Film in the Business School, Leiden & Boston: Brill Sense.

Turn to Film: Film in the Business School offers creative and powerful uses of film in the business school classroom and surveys the pedagogical and performative value of watching films with students. This volume examines not only how film offers opportunities for learning and investigation, but also how they can be sources of ideological poison, self-delusion and mis-representation. Throughout the text, renowned contributors embrace film’s power to embark on new adventures of thought by inventing images and signs, and by bringing novel concepts and fresh perspectives to the classroom. If film often reveals organizational dysfunctionality and absurdity, it also teaches us to understand the other, to see difference, and to accept experimentation. A wide spectra of films are examined for their pedagogical value in terms of what can be learned, explored and discussed by teaching with film and how film can be used as a tool of research and investigation. The book sees film in the classroom as an educational challenge wherein rich learning and personal development are encouraged.

La revue internationale de psychosociologie et de gestion des comportements organisationnels publie un numéro spécial sur l’écriture et la description dans les recherches qualitatives sur les organisations. Pour les auteurs, cette recherche se forme et s’exprime dans la texture et l’épaisseur de la langue. Écrire et décrire le qualitatif demandent d’inventer une écriture propre, un travail de création tout comme l’artisan façonne son art ou l’acteur travaille sa présence et sa voix. L’écriture n’y est pas véhicule mais création de sens, communication avec le lecteur. Réflexions, prises de positions, inspirations et propositions entre autres de Hervé Dumez, Andreu Solé, Ânegela Marques, Ana Oliveira, Hervé Laroche, Amaury Grimand, Olivier Germain, Felipe Alves de Freitas Carlos Mendonça, Jean-Philippe Denis, Jean-Luc Moriceau.

Disponible sur Cairn: https://www.cairn.info.bibproxy.tem-tsp.eu/revue-internationale-de-psychosociologie-de-gestion-des-comportements-organisationnels-2018-57.htm

Soirée débat organisée à l’occasion de la publication du dossier spécial de la RFG : « Entre audit, impact et performativité des sciences de gestion: Retrouver du sens ». 

Les sciences de gestion constituent une discipline académique jeune mais aux forts enjeux sociétaux: la formation des futurs dirigeants et cadres, la diffusion dans tous les domaines de la logique et des pratiques gestionnaires, plus de 20% de la population de l’enseignement supérieur… Elles influencent le monde que nous construisons pour demain. Or, comme dans d’autres disciplines, de nouvelles pratiques (classements, audits, recherche d’impact, du financement de l’activité, listes élitistes…) menacent pensée, critiques et créativité, mettent en jeu l’indépendance et diffusent la concurrence là où prévalait plus de partage et de commun. Bref la logique gestionnaire a aussi envahi le monde de la recherche en gestion. Et alors que cette recherche restait largement en prise directe avec le monde concret et quotidien de la gestion, une tendance est vers l’abstraction autocentrée et la mathématisation sur le modèle des sciences économiques, que ni les managers, ni la société civile, ni les chercheurs des disciplines proches ne lisent et ne comprennent. La recherche participative (citoyenne) est encore rare alors que la recherche collaborative (co-conçue avec les entreprises) conduit au plus intéressant comme aux plus dangereuses liaisons.

C’est dans cet esprit que les auteurs du dossier spécial viendront présenter et discuter les articles qu’ils ont produits. On peut citer pêle-mêle : une typologie très parlante des réactions et attitudes des enseignants chercheurs en France et au Canada face aux classements, audits et nouvelles règles du jeu ; une présentation critique de l’exemple du Royaume-Uni (où les règles du jeu sont plus extrêmes et appliquées depuis plus longtemps), s’interrogeant sur des causes plus profondes et s’inquiétant des affects ainsi engendrés dans le monde universitaire, en particulier les business schools ; une interrogation sur ce qui est entendu en termes de ‘pertinence’, mot célébré dans le domaine de la recherche en sciences de gestion, mais qui n’est pas problématisé ; un pamphlet acerbe, décrivant les effets induits par les systèmes de classements et de rendu de comptes et tirant la conclusion que la seule issue est… de refuser collectivement d’y participer.

Comme toute vitrine de la RFG, cette manifestation sera l’occasion d’échanges avec des personnalités qui n’évoluent pas au sein du monde académique : Pascale Clark (BoxSons), Candice Marchal (BoxSons) et Adrien de Tricornot (Le Monde) font l’honneur et l’amité de participer à cet évènement et témoigneront de la façon dont la question du sens de la recherche, de l’impact voire de la quête de performance traverse aujourd’hui l’industrie du journalisme.

Entrée libre. Inscription obligatoire à : https://www.eventbrite.fr/e/billets-vitrine-de-la-revue-francaise-de-gestion-recherche-medias-et-journalisme-38784988946

 Les places du chercheur

Séminaire doctoral organisé par le LITEM (TEM et Université d’Evry-Val-d’Essonne) avec le soutien de l’ESCP-Europe du 16 au 19 mai 2017 à ESCP-Europe – 81 avenue de la République – Paris.

Dans une recherche qualitative, la place que prend le chercheur soulève un ensemble d’enjeux épistémologiques, politiques, éthiques et rhétoriques. Notre place définit en effet notre mode de contact avec le terrain, mais aussi nos possibilités d’interprétation, nos types de contribution, notre légitimité, notre responsabilité. Réfléchir sur notre place c’est réfléchir sur notre démarche, examiner notre interprétation et élargir notre compréhension. Par ailleurs une position originale peut apporter une perspective et une réflexion inédites. Alors sommes-nous dedans ou dehors, observateur, participant, intervenant ou activiste ? Sommes-nous seulement une instance d’interprétation imaginée neutre, ou avons-nous un corps, des affects, une culture ? Notre genre, nos orientations, notre classe sociale, notre âge ont-ils de l’importance ? Quelle est notre expérience, notre éthique, nos motivations vis-à-vis du thème étudié ? Nous posons-nous comme juge, témoin, concepteur, chroniqueur, expérimentateur, inspecteur, lanceur d’alerte, dessinateur, cartographe ? Nous pensons-nous comme auteur, acteur, essayiste, bricoleur, introspecteur, auditeur ou audité, faisant reflet ou réflexion, multiplions-nous les positions de sujet, cherchons-nous la polyphonie ? Et quelles sont les implications de notre appartenance à un laboratoire, à une école, les influences de nos maîtres, de nos parcours, de nos ambitions ? Quels sont nos liens, nos sentiments, nos préjugés envers les membres et lieux d’enquête ? Quels risques nos enquêtes et nos écrits leur font-ils courir ? Comment le sens et le sensible sont-ils partagés ?

Le but de ce séminaire doctoral est de réfléchir à sa propre position, de voir ce qu’elle permet ou limite, de prolonger la réflexivité sur son approche et d’envisager éventuellement d’autres places possibles. Des intervenants issus d’horizons différents présenteront leur expérience, leurs convictions et leurs conseils, et répondront aux interrogations sur ce qu’implique une position choisie. Chacun sera amené préciser et évaluer sa (ses) place(s). Des moments seront également réservés pour des discussions libres ou à des doctorants souhaitant présenter leurs interrogations vis-à-vis du thème du séminaire. Le but est la réflexion collective et l’écoute mutuelle, non l’imposition d’une one best place.

Programme

Accelerationism (a rather fast conference in paris june 22-23 2017)

‘Accelerationism’ comes in very different forms. It has roots in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. But what does speeding-up produce: hypercapitalism and exploitation, social control and repression, chaos and complexification, creativity and experimentation, entropy and the decline of civilization? Is speeding up really a form of slowing down?

Take the ‘ferocious but short lived assault’ of Nick Land on complacency and the academic status quo: is he a hero or a shirk? Was he ever the ‘surhomme’ and did he then become dangerous?

Is Noys (2014) right to claim that (hyper)speed-up can never surpass capitalism, but only nourishes it? Have the stock market traders epitomized the acceleration of financial capitalism in all its unknowing and destructive potential (Lightfoot & Lilley)? Have Nietzsche and Hobbes joined forces in a social-political nightmare? Is ‘alt-right’ a perverse re-interpretation of militant Deleuzianism? Williams and Srnicek (2013) have written an accelerationist manifesto wherein they claim that rapid socio-technical change could lead to a liberatory post-work society. They oppose the appeals to (re-)territorialization, to the ‘commons’, and to the ‘local’ by championing a post-industrial future.

Indeed, what does accelerationism mean for ‘organizing’? One thing is clear; it is controversial. Organization studies has drawn its radical and critical voices from the likes of Bataille, Artaud, Blanchot, Deleuze, deLanda, Virilio; theoreticians of motility and vitality. Org. studies has all too often assumed that market capitalism and (post-)Marxist socialism are the only ‘kids on the block’. Does accelerationism point elsewhere, to permanent impermanence? What is really left of ‘organization’ and ‘organizing’ in the (post-)chaos world of acceleration?

The conveners are: Robert Earhart (AUP), Jean-Luc Moriceau (TEM: ETHOS), Hugo Letiche (U. of Leicester) and Stephen Overy (U. of Newcastle).  We invite contributions of +/- 20 minutes each to discuss: Deleuze, Nietzsche, Land, thermodynamics, cybernetics, horror fiction, cyberpunk, virtual/virtuality, traders, bitcom, neo-reactionary-ism, (post- and hyper-)capitalism, etcetera from an accelerationist perspective.

Venue: American University of Paris; the afternoon of Thursday 22^nd June & all-day Friday the 23^rd June 2017.  Proposals (one A-4) to be submitted before 01.05.2017 to:  accelerationismAUP@gmail.com

Stream at the 10th Critical Management Studies Conference, Liverpool, July 5th to 7th 2017.

Stream Convenors:
Professor Simon Lilley (University of Leicester, UK) – Lead Convenor, s.lilley@le.ac.uk
Professor Jean-Luc Moriceau (Telecom Ecole de Management, France)
Dr Justine Grønbæk Pors (Copenhagen Business School, Denmark)

There has been increasing attention devoted to what has become known as ‘speculative realism’ in recent years, with a number of books and papers appearing across the philosophical, social sciences and humanities although, as of yet, there has been little direct incursion into the administrative and organisational sciences. We hope to begin to rectify this situation with this stream for we see much in speculative realism that offers potential to think anew many of the traditional objects of our inquiry such as products, services, assets (both physical and intangible), the derivative exotica of high finance (Lightfoot and Harvie, 2016) accounting and information systems, strategies, plans, formalised routines and the human resources that enact and embody them, to name but those that spring easiest to mind.
We are particularly interested in exploring the variety of ‘speculative realism’ associated with Graham Harman and his ‘object oriented ontology’. This form of thinking builds upon developments in science and technology studies, particularly the work of Bruno Latour, but it also differs in key ways, most specifically in terms of its thinking of the ‘objects’ that are to be found at the intersections of ‘actor networks’. ‘Objects’ are the building blocks of Harman’s speculative realism. Objects, in this view, are made of parts and can themselves be parts of other objects. . This is a ‘flat ontology’, shared in large part with DeLanda (2006) and building on DeLanda, Harman sees objects as having the following characteristics:
1. An object cannot be reduced to the parts that make it up; and thus it follows that,
2. The parts of an object are not the object itself.
3. An object can have effects upon other objects but, just as in relation to its parts, it cannot be reduced to those effects; and
4. All objects are independent of other objects.

In short for Harman, despite being made up of other objects, despite unleashing effects on other objects, an object has a realness that exceeds any of these under- or over-pinnings. The habits of thought that Harman would like his philosophy to break with tend to either undermine or overmine the reality of an object qua object when they respectively seek to reduce the object to its components or see it merely as a part, and nothing more than a part, of some greater whole.
For Harman all objects have a dual nature. On the one hand, objects recede into dedifferentiated world. On the other, they make something of themselves present to other objects and make new relations, new objects. There is a double move here though. A partial, translated object rather than a real object is what makes itself present to another object to enable a relation to be formed; as a new object in itself, and as the potential for further new objects. The new objects so made are of course the same in their objectness as their progenitors and can thus either appear to other objects in partial translated form, or retreat themselves into dedifferentiated world. This is not just a ‘what you see depends upon how you look argument’. For objects to be real and meet the criteria we
outlined above they have to be more than their relations to other objects, be those relations up, down or sideways.
Characteristics, including the agency, of objects have been typified and described by Harman as entailing multiple processes. New objects are combines of the ‘notes’ (Harman, 2005: 211) or ‘sensual qualities’ (Harman, 2011: 128) of their progenitors that are formed when one object ‘allures’ (Harman, 2005: 211) another into interaction. Interaction which, due to the intervention of the ‘sensual objects’ between the ‘real objects’ that are their cousins, is rendered by Harman as an aspect of the ‘vicarious causation’ (Harman, 2007) through which objects interact; real objects themselves being too much in retreat to interact directly and still persist as objects.
In essence then, Harman’s moves build upon the decentering of human agency at the core of key strands of actor network theory but go beyond that theory in the ways in which the object itself is thought. Whilst for Latour everything of the object is given by the relations of which it is thus formed, for Harman, there is something more to the object in and of itself.
Our proposal is timely for Harman’s latest work, Immaterialsm (2016), begins to approach organisations directly. Subtitled objects and social theory, the text explores the applicability of the authors developing ideas in relation to the traditional objects of the administrative and social sciences. Harman chooses to take the Dutch East India Company and its development in the early seventeenth century as his exemplary object and ‘argues that this company qualifies for objecthood neither through ‘what it is’ or ‘what it does’, but through its irreducibility to either of these forms’ (http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9781509500963). On the four hundredth anniversary of the Governor General, Jan Pieterszoon Coen’s, imposition of enclosures on the native clove growers of the Dutch East Indies, we invite object oriented philosophical reflection on the business and managerial practices of today. Papers of interest to the stream could consider addressing the following themes (although we in no sense see this as an exclusive or exhaustive list of the possibilities):
 What are the implications for management of taking objects seriously (in the Harmanian sense)?
 How are the objects of (high) finance and more pedestrian concerns such as human shelter related?
 Where do ‘products’ and ‘services’ begin and end?
 How do administrative, accounting and information systems relate to the objects that they survey?
 What is revealed by approaching such systems as objects in themselves?
 What are the objects of strategy, policy, plans and operations? What is to be gained by approaching these domains as objects?
 W(h)ither ethics in an object oriented world whose ‘flat ontology’ significantly problematizes an easy attribution to agency?

References
DeLanda, M. (2006) A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity, New York: Continuum.
Harman, G. (2005) Guerilla Metaphysics, Peru, Il: Open Court Books.
Harman, G. (2007) ‘On Vicarious Causation’ in Mackay, R. (ed.) Collapse II: Speculative Realism, Falmouth: Urbanomic: 187-221.
Harman, G. (2009) Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics, Prahran, Victoria.: Re. press.
Harman, G. (2011) The Quadruple Object, Winchester: Zero Books.
Harman, G. (2016) Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Latour, B., Harman, G., and Erdélyi, P. (2011) The Prince and the Wolf: Latour and Harman at the LSE, Winchester: Zero-Hunt.
Latour, B. (2004) The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, tr. C. Potter, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Lightfoot, G. and Harvie, D. (2016) ‘Finance: finding a philosophical fit?’ In Raza Mir, Hugh Willmott and Michelle Greenwood (eds) The Routledge Companion to Philosophy in Organization Studies, London: Routledge.

Simondon. Investigating the pre-organizational

La pensée de Simondon influence de plus en plus la théorie des organisations, que ce soit pour son approche en termes d’individuation, son analyse du travail et de l’aliénation, sa théorie de l’information, sa pensée du changement, de l’innovation, son approche des affects et de l’esthétique,  son humanisme qui laisse une place égale aux animaux ou aux individus techniques, son appel au développement d’une culture technique.

Pour mieux faire connaître son apport, avec Hugo Letiche, nous avons édité un numéro spécial de la revue Culture and Organization, publié en janvier 2017.

Nous renvoyons au premier article : Letiche Hugo & Moriceau Jean-Luc, 2017, « Simondon. Investigating the pre-organizational », Culture and Organization, Vol. 23, n°1, pp.1-13; Doi: 10.1080/14759551.2016.1240358

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14759551.2016.1240358

Jean-Luc Moriceau est professeur à Télécom Ecole de Management, une école de l’Institut-Mines Télécom, et responsable des formations doctorales