A market for weather risk ? Worlds in conflict and compromising.

In this paper we study the development of the market for weather derivatives in Europe. We show that weather derivatives conceived as financial products by their promoters have difficulties finding end-users. We describe the attempts of market promoters using a framework drawn from economic sociology, namely the theory provided by Boltanski and Thevenot's Economy of Worth. We derive some conclusions about the potential future of the market.Social studies of finance; Weather risk; OTC market;

Critical Management Education as a Vehicle for Emancipation: Exploring the Philosophy of Jacques Rancière

This paper aims to contribute to the literature on Critical Management Education (CME) by drawing on the work of philosopher, Jacques Rancière, whose thinking provides a means of resolving the dilemma underlying CME. It raises fundamental questions regarding the position of authority and the expertise of the critical educator, while at the same time dispelling the illusion of collaboration and consensus with students and managers. By presenting equality as an assumption to be actualised, Rancière invites us to reject the appropriation harboured by expert knowledge and the assignation of positions that this implies. On this basis, we can restructure the place of management and management education as a fertile ground for the emergence of dissensus in order to politicise what was neutralised and to give voice to those who have no voice.Critical Management Education - Critical Management Studies - Emancipation - Rancière

Market shaping as an answer to ambiguities. The case of credit derivatives.

Building on Smith (1989), we describe the social processes surrounding a new financial OTC derivatives market, the market for credit derivatives. We show that in contradiction to more traditional derivatives, credit derivatives generate ambiguities of a cognitive and political nature. By conducting an in-depth longitudinal qualitative study from 1996 to 2004, we document the efforts made by the promoters of the market to alleviate these ambiguities and show how the size of resources needed results in the leadership of the most powerful. We thus provide a socially based explanation for the concentration and lack of transparency of the market. Our research exemplifies the contradictions between the rhetorical justification of financial innovations provided by financial theory and the empirical realities of a modern derivative market. It suggests that the actual structure of the market might best be understood by paying attention to the way different cognitive and political communities react to these contradictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]Credit derivatives; Social processes; Derivative securities; Over-the-counter markets; Construction sociale d'un marché financier;

The connexionnist nature of modern financial markets. Challenges and possible outcomes

The recent financial crisis has triggered radical criticism against financial markets. In this paper, we propose to analyse this criticism in the perspective drawn by Boltanski and Thevenot (1991/2006) around the notion of justification. We see the main debate as opposing the critics and the defenders of what can be identified as a Market order (Boltanski and Thevenot, 1991/2006). While the former regret the consequences of deregulation in financial markets, the latter insist on the preservation of regulatory options favouring market activity as much as possible. This debate however relies on the hypothesis that financial markets in general fit the ideal-type of the Walrasian market model. While this hypothesis might make sense as regards the description of stock markets (this refers to the so called market efficiency issue), it appears unrealistic when applied to the majority of modern financial markets. At least 80% of those are OTC markets where bilateral contracts are exchanged between counterparties in the absence of any centralized structure. Our thesis is that to be useful, a critical perspective on financial markets should take full account of the nature of OTC markets, which guarantees neither the transparency of prices nor the efficiency of competition mechanisms. We propose to characterize this nature using Boltanski and Chiapello's concept (1999/2008) of the Connexionnist World. We then emphasize the difficulty of the connexionnist grammar of worth to develop principles of justice in OTC markets, which are characterized by their despatialization and the infinity of potential members. We suggest potential tracks to struggle more efficiently against the drifts of the connexionnist logic as they arise on financial markets and their spillover effects on societies. The contribution of the paper is thus to provide a more precisely targeted critique of modern financial markets.connexionism, social studies of finance, critical theory

Market Shaping as an Answer to Ambiguities.

Building on Smith (1989), we describe the social processes surrounding a new financial OTC derivatives market, the market for credit derivatives. We show that in contradiction with more traditional derivatives, credit derivatives generate ambiguities of a cognitive and political nature. By conducting an in-depth longitudinal qualitative study from 1996 to 2004, we document the efforts made by the promoters of the market to alleviate these ambiguities and show how the amount of resources needed results in the leadership of the most powerful. We thus provide a socially based explanation for the concentration and lack of transparency of the market. Our research exemplifies the contradictions between the rhetorical justification of financial innovations provided by financial theory and the empirical realities of a modern derivative market. It suggests that the actual structure of the market might best be understood by paying attention to the way different cognitive and political communities react to these contradictions.Social studies of finance, social construction of value, financial innovation, OTC markets, cognitive and political ambiguities

Rethinking Emancipation in Organization Studies. In the light of Jacques Rancière's Philosophy

The demand for emancipation was once something we only associated with oppressed social groups such as Women, Workers or the colonized who were seeking to escape from various forms of domination which they had long been subjected to. Today, some of the most privileged groups in our society such as middle managers and professions talk about their thirst for emancipation. They seek this precious and awe inspiring goal through participating in management courses (Gosling, 2000), reading various forms of management literature which promises to turn them into revolutionaries (Jacques, 1996), and engaging with various journeys to free themselves from the shackles of thought control and simply 'be themselves' at work (Fleming, 2009). Corporations routinely sell themselves as a route to emancipation for their consumers and employees. One only needs to think about the recent advertisement for Virgin which replaced the famous images of the revolutionary Ché Guevara with Richard Branson. The message seems to be clear - it is not just radical political movements that can provide emancipation, corporations can too! The fact that emancipation has lost its anchor in radical political movements and shocks and scandalizes some. For others, it is a kind of an indication of how endlessly flexible and omnivorous capitalism is insofar as it is able to adopt nearly anything - include forms of virulent anti-capitalism - to further itself. While these two explanations are certainly appealing, we think that the widespread adoption of this culture of emancipation actually underlines the increasing uncertainty and fragmentation that has taken place around the term. For us this is due to a shift in focus of understanding of emancipation. Previously, emancipation was understood as a form of wide-scale transformational change in society achieved through intellectuals enlightening people who find themselves dominated. This notion informed studies of emancipation for many years. The result was that research on emancipation tended to focus on either documenting large scale challenges to capitalism and management or agitating for emancipation through a progressive enlightenment of the audience. This approach to emancipation began to fall out of favour as it was accused of being too grandiose - subjects were positioned as victims of managerial knowledge which they could only escape from through the progressive enlightenment under the tutelage of critical intellectuals. Such disenchantment led researchers to turn their focus towards more minor forms of micro-emancipation whereby people momentarily escape from domination in their everyday life through minor activities (eg. Alvesson and Willmott, 1992). This focus produced a deep body of literature that documented the various ways individuals seek out micro-emancipation in the workplace (eg. Zanoni and Jensens, 2007). However, recently we have witnessed some important questions being asked around this research agenda. In particular, some are concerned that it has begun to fundamentally constrain how we think about forms of emancipation, creating a myopic focus on small-scale struggles and fundamentally ignoring many of the broader social struggles that challenge management. In this paper we seek to overcome these problems associated with macro as well as micro-emancipation by positing a new conception of emancipation offered in the recent thought of Jacques Rancière. For Rancière, emancipation should not be seen as an ideal to be reached, but as a postulate to be acualised in day-to-day practice. He points out that equality can be actualized by interrupting the order of sensibility (rather than through quotidian everyday acts), through creating a sense of dissensus (rather than collaboration and attempts to create consensus), and attempts to singularize the universal (rather than through fragmentary struggles). By focusing on these three processes, Rancière enables us to see a range of emancipatory struggles that we were blinded to by both accounts of marco-emancipation (which went looking for grand revolts) as well as micro-emancipation (which focused on everyday transgression). In particular it enables us to register the kinds of emancipation movements that have frequently been left out of accounts of emancipation in organization studies. These include the self-education movements, proliterian intellectual movements, as well as forms art. Rancière's account of emancipation allows us to extend how we think about processes of emancipation in and around organizations in three ways. First, it allows us to register activities in our theoretical gaze that we had previously ignored or discounted. Macro-emancipation focuses our attention on collective movements which are organised and micro-emancipation focuses our attention on often individual every-day activities which are not organised. In contrast, Rancière draws our attention to various emancipatory movements that are often collective, but are not formally organised. This broadens the range of forms of emancipation we can study. Second, Rancière allows us to rethink how exactly emancipation works. Instead of focusing on creation of new states of freedom (as studies of macro emancipation do) or attempts to seize fleeting forms of freedom (as studies of micro emanciption do), Rancière's work allows us to see how emancipation involves the transformation of the sensible. This re-orients our studies to how emancipation movements seek to change what and how we actually see the world. Finally, Rancière allows us to move beyond the assumption that contemporary resistance is fragmented and disorganised by registering how individual forms of resistance are experienced as an embodiment or singularization of universal struggles. Doing this allows us to recognise the link between the specific demands of many resistance movements and more universal claims such as dignity, recognition, and justice. By making these three contributions, we hope to move beyond either an elitist account found in studies of macro-emancipation and the banal account found in studies of micro-emancaiption. In order to make this argument, we proceed as follows. We begin by reviewing the two dominant conceptions of emancipation. First we look at three different modes of emancipation that have been successively pursued - political emancipation, economic emancipation and ideological emancipation. We then look at the ways in which organization studies has suggested these struggles take place - through 'macro-emancipation' or 'micro-emancipation'. In this review we highlight the shortcomings of these two existing conceptions of emancipation. We then introduce a third conception of emancipation inspired by the work of Jacques Rancière. After we have outlined this, we then draw out the implications of this for the study of emancipation in organization studies. We conclude by sketching out what new areas of emancipation this allows us to understand and perhaps engage with.Rancière ; emancipation ; critical theory ; critical management studies ; micro emancipation

Changing nature and sustainability of the industrial district model : the case of Technic Valley in France

This paper examines the impact of contemporary pressures on industrial districts and analyses the changes that are taking place in an industrial district confronted with disembedding and globalization. We discuss the following questions: what are the processes and consequences of disembedding for the changing shape and form of inter-firm trust, contract and network forms? Is there an evolution in subcontracting and trade interdependency? What is the role of institutional infrastructures? We performed a longitudinal qualitative study using a number of different data sources to analyse the evolution of one French industrial district, particularly how new pressures of internationalization and disembedding work to reconfigure inter-firm relations in this district. While the recent literature is dominated by notions about industrial districts that concern only the trend towards increased competition or disembeddedness, this article shows that there is no unilinear trend. In contrast with the findings of certain recent studies, we argue that economic logic does not fully account for recent developments since the adjustment that are being made by the district are characterized rather by re-embeddedness, increased cooperation and institutionalization.industrial district, globalization, economic sociology

Reproduction de l'ordre institutionnel face à l'incertitude

Comment certains systèmes se maintiennent-ils malgré un environnement incertain et changeant ? Cette question reste peu explorée dans la littérature, en particulier en ce qui concerne la compréhension des efforts des acteurs pour reproduire des croyances et des schémas de pensée. Dans cette perspective, les auteurs focalisent l'attention sur le discours des majors du disque dans la filière musicale et déterminent leur rôle dans la relative persistance de l'ordre existant.théorie néo-institutionnaliste, maintien institutionnel, analyse de discours, industrie musicale

Extension du domaine de la stratégie. Plaidoyer pour un agenda de recherche critique.

L'objet de cet article est de spécifier la nature et les contours d'une activité critique dans le champ de la stratégie. Alors que les analyses dites post-rationnelles ou processuelles ont offert des alternatives au courant conventionnel en stratégie, elles ne rendent pas compte de la spécificité de l’approche critique et ne s’inscrivent pas dans le projet d’une théorie critique du management stratégique. Elles ont certes introduit le thème du pouvoir, mais ont peu insisté sur les phénomènes de domination. Elles ont par ailleurs intégré le rôle des discours mais sans insister sur l'importance de celui-ci dans les processus de subjectivation. Elles ont enfin été soucieuses de réflexion sur la définition du périmètre de la stratégie, mais ont échoué à mettre en oeuvre une réflexivité radicale. Au travers de l’examen des quelques travaux existants proposant une approche critique du management stratégique, ce papier explore la manière dont l'analyse critique peut se saisir de problématiques-clés en management stratégique, en dépassant la perspective post-rationnelle et en proposant un agenda de recherche résolument critique pour la discipline.The purpose of this article is to specify the nature of a critical activity in the field of strategy. While post-rational or procedural researches offered alternatives to conventional strategy, they do not reflect the specificity of the critical approach and do not really fit to a critical theory of strategic management . Building on a literature review in critical management studies and strategy, our article calls for a critical research agenda in strategic management, that goes beyond the post-rational perspective in the field.épistémologie; actionnabilité de la recherche; Critic; Pedagogy; Power; Strategy; Reflexivity; théorie du management stratégique; stratégie collective; pédagogie;

Pierre Bourdieu. Critique et réflexivité comme attitude analytique en sciences de gestion

L'objet de cet article est d'analyser l'apport potentiel des travaux de Pierre Bourdieu pour les sciences des organisations. Les principaux concepts de cette sociologie sont présentés, avant de mettre en évidence quelques pistes d'application possibles en sciences de gestion. La dimension résolument critique de l'œuvre, qui valorise la part de réflexivité dans le travail du chercheur pour renouveler les pratiques scientifiques, est enfin soulignée.sociologie critique, réflexivité, émancipation