Power can be used as a way to create fruitful opportunities for scientific agendas. Power also offers an analytical tool to make sense of social phenomena. This does not imply that power theory building only may derive heuristic benefits using it. The paper concludes by a series of still open...

Why do social scientists give less and less attention to policies and policy-making as a specific domain for inquiry while they use empirical contexts of policies and policy-making as empirical data sources and tests of broader theories about society and politics? The paper relies on the...

L'article met en relief la passivité des cadres dirigeants du ministère de l'Équipement face à la décentralisation de 1981-2 et leurs raisons. Il détaille les cadres cognitifs dominants dans les services extérieurs. Il resitue les transferts de compétence et les adaptations dans une...

Objectives. We investigated involvement and cooperation patterns of local Brazilian AIDS program actors and the consequences of these patterns for program implementation and sustainability. Methods. We performed a public policy analysis (documentary analysis, direct observation, semistructured...

Integration appears among the core concepts of organizational theories, which have supported the progresses of social sciences. Faced to difficulties in collective actions, researchers and managers have been thoroughly studying the levers for action, in search of the key conditions for unity,...

Organizations are cognitive actors. They build languages for action taking to interpret and make sense. How are such shared languages build, adapted and managed? What consequences do they induce in business and interrelational terms? How to study them? An in-depth study of two MNCs provides...

Quality judgments in terms of academic standards of excellence required by external stakeholders such as labour markets and steering hierarchies obviously exert strong pressure on universities. Do they generate an "iron cage" effect imposing a passive and uniform conformity on global standards?...

Qu'apporte l'analyse sociologique des universités comme organisations à la connaissance de la transformation des disciplines qui les composent? La présente contribution suggère une boîte à outils analytique. Elle caractérise les universités comme étant des organisations relevant d'un...

La sociologie des organisations éclaire-t-elle la question de la responsabilité des acteurs économiques, sociaux et politiques? A priori son regard et son programme de travail sont largement consacrés à élucider un mystère scientifique qui a priori ne relève pas du registre de la...

This chapter covers the evolution of institutional theory and its application to public adminsitrations in the last 20 years. It discusses the various streams, their reseach agendas and their contributions, but also their limits to add value to knowledge.