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?...

Le texte élabore une typologie de la diversité des formes locales d'appropriation des nouvelles normes d'action, en s'appuyant sur la prémisse de Merton selon laquelle la qualité académique repose sur l'appui réciproque de dimensions instrumentales et honorifiques. Depuis les années où...

Comment poser la question de la réforme du système public français de la recherche et de l'enseignement supérieur? Le texte passe en revue les nombreuses propositions émises en 2004 lors du débat national. Mobilisant le savoir acquis par la sociologie des organisations et par l'analyse des...

La massification de l'enseignement, la multiplication des classements, la transformation des modes de financement et, plus généralement, l'internationalisation constituent quelques-uns des bouleversements profonds auxquels est confronté l'enseignement supérieur dans la plupart des pays de...