Does organizational governance contribute to academic quality? Two top research universities are observed in-depth: Berkeley and the MIT. Three key factors are listed that help generate consistent and lasting high performance. Priority is allocated to self-evaluation and to the development of...

Administration in organizations emerged as a specific field of inquiry for social sciences in the middle of the twentieth century. Herbert Simon has defined a program that allows social sciences to move from principles to concepts about action and action taking. Four main perspectives of...

Quality judgements 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...

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...

Analyse du phénomène de la contrainte "douce" exercée par l'entreprise sur ses cadres et la résistance que certains d'entre eux y opposent, avec des témoignages

The paper is based on intensive longitudinal field research. It suggests an interpretative model of territorial governement in France. Relations between national and local authorities as well as policy-making processes suggest that the centralized state has face a major decline of its hegemony...

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...