Search results

This paper aims to provide a more nuanced image of cooperation in France, first, insisting on the idiosyncratic conditions under which French will be likely to cooperate, and, second, pointing the importance of the local context, finally criticizing the average stereotyped image given by the intercultural management quantitative literature.

The studies behind the article are based on qualitative data and on an interpretative analysis of culture, considered as a frame of meanings through which people read the organizational situation they are in.

Advanced form of cooperation may be obtained when some balance can be established through subtle arrangement between organizational and cultural needs, i.e. allowing staff to escape from their founding fear of servility.

Such analysis of the conditions that can facilitate or hinder cooperation should not be limited to France. It may be applied to any other cultural area.

Intercultural management training sessions for expatriates could benefit from this qualitative approach.

This approach challenges the quantitative main Stream approach in cross-national studies on management.

In the postcolonial context of New Caledonia, where management and business leadership are almost exclusively performed by those who are locally called “Europeans,” the management of diversity, as conceived by them, is doubly challenged by the cultural references of Pacific Islanders. They establish both the primacy of “welcoming” on the “welcomed,” posing as legitimate a local equivalent of positive discrimination in favor of Kanak (first people), and the superiority of the principles of balance and harmony between different identity components of the social body over that of individual merit. The founding principles of nondiscrimination in hiring and meritocracy in the management of internal promotions are therefore far from consensus locally. Such a conclusion led to the interrogation of the very notion of diversity, appearing thus rooted in its culture of origin than would be believed in its universalist vocation, and, consequently, its capacity to serve as a common superior principle beyond its cultural sphere of origin.

The purpose of this paper is to develop the concept of managerial controversy. This concept focusses on organizational disagreements in order to understand the emergence of organization, and also postulates that researchers can better understand organizational phenomena through the ruptures that occur in an organization's everyday activities.

While the concept of controversy was initially developed to understand the emergence of outputs, this paper develops the concept of managerial controversy in order to understand the emergence of ways of working.

The concept of managerial controversy demonstrates that the authors can improve the understanding of organization by focussing on the disagreements, the associations of heterogeneous elements, the mediators, and the traces left by actors, as well as by considering the viewpoints of these actors.

The concept of managerial controversy can be used as a framework for describing the development of organization over time. This concept is suitable for management and organization scholars interested by issues related to organization and organizing.

This paper offers an analytical framework for analyzing the emergence of organizational features from ruptures. Furthermore, the concept of managerial controversy extends to not only the literature of actor-network theory, but also to the literature related to organizing.