Papers by Philippe Lorino
Controlling, Jan 14, 1997
Oxford University Press eBooks, Jan 19, 2012
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Jul 4, 2012
Architectures of buildings influence work relationships and organizational practices. The case of... more Architectures of buildings influence work relationships and organizational practices. The case of building architecture can be extended to other complex instrumental systems which constrain and enable, not only the activity of local teams, but entire organizational processes, across functions. This paper explores the potential contribution of "sociomateriality" research to analyze such "architectural instruments" (e.g. integrated management information systems-ERP). It is suggested that sociomateriality analyses lack a theory of collective activity. Pragmatist authors allow conceptualizing activity as the collective production of meaning through dialogical interactions mediated by triadic signs. Beyond multiple classes of tooling, the basic mediation of activity is provided by the cultural repertory of habits, which makes situated acts recognizable, debatable, and connects them to culture. Habits are the key to adaptive repetition, but, when disrupted by unexpected situations, they trigger inquiries to reengineer them. The iteration between habit and inquiry, the two building blocks of collective activity, shapes the polyphonic narrative of what actors do together, framed by tacit narrative frames, "architextures", such as temporal-spatial frames and generic characters. Architectural instruments are "architectural" because they are "architextual", i.e. because they instantiate implicit narrative frames in day-today activity. Two cases illustrate these ideas: the implementation of an ERP system in an electricity company and an informal procedure to manage engineering changes in an aerospace company.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2014
La fuite managériale devant la complexité : l'exemple historique du "lean management" La fuite ma... more La fuite managériale devant la complexité : l'exemple historique du "lean management" La fuite managériale devant la complexité : l'exemple historique du "lean management".
Revue française du marketing, 1984
[Revue française de gestion industrielle], Jun 1, 1989
[Revue française de gestion industrielle], Sep 1, 1989
Pratiques de travail et dynamiques organisationnelles
This research examines the organizational effects of applying monological theories of activity to... more This research examines the organizational effects of applying monological theories of activity to organizational processes that prove inherently dialogical. It uses a theoretical framework drawing simultaneously from communicational approaches (Cooren & al., 2011; Kuhn, 2008; Taylor & Cooren, 1997) and dialogical approaches inspired by Bakhtin (Clot, 2009; Jabril, 2016; Lorino & Tricard, 2012; Lorino, Tricard & Clot, 2011; Shotter, 2008; Tsoukas, 2009), stressing the convergences and complementarity between these two frameworks, their potential divergences, and their implications for organizational theory and for research methodology.
Projectics / Proyéctica / Projectique, 2019
Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour De Boeck Supérieur. Distribution électronique Cairn.inf... more Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour De Boeck Supérieur. Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour De Boeck Supérieur. La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit. Article disponible en ligne à l'adresse Article disponible en ligne à l'adresse https://www.cairn.info/revue-projectique-2019-3-page-79.htm Découvrir le sommaire de ce numéro, suivre la revue par email, s'abonner... Flashez ce QR Code pour accéder à la page de ce numéro sur Cairn.info.
L'enseignement de la gestion en France, 2021
De Gruyter eBooks, Aug 9, 2021
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Jan 4, 2022
Introduction: "Man without a star" !e wandering Texan cow boy Dempsey Rae, played by Kirk Douglas... more Introduction: "Man without a star" !e wandering Texan cow boy Dempsey Rae, played by Kirk Douglas in the movie "Man without a star" directed by King Vidor in 1955, arrives in Wyoming. He hates barbed wires since they took his brother's life. Above all, for him, they epitomize the end of what he most cherishes, free riding in vast open spaces. But he is caught up in a range war: his boss, the steely female rancher Reed Bowman, has plans to triple the size of her herd, which will crowd out the smaller ranchers on the range. Rae faces a dilemma: should he serve Bowman's plans to edge out other ranchers and dominate the whole region, or support the smaller ranchers' will to defend their living by fencing o$ their pastures? At the end of the movie, Rae leaves the area disenchanted, probably guessing that his dreams of community life are just getting historically outdated. !e range wars between big and small ranchers, or between ranchers and crop-growing farmers, or between ranchers, farmers and mining companies, are one of the favorite themes of classical westerns. !ey provide an archetypical illustration of "the tragedy of the commons" theorized by neo-classical economists: a rare resource (land), multiple competing appropriators (livestock grazing, crop growing, mining), individualist pro%t-maximizing consumption of the resource at the expense of other users, gradual depletion of the resource (soil depletion). !is example is also interesting because this "tragedy of the commons" tacitly rests on a concealed past (the native Americans' previous expropriation and eviction), unthought-of future disruptions (galloping urbanization, industrialization), more or less distant environmental transformations (precisely at the same time, the quick development of railway infrastructure, massive European immigration, leading to range and ethnical wars depicted in Cimino's 1980 movie "Heaven's Gate"). Dempsey Rae's story is thus a case of commons con)ict with a precise social, temporal and spatial frame (land utilization should be grazing or cultivating, not manufacturing or urbanizing; users are settled ranchers or farmers, not nomads; competing values are social justice, individual freedom and economic growth) but this frame is in the very process of "over)owing" (Callon, 1998): the terms of the problem are too local, too immediate and too static to understand the situation and construct viable futures. !ere is no other future for Dempsey Rae than further wandering in space and time and moving to distant territories.
Oxford University Press eBooks, Mar 22, 2018
Pragmatist inquiry involves a group of inquirers who face a break in their experience and pursue ... more Pragmatist inquiry involves a group of inquirers who face a break in their experience and pursue existential motives. They must continuously build reciprocal intelligibility. The felicitous outcome requires reciprocal trust, transforming the group of inquirers into a temporary community. The community dimension of inquiry is illustrated through a case study: the implementation of an integrated management information system in an electricity company. It identifies the roles of two types of communities: communities of practice, characterized by common practice, and communities of inquiry, characterized by the diversity of practices but an agreed general concern. The concept of community of inquiry was initially sketched by classic pragmatist authors and later developed by organization scholars, particularly in the field of public management. It is related to Follett’s view of “group organization” as the basis of democratic life and Latour’s concept of “matter of concern.”
Oxford University Press eBooks, Mar 22, 2018
Mainstream organization studies have long conceptualized organizations as structures imposing ord... more Mainstream organization studies have long conceptualized organizations as structures imposing order on individual and collective practices. Many organization scholars see organizing as an ongoing process, given the ceaseless adaptative experience of organizations. After an account of the “process turn” in organization studies, this chapter identifies six key questions about the characteristics of organizing processes and analyzes the process orientation of pragmatism and the specific contribution of the main pragmatist thinkers to process thought. It clarifies the pragmatist responses to the six key issues: (1) Organizing is an intrinsic dimension of ordinary activity rather than a specific process reflexively examining activity; (2) organizing is a relational/trans-actional rather than (inter-)subjective process; (3) organizing is a teleological rather than self-contained and autopoietic process; (4) organizing operates segmentation and unification, spatializing and temporalizing at the same time; (5) organizing is both experience-based and creative, it entangles cognition and intuition; (6) organizing is ediated by signs.
Oxford University Press eBooks, Dec 18, 2020
In this chapter, we explore a methodology for “process as withness” (Fachin and Langley, 2018). T... more In this chapter, we explore a methodology for “process as withness” (Fachin and Langley, 2018). The goal is to study the experience of “living forward” by creating “narratives of prospect” (Weick, 1999). The chapter builds on Shotter’s work (2006; 2009) on a withness approach, which helps in understanding the struggles of living forward experienced by practitioners and researchers alike. Withness until now has remained philosophical with a few vignettes by Shotter (2006; 2009). We operationalize withness through embedding it within pragmatist inquiry (Farjoun, Ansell, and Boin, 2015; Lorino et al., 2011; Martela, 2015). For this, we propose to build on the existing links between a withness approach and pragmatist inquiry in the work of James, Dewey, and Mead, but to extend these to fuse a withness approach and pragmatist inquiry into “pragmatist withness inquiry.” We end with a call for other researchers to learn from, criticize, and build on our attempts to develop “pragmatist withness inquiry.” The challenges are dialogue, access to doubtful situations, and creating “narratives of prospect.”
Oxford University Press eBooks, Mar 22, 2018
This chapter narrates the efforts of a hospital cardiology department to create its country’s fir... more This chapter narrates the efforts of a hospital cardiology department to create its country’s first chronic heart failure (CHF) multidisciplinary unit. With an average treatment cost that was too high, threatening their required funding, the department’s actors strove to reduce it. They analyzed collective activity, made exploratory hypotheses about cost drivers, and developed new performance measurements to verify their hypotheses. This is an example of the social process of inquiry. The chapter presents the pragmatist definition of inquiry, a non-dualist and relational framework, recursively articulated with the concept of habit. It integrates action and thought, narrative and logical thought. The respective roles of the three types of inference identified by Peirce are analyzed: abduction, deduction, and induction. The chapter highlights the mediated and mediating nature of inquiry, illustrated in the hospital case by the reengineering of management indicators, and closes with the major differences between inquiry and the mainstream problem-solving framework.
[Revue française de gestion industrielle], Mar 1, 1989
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Jul 7, 2016
The paradigm of organizational control supposes that human activity is simple and transparent eno... more The paradigm of organizational control supposes that human activity is simple and transparent enough to be represented from the outside, in a stabilized and standardized form. The "control" approach, epitomized by Taylorism, thus implies some denial of the complexity of activity and favors the representation of activity – as a set of standardized and measurable operations, in the Taylorian case – rather than activity itself, as the primary object of management. The quality management movement, forerunner of "lean management" (Womack et al. 1990), was first inspired by a pragmatist philosophy in the 1930s in the US. It redefined activity as the focal point of management and stressed the exploratory nature of collective learning, which is embedded in practical experience and incompatible with variance-based control. As such, it appeared at the time as an anti-Taylorian managerial reaction. Strangely enough, using the labels "lean management" and "total quality control", a Taylorian revival, completely reverting the messages of the pioneers of lean management, has occurred in recent years, discarding the central role of activity and erasing its original pragmatist inspiration. The paper will first present a case study about work organization and management in the call centers of a large European utility company, supposedly based on the principles of lean management. The paper then describes the history of the quality and lean movement and shows that the principles applied in the case of those call centers are in direct contradiction with the historical pragmatist inspiration of lean management. To conclude, the paper analyzes the implications of the "control" versus "inquiring" debate for the design and use of mediating artefacts, as illustrated by the development of a role-playing module at the company where the case study took place.
Dunod eBooks, Jan 4, 2017
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Papers by Philippe Lorino