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Stéphane Jaumier (2015)PhD Thesis for the title of Doctor of Management SciencePresented and publicly supported on 24 November 2015.https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01272555RESUME"Mon étude s’intéresse aux questions de pouvoir, contrôle et résistance au sein des coopératives de salariés. Dans une première partie, j’analyse une situation d’échange entre représentants du monde coopératif de façon à montrer le rôle joué par la critique dans leur appréhension du pluralisme caractérisant leur environnement. Le reste de mon travail repose sur l’étude ethnographique d’une tôlerie coopérative comprenant une trentaine de salariés-associés, et dans laquelle j’ai travaillé comme ouvrier durant une année. J’y détecte deux formes de contrôle principales à l’œuvre. La première repose sur des mécanismes essentiellement verticaux, dirigés du bas vers le haut, et par lesquels les coopérateurs sapent l’autorité de leurs chefs de façon à garantir le fonctionnement démocratique de l’organisation. La seconde s’apparente à une forme de contrôle par les pairs, fondée sur une éthique artisanale, et sur laquelle les coopérateurs s’appuient pour empêcher la managérialisation de leur organisation. Mon travail contribue ainsi à montrer l’intérêt de l’étude de formes alternatives d’organisation telles que les coopératives pour la compréhension des questions de pouvoir, contrôle et résistance ainsi que la façon dont le recours à une culture professionnelle forte peut faire obstacle à la matérialisation du risque de dégénérescence coopérative."ABSTRACT"My study focuses on issues of power, control and resistance within employee cooperatives. In a first part, I analyze a situation of exchange between representatives of the cooperative world in order to show the role played by criticism in their apprehension of the pluralism characterizing their environment. The rest of my work is based on the ethnographic study of a cooperative sheet-metal working plant comprising about thirty employee-members, and in which I worked as a worker for a year. I detect two main forms of control at work there. The first is based on essentially vertical mechanisms, directed from the bottom up, by which the cooperators undermine the authority of their leaders in order to guarantee the democratic functioning of the organization. The second is similar to a form of peer control, based on a craft ethic, which the cooperators use to prevent the managerialization of their organization. My work thus contributes to show the interest of studying alternative forms of organization such as cooperatives in understanding issues of power, control and resistance, and how the use of a strong professional culture can prevent the risk of cooperative degeneration from materializing."EXTRACT"The sociology of conventions has developed a vision of pluralism based on the empirical observation of the argumentative resources that actors mobilize when they engage in public justifications (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1999, 2006). In such situations, actors actually rely, when articulating their claims, on a limited number of so-called ‘orders of worth’, each featuring a singular definition of the common good. All orders of worth being simultaneously available to actors, pluralism is no longer conceived of as a transitional issue to be eventually solved but rather as inherent to any social situation (Cloutier and Langley, 2013; Daudigeos and Valiorgue, 2010). It is because actors are equipped with critical capacities that they are able to deal with the social inherence of pluralism and the ever-present ambiguity this entails. They do this by deciding on the order of worth that should prevail in a given situation, articulating critiques and justifications accordingly and, when needed, settling compromises (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1999, 2006). We here contend that such premises offer a strong avenue for furthering our understanding of how individuals construct situated instantiations of pluralism. More specifically, drawing on the premises of the sociology of conventions, we will pay attention to the role of critiques and compromises in these instantiations.Although pluralism can in this sense be understood as a concern for any setting, hybrid organizations, i.e. those whose identity is built on differentiated principles, still constitute a favoured object of study for pluralism since they proactively strive to compromise between multiple principles (Battilana and Dorado, 2010; Pache and Santos, 2013b). Co-operatives, which seek by definition to link an economic principle with a social one, are such an example of hybrid organizations (Leca et al., 2014; Webb and Cheney, 2014). Interestingly, co-operatives provide an additional level at which pluralism can be analysed, the co-operative movement having elaborated on a shared set of values and principles to orient co-operators’ grasp of co-operative spirit (Birchall, 1997; ICA, 1995). Co-operatives thus offer a privileged position from which to understand how organizational members may articulate different responses to a shared set of principles.More specifically, our empirical setting is French worker co-operatives. In line with the sociology of conventions, the collected data relate to a situation in which representatives of such co-operatives were in a position to publicly justify and respond to criticism about the way they conceive of co-operative values and principles. The analysis of these data through the lens of the sociology of conventions allows us to identify three main instantiations of co-operative principles. The pragmatic co-operator pursues market objectives with the aim of contributing first and foremost to member benefit. The reformist co-operator integrates broader society concerns within a reformist critique of capitalism. The political co-operator advocates a new model of society with a radical critique of capitalism." (p. 10-11)JuryMme Isabelle HUAULT, Professeure à l’Université Paris-Dauphine (Directrice de  thèse)Mme Eve CHIAPELLO, Directrice d’études à l’E.H.E.S.S. (Rapporteur)Mr. Pierre-Yves GOMEZ, Professeur à l’EM-Lyon (Rapporteur)Mr. Nicolas BERLAND, Professeur à l’Université Paris-Dauphine (Suffragant)Mme Robyn THOMAS, Professeure à l’Université de Cardiff (Suffragant)Mr. Thibault DAUDIGEOS, Professeur Associé à GEM (Suffragant)Download PhD thesis Jaumier