EDITORIAL : The OCE Research Center, A Collective in the Age of Academic Individualism

In the current context of research that pushes us to “every man for himself”, how can we “act collectively”? This question has motivated the researchers members of OCE (Organizations: Critical and Ethnographic Perspectives), for twenty years. OCE is a space where mechanisms operate to establish boundaries between often contradictory directives. For example, there is a tension between the idea of the common good generated by research – such as a way of teaching or producing knowledge relevant to the social world – and the idea of a more personal good. The latter has been exacerbated in recent decades by the individualistic nature of the academic world, which emphasizes producing an individual reputation through scientific publications.

Since its creation by Françoise Dany in 2004, the OCE center has always been designed as a means of ensuring that these often-tense interfaces are never obstacles to cooperation. This implies a foundation of shared values, even if they are not necessarily consensual, such as practicing fieldwork and seeking to reveal “what is wrong” in organizations. It is a kind of roadmap that facilitates the structuring of collective practices and the construction of a shared vocabulary that allows us to work together, even if only to talk and exchange ideas about work that is considered relevant and interesting by most members.

The invisible work that gives OCE a “collective identity” that helps it navigate the choppy waters of academia is considerable. There is a large gap between formal representations of scientific work (in particular publication) and behind-the-scenes work, which is less measurable in temporal or monetary units. What can be said of all the conversations, formal and especially informal, the sharing of field data, the exchanges around individual and collective, pedagogical and research projects that indicate (sometimes discreetly, often uncertainly) the directions taken by the collective? The whole constitutes a succession of assemblages of ideas that continue their path, sometimes written, sometimes verbal, on campus or in other places, at other times… and that give the research center an idea of what it represents.

The genesis

The early days of the creation of OCE made it possible to breathe in the scent of convivial atmospheres and the collective energy of a group of researchers united by values and desires for conceptual and empirical encounters, at a time when business schools were not yet driven by a productivist vision of research. While the pressures on scientific productivity are now unprecedented everywhere, OCE has managed, as best it can, to “resist” the assaults of a frenzied individualism, which has largely deteriorated work collectives, in universities, schools, and factories. This singular little collective has maintained itself against all odds in a context where it is not easy to do social sciences and humanities, let alone critical.

The social relationship between the individual and his work

From the outset, OCE has developed a critical look at the forms taken by people’s experiences and careers at work, and even more generally, at the social relationship between the individual and his or her work. The challenge was to analyse the deep springs of individual trajectories. The research carried out underlined the gradual disappearance of work solidarity, the growing political asymmetry between individuals and the organizational “system”, taking up some of the classic anticipations of the great thinkers of modernity. These analyses then pushed OCE researchers to adopt a critical posture, aiming to take a serene look, without the necessary ideological substrate, at the deleterious human and social consequences of organizational transformations.

This position implied orienting our work on two levels: that of the deconstruction of social interactions aimed at revealing phenomena such as inequality, relations of domination, discrimination, segregation, and that of a specifically political reflection: for the OCE researchers, the organization is indeed a space where work ethos or even divergent ideals and worldviews – the struggle of which partly determines the fate of people, as well as the overall architecture of managerial power structures – intersect and collide. We might as well go and see it closely, and this is how the central perspective of OCE was quickly qualitative and ethnographic research, in order to privilege the immersion of the researcher in the subtle mechanisms of tensions endogenous to the “system”. The theoretical core of the research center’s discussions was to develop a work program on the drivers of managerial domination projects, in the “neo-liberal” contexts that already constituted the bulk of our empirical observations.

A porosity to the social world

These elements suggest that the collective, in its composition as well as in its operating methods, has evolved as the choices of issues have also evolved. OCE is turned towards society and has therefore always been porous to the transformations of the world: never has theoretical work “in the bedroom” been able to surpass the strength of empirical results in the construction and constant reconstruction of work axes.

In addition to the scientific personalities, the research center also evolves according to the scientific disciplines represented within it. The roots of the humanities and social sciences, already strong at the beginning, have been strongly affirmed over the past ten years with the arrival of sociologists of organizations, an anthropologist and a political scientist more recently. As a result, the themes of work also diversified, while anchoring the work of the research center even more strongly in analyses of high social relevance: illegal organizations, collective housing, normalization of crises in the nuclear industry, interrelations between life at work and gender in times of crisis, spatial dynamics in the construction of work collectives, migration policies and social mobilizations, the blood plasma industry as a space for the exploitation of poverty… OCE expands its investigative themes, while remaining firm and stable on its original ethical and political biases.

A doctoral workspace

The presence and activity of doctoral students is the foundation of the construction of research collectives. This assertion is neither gratuitous nor sycophantic but based on OCE’s twenty years of experience with doctoral students with diverse trajectories. In particular, without them, our ethnographic “database” would be much less nourished; fewer socially and personally “risky” work would be supported. Ethnographic work also has its temporalities, and the demands placed on the members of the center (administrative, managerial, pedagogical, etc.) can sometimes limit their ability to carry out long-term fieldwork. OCE’s ethnographic engagement cannot therefore be conceived or pursued without the doctoral work carried out since the creation of the center.

The research of the doctoral students of the OCE center has been over the years the faithful reflection and marker of the collective thematic choices. Works on workers’ resistance in companies (David Sanson), on resistance to capitalism seized by local communities in Argentina (Pablo Fernandez), on forms of work and power around “new” platform companies (Claire Le Breton), on territorial collaborations (Leia Abitbol), liberated companies (Hélène Picard), intentional communities and the defense of alternative values (Carine Farias), on the activist work of non-violent (Yousra Rahmouni El Idrissi) and violent (Elise Lobbedez) organizations, on the identities of police officers (Vanessa Montiès), on entrepreneurial educational engagement in Madagascar (Joseph Tixier), on the persistence of “artisanal” ethics in an industrial environment (Sanjana Goreeba) etc., are the concretizations of the thematic and political perspective favored by the center.

Never far from the field of observation, the work of our doctoral students has also served to develop a kind of “school of reflexivity”. They help us to defend the idea that the very existence of a “critical science” can still be solidly validated on and thanks to the field. In the same way, doctoral research, by its very diversity, allows OCE to constantly regenerate its way of interpreting social demands and pressures, because the contexts of inquiry have changed over the past twenty years and the place of the researcher in the Social Sciences and Humanities in a management school needs to be [re]defined: access to the field, taking the time for a long investigation, choosing the form of ethnographic involvement that is “desirable”, remain the conditions for the production and transmission of knowledge likely to have any social utility in the contexts studied.

This type of research in the social sciences and humanities has, hopefully, a bright future ahead of it in the context of a Business University. Yet, the constancy of our perspective for more than twenty years has been and remains a struggle against often fallacious and ill-informed orthodox preconceptions and judgments about what constitutes legitimate research. This constancy requires more than stubbornness: the adaptation of the conditions that will allow work based on field research to continue and perpetuate itself, a strong message about the meaning that can have today of research too exclusively concerned with quotations and indexical calculations.