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This article of exploratory research provides a critical perspective on accountability, focusing on three characteristics: transparency, asymmetry and individual agency. An experimental method is developed, calling for an ethics of accountability.

Four entrepreneurs have given accounts of themselves and their projects in life cycle interviews. This article applies Devereux's approach (1967), which allows for opacity (the “unconscious”) to oneself and to others with symmetry between analysts and analysed, and a lack of demarcation between the observer and the observed.

A tragic entrepreneurial accountability trap of continuous self-justification was discovered, which pertains both to the entrepreneurs and the researchers. Nonetheless, the researchers as inspired by Devereux's method were able to realize a form of accounterability.

This article shows that the demands for transparent, asymmetrical and agentive accountability call for ethical reflection. The request for accounts, as resulting in the accounts given and the research conducted into accountability, are all sources of constraints. Differing the accountability situation may lessen the constraints.

This study introduces Devereux's method as an investigative tool in accountability research, opening up new perspectives on communication and analysis. This article shows the researcher as situated both inside and outside of the accountability mechanisms. This article explores a singular form of accountability; that of entrepreneurs who seemingly only account for the future, thereby disconnecting them from others.

This study aims to explore inefficiencies that arise from public and private policy initiatives undertaken in suburbs and outlying localities, where various intersecting economic, educational, ethnic and geographical disadvantages mutually reinforce each other. The authors propose to transpose the cross-disciplinary concept of intersectionality from an individual and community-based level (i.e. encompassing a variety of racial, ethnic and socio-economic minority communities) to a locality-based context.

The empirical data underlying this study were based on a long-term field study drawing on both interviews and observations. A self-administered ethnographic research approach was combined with classic analyses of conversations transcribed verbatim, using qualitative coding.

The main actors’ inability to understand the concrete situations experienced by subjects residing in outlying localities, as well as the managers’ failure to cooperate and engage collectively to promote employment among these populations, can be explained by the ineffectiveness of the categories that were designed and used in carrying out managerial action, as part of corporate policy, and then implemented within factories. These findings are particularly well-illustrated by the relatively lower inefficiency of SMEs, which had more limited resources, as compared with the actions undertaken at production facilities run by large companies, even though the latter devoted considerable resources to vocational inclusion (recruitment, integration and job preservation) and efforts to combat discrimination.

In identifying a new way to categorize a certain type of social dynamic driven by businesses and various social actors, the authors sought to overcome the epistemological obstacles that arise from relying on neo-institutional theory, which, when applied to the case at hand, would have merely resulted in mimetic similarities, without offering any means for unblocking the socio-economic factors that come into play. The limitations of the study are related to its strict temporal and geographic isolation (i.e. a two-year study examining three production facilities located within the same suburb north of Paris).

The authors hope the study will urge actors operating in the same disadvantaged locality to collectively address the multiple intersectional challenges that tend to render policies for social inclusion and economic development so difficult to implement within areas suffering from a myriad of socio-economic ills. The first step in that direction, the authors feel, consists in naming these intersectionalities adequately.

Using a rich empirical database, this paper aims to show the relevance of the concept of intersectionality beyond its traditional scope of application (disadvantaged minority communities and individuals) while directing interest toward a less anthropocentric level of analysis: the locality.

Does democracy within the firm have a positive influence on its economical and managerial efficiency? What sort of democracy do we consider, for what sort of efficiency? Tracing back competitiveness to rights and statutes is particularly difficult because of the multiplicity of involved factors and looks like a multidisciplinary challenge. This paper attempts to address these issues.

The paper presents an in the field research, conducted inside a French retailing bank, followed by an analysis of the findings using as well constitutional law theory, organizational routines theory and practice theory. Institutional features are here analyzed through Hauriou's institutionalism and Turpin's constitutional law theory, whereas organizational routines are described through a triadic model (ostensive aspect, performance and artifacts) proposed by Pentland and Feldman.

The main result of the study is to show how interconnected practices taking place inside the firm play the role of a medium of interaction between the organizational and the institutional dimensions of the firm.

This leads the authors to consider the possibility of building a “constitutional theory of the firm” according to which some political constitutional law inside the corporation may favor virtuous or noxious circles linking universes of virtues on one side and organizational practices on the other side.

In this chapter, we explore to what extent psychological contracts occur between the crowdfunded and the crowdfunders. First argument: fundamentals of finance imply a psychological dimension in financial transactions, which are at the same time contractual. Second arguments: some concrete cases of crowdfunding scandals pertain to contractual violation, which provides evidence for the importance of psychological contracts in crowdfunding projects and processes. This leads to two contributions: (1) a systematic review of the concepts related to psychological contracts theory and the assessment of their transferability to crowdfunding and (2) a list of questions and operational recommendations for every crowdfunding project developer.

This paper aims to look at three management research papers, which are placed in dialogue with Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy.

Notable research articles are subjected to a thorough de-construction and re-construction process, as they are examined through the lens of Gilbert Simondon’s ontological and epistemological perspectives.

Some solutions to epistemological antinomies underpinning management science are proposed, by relying on Simondonian paradigms.

This paper involved no direct field study. The transcendental status of Simondon’s propositions is briefly called into question but is not addressed per se.

Showing the fuzziness, not to say irrelevance, of efforts to make a strict demarcation between business and society, as illustrated by qualitative meta-analyses of management science cases.

Simondon’s importance is barely beginning to be acknowledged in the field of Social and Management Science. This paper takes a step toward rectifying this oversight by providing scholars with an introduction to his main concepts and illustrates how they might be transposed into management science by subjecting management scholarly papers to his “experiments of thought” approach.

This critique of Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century summarizes and comments on the main tenets of the author’s principal theory. The author's aim is to point out the book’s contributions to a critical debate around social and economic issues, while giving special emphasis to its theoretical and epistemological relevance for management science.

Based on a careful reading of the book, in the original French and English translation versions, the author explores Piketty’s arguments and proposals and attempts to place his “scholarly discourse” in relation to Marx’s “worldview” as well as the philosophy of the Enlightenment.

The book’s potential impact over the long run is extremely high, ostensibly enough to make it as important as Marx’s work, but relying on a decidedly different method and philosophy. The author also considers the strong complementariness between this work and that of Pierre Rosanvallon in the field of political science. Some similarities with Fukuyama’s approach are also considered, but on a much lesser note.

The question of unemployment, which is given little attention in Piketty’s work, is not addressed here.

In contrast with Piketty’s book, this paper intends to find social application only within the microcosm of the scholarly community.

The author hopes to draw a link between the book’s contribution to economic thinking and its philosophical underpinnings, that is by presenting a reading that is both a positivist assessment and an attempt to decipher underlying assumptions.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate to what extent Denise Rousseau's psychological contracts in organizations and Jean‐Jacques Rousseau's social contract present superficial or profound similarities. Having localized more precisely the lines of gaps between both works, “transgressive” research directions are proposed to enrich each of both thoughts of contracts.

This work consists in an analysis in the sense of Descartes, dividing conceptual difficulties into smaller and smaller parts. More precisely, that analysis is a semiotic one, as defined by linguist Hjelmslev, considering each step of the analysis a “level” and assessing the depth of similarities between two works: On the Social Contract and Psychological Contracts in Organizations. The parallel study of both works consists in analyzing the “grammar of use” of concepts at each level, establishing semantic comparative tables. This digging into parallel strata of sense is metaphorically considered as the tectonic study of two continents of thought.

It is established that common ideas and concepts are similar up to the depth of level three but radically differ at level four. At level one, nine main common ideas and concepts are raised. Analysis at level two allows considering those superficial similarities as nine more profound homologies in the sense of Greimas and Courtes. At level three, two different groups of homologies are established, binding, on the one hand, an isomorphism between spheres of contracting and, on the other hand, an isomorphism between substances of contract. At level four a deep tectonic fault is unveiled between Jean‐Jacques' and Denise's thought of contract: the sovereignty/exchange gap. This fault corresponds to two universal different syntaxes of subjects and objects defined by Greimas: the participative communication vs closed circulation of the objects of value.

This analysis is based on a corpus of two major works. However, every grammar of use relies on the study of a finite corpus.

The liberal assimilation of every social contract to exchange dynamics is radically denied by such work. The challenge of raising “sovereignty‐like” dimension in psychological contracts is all the more so critical since those contracts are pervasive in organizational and social life.

This paper proposes rigorous criteria for every trans‐cultural and trans‐disciplinary use of concepts in an original manner. A comparative “geology of thought” is made possible through semiotic instruments.

Induction and institutions may have followed the same tracks for a long period of time, but their interaction is scarcely analyzed. On the one hand, induction prepares newcomers to work in an organization that is completely new to them. On the other hand, institutions apparently need induction processes to maintain themselves in the same time they renew their members. The purpose of the present paper is to analyze induction as a practice, and to show how this practice turns itself into an institution, in spite of the embeddedness of action scripts into rational schemes.

The paper introduces the case of a retail bank and a consulting company in France. Both have formalized induction systems, but they show enough differences to be considered as offering two complementary approaches of a same practice. The same method is applied to both fields. It consists of analyzing induction as an aggregate of ostensive (action scripts), performative (actions themselves) elements, and artefacts (material productions).

The successive steps of selections and integration of induction process appear as ways of testing the compatibility of newcomers with the immunity system of the organization. Moreover, throughout both case studies, the ostensive aspect of induction has remained stable for years, although markets and business models have changed a lot. Induction seems to be frozen as far as practicing (i.e. the implementation of action scripts) is concerned. The study of practising (i.e. the dialectic interaction of ostensive, performative elements, and artefacts) shows that constant and individually lead adaptive moves preserve the institutionalized practice without any shape of rigidity.

Stability vs change, uniformity vs diversity depends on the lens by which the paper it looks at practices. If it takes into consideration the ocean of actions that are performed day after day inside the firm, diversity and change appear. However, if it adopts a longer range look at what happens and correlate it to appropriate institutional factors, stability, and uniformity emerge from permanent change. That disqualifies both technocratic attempts to standardize performance from abstract patterns and naive designs of spontaneous emergence of “not embedded” behaviors.