The Twilight of a Slogan. A contribution to an organisational theory of capture: the case of territorial attractiveness
JURY:
Summary
The Anthropocene is wearing down both people and things. Ecological systems are disappearing; infrastructure is faltering; production and consumption processes are in turmoil; and the gap is widening between organisational techniques, strategies and objectives, and the phenomena they are supposed to address. This formidable wave of ‘zombification’ also affects the conceptual entities that govern and shape us: our ideas, our concepts, our epistemological categories, our myths, and so on.
This is true of the key themes of local public policy (development, competitiveness, etc.), one aspect of which – attractiveness – is examined in this thesis. Carried out under a Cifre contract with Auxilia Conseil, an organisation that assists local authorities (local councils, joint associations, agencies, clusters, etc.) to develop their environmental, economic and social policies, it enabled us to conduct research in a variety of settings and with a wide range of people, including practitioners and observers, both critics and supporters of policies aimed at enhancing attractiveness.
This thesis takes obsolescence seriously — a concept which is, of course, contested, open to debate and subject to power dynamics — and which is said to be affecting a region’s appeal today. It helps to better understand the issues surrounding the following research question: how do organisations created for and governed by a guiding principle that is now losing its relevance attempt to move away from it?
This thesis discusses Critical Management Studies (CMS) and contributes to debates concerning its crisis — in other words, the critique of the critique. Noting the limited positive and decisive impact that management critique has on the experience of workers, some studies argue that, far from merely exposing the mechanisms that hinder emancipation, such criticism must contribute to the development, testing and dissemination of concrete improvements. Whilst it endorses such an ‘additive’ approach to critique, this thesis advocates the perspective of a ‘subtractive’ critique. It does not examine the way in which territorial organisations are co-opted into alternative slogans (liveability, hospitality, resilience, etc.) — but focuses instead on the ways in which organisations seek to withdraw from this attractive slogan. In this respect, it draws on the recent ‘ecology of dismantling’.
With this in mind, she draws on the theory of ‘taking’, which stems from pragmatist sociology and was developed for the study of objects with an uncertain ontological status. To our knowledge, this theory has not yet been applied to the field of organisation, despite having been developed over thirty years ago. The subtractive operation under consideration finds an intermediate formulation within this theory. What does it mean to ‘take up’ a slogan, and how might this be approached at an organisational level? Beyond its theoretical interest, it is the evocative power of the term ‘grip’ that interests us: the storming of the Bastille, rock climbing, judo, and so on. This semiotic richness, in turn, points to the strategic possibilities available to organisations. We thus demonstrate that, in order to free themselves from the attractive slogan, the organisations studied seek both to gain a hold on it, to reduce its hold, and to provide a foothold for alternative slogans.
We supplement the prehensive reciprocity identified in the literature — to gain a grip on something is always to provide a grip for it — with a second principle: to provide a grip here is always to provide less of a grip there.