Article pp.187-190 du Vol.38 n°225 (2012)

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9 Contributors to this issue

13 Environmental strategies in the retail sector: proposition of an analysis framework

Guillaume Barbat, Grégory Bressolles, Jean-Marc André

Over the last ten years, most of retail companies have developed environmental strategies. Are these strategies really relevant? How are they implemented?

What are the specificities and the consequences in terms of strategic positioning? This paper aims to answer these questions by providing an analysis framework applied to the French retail sector.

27 The Balanced Scorecard from the perspective of a French SME. Or why SMEs prefer “tailor-made tableaux de bord”

Fabienne Oriot, Evelyne Misiazek

Faced with the need for rapid decision-making in an uncertain environment characterized by intense competition, more and more SMEs now need to implement strategic performance management systems. Although originally designed for large companies, the Balanced Scorecard might meet that need. A case study conducted in a French SME questions, on the one hand, the applicability of that normative model to a specific context of restructuring and, on the other hand, draws the portrait of a strategic tableau de bordtailored to fit the needs of this SME’s CEO.

File: Decision as practice

Guest Editors: Olivier Germain, Jean-Louis Lacolley

47 Does the decision exist?

Olivier Germain, Jean-Louis Lacolley

61 On the mode of existence of theories in organizations.

Decision-making as performative praxis Laure Cabantous, Jean-Pascal Gond

This paper provides a renewed perspective on the manufacturing of organizational decisions. We approach decision making as performative praxis

issue 225 June-July 2012

S U M M A R Y

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– a set of activities whereby actors simultaneously produce decisions and turn theories of decision-making into social reality. We extend the performative praxis perspective – that combines the processes of conventionalization, engineering and commodification – to account for actors’ direct and indirect mobilization of theoretical representations when making decisions.

83 Alpinists in the unexpected: Towards a naturalistic decision making perspective?

Yvonne Giordano, Geneviève Musca

Over the last twenty years, the Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) perspective has received an increased interest in the literature. This approach aims to provide a better understanding of how experts make decisions which had to be efficient, fast and safe, while external conditions are hostile, changing, and possibly involving vital issues. Although the NDM perspective is grounded on a variety of field studies, it was never considered how mountaineering professionals, usually dealing with particularly hostile and unexpected situations, could be studied as experts coping with them. This paper offers a new insight into how the NDM perspective could illuminate decision making process of these professionals in action. It also highlights the need to develop in vivoresearch and raises the associated empirical and methodological challenges.

109 Decision-making as a situated managerial activity: a pragmatist approach Benoit Journé, Nathalie Raulet-Croset

This paper proposes to analyze decision making as part of managerial activity.

It develops a pragmatist perspective on decision making based on the concept of “situation”. We consider a decision as a progressive construction which mixes cognition and action through an enquiry process about the situation the manager is confronted with. This perspective leads to a model of decision making in context of ambiguity and uncertainty.

129 Decision making under ambiguity: the look taken at a situation Julien Henriot

March 1999, the 24^th, at 10h52, the French regulator of the Mont-Blanc tunnel becomes a participant to an ambiguous situation, i.e. hard to decipher, complex and paradoxical. Indeed, he has just noticed a smoking truck stopped in the middle of the tunnel. How, in this situation, decisions will be taken, beginning by the decision to close the tunnel? Based on the literature of sense-making, the author proposes to scientific debate the concept of look taken at a situation.

188 Revue française de gestion – N° 225/2012

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147 Dramatic decisions or insensible incisions? Towards a becoming theory of decision-making

Robert Chia, Ajit Nayak

Decision-making is usually associated with free will, conscious choice and deliberate intervention. Successful outcomes are causally attributed to the spectacular actions of significant individual agents. Such an outlook is predicated upon a being ontology that elevates discrete entities over “unowned”

process complexes and silent transformations. From a becoming ontology however, decisions are instead construed as ongoing, mundane and multifarious insensible incisions into the flow of social reality. Favourable circumstances and desirable outcomes, therefore, arise not because of spectacular actions taken, but because of the cumulative effect of prior countless insensible insertions.

167 Infectious doubt: Decision and sensemaking in an emergency management team

Véronique Steyer, Hervé Laroche

Karl Weick’ssensemaking theory is one of the most productive approaches for explaining organizational reactions to crisis situations. This theoretical approach however leaves little room for decisions as compared to how important the decisional practices seem to actors within organizations. This paper suggests considering decisions as a support of the sensemaking process.

A three-dimensional conception of decisions is developed to analyse the positive and negative dynamics linking sensemaking and decision-making.

These propositions are based upon a case study of the reaction of a group of actors facing the realization of an anticipated threat, the 2009 influenza pandemic.

187 Summary

190 Instructions for Authors

Summary 189