Profile

The mission of the Scientific Management Centre (CGS) is to contribute, through research and education, to the development of knowledge on the operation and transformation of organisations. The general thrust of the Centre's research is based on intervention in industry or in the civil service. In this framework, the main areas currently explored by the Centre are the following:

• Transformation of productive systems: new tools for production management; autonomous teams; integration of manufacturing and support functions; corporate networks.

• Rationalisation of design activities: co-ordination between design, research, methods and production; structuring project teams in terms of product-process; organising the capitalization of technical know-how.

• Human resource management, work organisation, skills: training; classification; reskilling organisations; working hours and conditions; labour relations.

• Modernisation of the public service: contractualisation of relations between services and their supervisory authorities; new management control and incentive mechanisms; taking into account customer requirements in planning supply.

• Developments in the Health sector: management training for medical staff; auditing and evaluation; distribution of budgetary allocations among hospitals and medical disciplines.

Research at the CGS is focused on the origins and effects of formalised methods designed either to provide actors with incentives, to evaluate their performance, or to specify and co-ordinate their respective tasks. These methods can be classified under the generic term "management tools". It has been established that, in stable organisations, actors' behaviour is often largely determined by management tools and, in particular, by the quantified systems set up to evaluate their activities. When juxtaposed, these different management tools, each inducing a logic of local behaviour among the actors, result in global inconsistencies unforeseen by the "architects" of the systems.

In a dynamic context management tools can no longer be analysed solely from the viewpoint of their role in stabilising behaviour, isolated from the development of know-how. This development spawns new management tools and especially new uses for them which, in turn, become knowledge tools. It is then necessary to propose a typology of know-how, to find the organisational factors of its development and distribution, and to study the development phases of new management tools or the transposition of tools existing in fields other than those in which they originated.

The CGS's " research-intervention " approach requires a request for assistance in solving problems from at least a part of the members of the organisation concerned; as a result research is, to a certain degree, oriented downstream. Changes in types of demand are a stimulus for research, providing new challenges, for example in those organisations in which management tools seem to be largely absent (museums, research centres, law courts). The aim is, by means of this often abundant research material, to identify consistencies in the functioning of organisations, and to devise interpretative theoretical frameworks.