Institutional work translates actors' capacity to bring about change in an institutionalised practice through its creation, continuation or destruction. This research examines political institutional work in order to understand actors' activity in the regulative pillar of the institution. With its focus on the cognitive and normative institutional pillars, the existing literature has underestimated the regulative pillar's contribution to institutional change, ignoring part of its role in institutional change. We propose to examine the status conferred on this regulative dimension through a qualitative study of an institutionalised practice, the legal concept of Faute Inexcusable in France from 1898 to 2012. We use secondary data including legal data, contextualised with other sources, and interviews with two key actors in the field. We show the existence of a genuine "regulative dynamic"; beneath its apparent stability, the regulative pillar is in fact the setting for institutional struggles that lead institutionalised practices to evolve. We highlight sequences of institutional work in which various forms of political institutional work interact. This research advances understanding of institutional dynamics in the regulative pillar, casting light on actors and mechanisms that have so far gone unreported. The article thus contributes to a rehabilitation of the regulative pillar's role in neo-institutional theory.

International audienceComment mettre en échec un mouvement social ? Nous étudions le rôle des organisations frontière dans le travail de maintien institutionnel. Notretravail s " appuie sur le cas de l " amiante en France à travers la mise en place du CPA (Comité Permanent Amiante). Le CPA (1982-1995) est une organisation frontière qui a promu l " Usage Contrôlé de l " Amiante et a ainsi participé au maintien de la pratique institutionnalisée. How to defeat a social movement? We focus on the role of boundaries organizations in the institutional work engaged in the logics of maintenance. We study the case of the CPA (Asbestos Permanent Committee) as a boundary organization in the process of maintenance of an institutionalized practice through the " controlled use of asbestos "

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Observation captures complex organizational phenomena in situ. The literature on this method explains the possible data collection methods but says less about the use and organization of the data collected. As a result, the question of the meaning of observation data remains open. This article explores that question with the focus on a specific form of observation, dynamic observation, which can grasp indeterminate situations whose meaning is elusive for both practitioners and the researcher. Drawing on the work of Ricœur, we propose a conceptual tool kit founded on mimesis. We show that organizing observation data into a plot and narrative, through an inquiry conducted by researchers and practitioners together, can shed light both on the observation data and the situation observed. We embody our method by applying this tool kit to a dynamic observation conducted in a high-risk industry. We discuss the methodological issues of this co-construction of shared meaning and its role in restoring centrality to observation in the management sciences, and resituating the situations and the actors as core concerns.

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