Interacting Individuals and Organizations: a Case Study on Cooperations Between Firms and Research Laboratories

Abstract

IntroductionThe question of which kind of entities are really interacting is specifically central and difficult in the study of cooperations between research laboratories and firms, because these cooperations involve various kinds of agents.In France, a contract of cooperation between a research laboratory and a firm is signed both by the firm and by a big research organization like a university or the CNRS. The contract generally mentions the name of the research laboratory, as it is defined by the university or the CNRS (the french national center for scientific research), and also the name of the research leader. For the research side, there are three different levels of action : the liable organization ; the research laboratory as an internal organization inside the university or the CNRS ; and at last a single researcher. It is also known (Amiot, 1996) that there is fourth level, which is the small research team (a dozen of researchers) working with the scientific leader. For the firm, there are also several levels, especially for a group : the group ; a local establishment really cooperating with the laboratory ; a specific team within this establishment ; and at last, the industrial leader of the cooperation.Which is the appropriate scale of analysis for the study of this kind of interactions between heterogeneous agents ? What are the agents really interacting (individuals, small teams, organizations) ? What are the processes by which decision making shifts from a level to another ?We will address these questions on the basis of the results of an empirical study of cooperations between firms and CNRS laboratories in the field of engineering, conducted in order to understand the genesis of cooperations. For that, we have reconstructed 130 stories -1 This paper presents the first results of a study made with the support of the CNRS program "Les enjeux 2 from the beginning to the end -of cooperations (with a contract at one time, but not necessary during all of the story), involving 27 scientific leaders, 19 laboratories and 81 industrial partners (firms or interprofessionnal organizations). These stories were reconstructed by using interviews with the participants, in the laboratory and in the firm. A minimum of two interviews (and a maximum of five) were used for each story. The stories have various duration (from six month to forty years) and take place in various fields (computing, electronics, fluid mechanics, chemical engineering, etc.) and various institutional contexts (existence of a technical milieu with associations or government organizations). The questions were mainly focused on the genesis of any cooperation and also on the processes of routinization and institutionnalization resulting in a shift of the level of action and relationship (shifting from individual level to the organizational one for example). We will discuss the various kinds of meeting using the notions of embeddedness (Polanyi, Granovetter, White), and decoupling (White), and more generally the theory of Harrison White's "Iden...

Proximités : retour sur 25 années d’analyse

“…Premièrement vers d'autres disciplines, et en particulier la sociologie et les sciences de gestion (un peu plus tard). L'analyse des réseaux d'acteurs et de leur positionnement social s'est avérée indispensable, par exemple à travers les études menées au sein des technopoles ou des firmes high tech, où les liens de connaissance, familiaux ou culturels, continuent à jouer un rôle essentiel en dépit du caractère innovant des activités (GROSSETTI et BES, 2001 ;GROSSETTI, 2008). Si l'espace est longtemps resté « un impensé de la gestion » (LAURIOL et al, 2008, p. 92), les travaux de l'école de la Proximité ont proposé une grille conceptuelle utile à la compréhension des diverses stratégies de localisation des organisations (GOMEZ et al, 2011 ;TALBOT, 2013 ;GAHINET, 2018, dans ce numéro), ainsi que des avancées par rapport à certaines approches classiques de prise en compte de l'espace en science régionale : l'espace comme coûts de transport, ou comme rente foncière en fonction de la distance au centre.…”

Introduction: the role of proximity relations in regional and territorial development processes

“…Innovation is, then, considered as a cognitive process, different from information, which can be transmitted at distance without any loss; whereas the transmission of knowledge cannot be made in a totally standard manner. Even if severe doubts are now raised about this rather simplistic explanation and the assimilation between tacit knowledge and proximity relations (Grossetti and Bès, 2001), these approaches opened the way for a more detailed and acute analysis of proximity relations, their meanings and their main characters.…”

Control by proximity: Evidence from the ‘Aerospace Valley’ Competitiveness Cluster

“…Formal control supposes that the results are easily measurable and the behaviours relatively programmable. If this is not the case, one can associate with it informal control founded essentially on tacit mechanisms, that is to say self-regulation dependent on the psychological and social characteristics of those who draw them up (GROSSETI and BES, 2001). In the case of inappropriate behaviour, the sanctions tend to be moral.…”

“…Nevertheless, tacit knowledge is often associated with individual people, the fact of being physically close will have a positive effect on the transfer of such knowledge (AUDRETSCH and FELDMAN, 1996), reinforcing the constraint of geographical proximity. This is true even if the technologies have evolved by facilitating the informal interactions necessary to the sharing of tacit knowledge and if the physical interaction does not necessarily imply permanent proximity of the individuals (GROSSETI and BES, 2001;TORRE and RALLET, 2005). One can thus understand why we observe, in the last column of table 3, that informal control is exercised by public research establishments playing the role of intermediary 13 , establishments located for the most part near the other establishments of the SBUs.…”