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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the structural problems emerging in the course of managing and safeguarding a French association for home care to a thousand elderly or disabled people between 2007 and 2012, employing 150

190 people and on the verge of bankruptcy. In France, small local businesses not only compete with major capital outlets in this sector but also with associations of varying size and origin. Free market rules apply, under the legislation of 2003, to what is, in part, “competition free”, being “in the public interest” and within the framework of local and national public funding.

This paper analyses those pragmatic solutions put in place to meet the aim of shared governance and in the context of a generalized financial crisis.

Borrowing from cooperatives and associations, the non-profit-based management structure the authors arrived at, including worker participation in the decision-making processes, raises questions for researchers as to the advisability of any short-term models and the validity of present social and supportive economic models.

The hybrid management of this paper is offered as a working model in what the authors have termed an “adhocracy of stakeholders”.