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Past research on collectivist-democratic organizations has attributed their distinctiveness to their socio-political goals and democratic decision-making and largely ignored their work processes. This ethnographic study examines how such organizations resist alienating forms of work even in the face of direct competition with for-profit companies. It focuses on Scopix, a French cooperative sheet-metal factory where the first author spent one year as a shop-floor worker. Cooperators there developed various practices to retain an emancipatory dimension to their work, regularly putting forward “craft ethics” as a counterweight to the sheet-metal industry’s drive to rationalize work processes. Drawing on the sociology of worth, the authors analyze how these practices emerged from the arrangements that workers made between the industrial world on the one side and the domestic and inspired worlds on the other. This study contributes to the literature into two main ways. First, the authors refine the sociology-of-worth framework by conceptualizing the emancipatory dimension of work as the result of ad hoc arrangements between different worlds. Second, the authors highlight the need for the literature on collectivist-democratic organizations to increase its focus on work, introducing the concept of work degeneration as a step in that direction.

Since the end of the 1990s, the Algerian public authorities have implemented research and innovation policies in order to build a solid National Innovation System (NIS) and improve industrial and economic performance. Today, the NIS remains immature, which hinders the learning and innovation processes. Our objective here is to analyze under a broad vision the Algerian NIS by examining its various components, to evaluate the capacities of training and innovation, and to measure the production of the innovation and the economic performances. Our research question is the following: How could the Algerian public authorities build a solid NIS in order to improve economic performance? To answer this question, we use a research methodology that mobilizes three types of complementary indicators in order to analyze the processes of learning and innovation from a systemic and interactive perspective. We also use economic performance indicators in order to put the analysis into a broader perspective. At the end, we propose action policies in favor of the construction of a complete Algerian NIS to improve economic performance.

This chapter does three things. First, it estimates regional gross domestic product (GDP) for three different geographical levels in Switzerland (97 micro regions, 16 labor market basins, and 3 large regions). Second, it analyzes the evolution of regional inequality relying on a heuristic model inspired by Williamson (1965), which features an initial growth impulse in one or several core regions and subsequent diffusion. Third, it uses index number theory to decompose regional inequality into three different effects: sectoral structure, productivity, and comparative advantage.

The results can be summarized as follows: As a consequence of the existence of multiple core regions, Swiss regional inequality has been comparatively low at higher geographical levels. Spatial diffusion of economic growth occurred across different parts of the country and within different labor market regions. This resulted in a bell-shaped evolution of regional inequality at the micro regional level and convergence at higher geographical levels. In early and in late stages of the development process, productivity differentials were the main drivers of inequality, whereas economic structure was determinant between 1888 and 1941. The poorest regions suffered from comparative disadvantage, that is, they were specialized in the vary sector (agriculture), where their relative productivity was comparatively lowest.

In this chapter, we first show how the concept of competency, and management of or by competency, can be a factor in helping more people find employment, improve employability and develop competency, thus contributing to increased diversity in the workforce at every level of an organisation. We then examine a different part of the literature, more closely related to organisational learning, which finds that deviance and diversity can potentially boost competency. Subsequently, we look at diversity management first as an organisational competency, then as an individual competency. Concerning the reasons for the spread of management by competency and diversity management, we shall see that their respective advocates employ the same rhetoric of economic rationality, with both types of practice being justified by an objective change in the environment and, for this reason, presented as unavoidable and to some extent as simply “moving with the times”. In opposition to this supposed rationality as seen by companies, we will show that, in France, the two concepts of competency and diversity interact closely with institutional processes of mimetism, normalisation and coercion. In the final section, we shall look more closely at critical views of management by competency and diversity, as the criticisms of the two concepts are very similar and question their (possible) claims to be propelling society towards a fairer society.

Previous theories discuss how corporate managers can stir anti-discrimination laws away from their initial social goal by managerializing the law. Yet, other actors – notably insider activists – can contribute to move corporate regulations beyond merely symbolic compliance. I demonstrate this influence of activists with three cases studies: (1) LGBT activists for same-sex parental leave; (2) disability rights activists for implementing a quota; and (3) Muslim activists to secure accommodations in French workplaces. Through these cases, I show how activists can move corporate laws beyond compliance, pressure firms to go from merely symbolic to substantive compliance, and analyze mechanisms that explain their unequal success. Bringing together insights from the legal endogeneity theory and social movements theory, I analyze these activist legal intermediaries as actors faced with unequal structure of opportunities, and examine what factors hinder or favor an activist-driven legal endogeneity. I demonstrate the impact of more prescriptive regulations, the institutional power of union representatives (and their alignment with activists’ claims), reputational stakes for companies, and the resources of activists themselves (legal expertise, ability to reframe laws, and informal power within their organizations). Last, I show how activists leverage organizational and legal tools (collective agreement, diversity policies) to induce recoupling between formal commitments and informal practices.

This chapter focuses on diversity issues in France. It shows how these issues came historically in the French context and how the main tensions generated, notably the equality-diversity and universality-diversity tensions, are not understandable without a knowledge of the French Republicanism which gives to the foundations of the French social fabric its peculiarities.