“On the shoulders of…” Joanne Martin (Stanford), by Youcef Bousalham

*This title is inspired by a phrase used and adapted over the centuries by many intellectuals, and refers more directly in France to Jean-Claude Ameisen's famous France Inter programme, Sur les épaules de Darwin. For 12 years, this tireless disseminator of knowledge took listeners on a journey ‘through research, culture and social life’, and we invite you to (re)discover the 600 episodes in podcast form. In all modesty, we would like to contribute to this epistemological approach by giving our professors the opportunity to tell us why and how leading figures in research and the economic world have influenced their careers.

You have chosen to focus your research on reflexive and humanistic approaches to management. How did this perspective come about?

Youcef Bousalham: I was struck early on by the fact that organisations produce not only goods and services, but also subjectivities, norms and ways of acting and thinking. While working on corporate social responsibility, I noticed a sometimes staggering gap between the rhetoric and actual practices. This gap did not seem accidental to me: it reflected structural tensions in the way our economy works.

This led me to think about organisations from a perspective that goes beyond simply improving existing techniques, a perspective that interrogates the very foundations of organisational practices often taken for granted -- ven traeted as immutable. I believe this perspective is more necessary than ever at a time when social and environmental expectations of businesses are growing.

Your thinking has been deeply influenced by the work of Joanne Martin, a leading figure in the study of organisational culture. Can you tell us about her impact on your career and your approach to organisations?

Yes, Joanne Martin played a decisive role in shaping my intellectual development. She is not only an excellent researcher, but also a pioneer in every sense of the word.

She was the first woman to obtain tenure at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, at a time when the university was still very much dominated by male norms, even in its architecture and job titles. She herself humorously recounts the difficulty she had in choosing between the toilets reserved for ‘faculty’ (implicitely “male”) and those for ‘secretaries’ (a default category for women at the time).

Her personal journey seems to me to be inextricably linked to her analytical work on organisations and her way of thinking about them as spaces reproducing implicit norms that they often end up no longer questioning.

 
On a theoretical level, this led her to rethink the study of organisational culture by proposing a pluralistic and metatheoretical model. In addition, much of her later work adopts a feminist perspective, attentive to power relations, implicit gender norms and marginalised trajectories. She has helped to highlight forms of symbolic domination within academic and organisational spaces.

Credits: Stanford GSB archives - https://www.instagram.com/stanfordgsb/p/DHwQVl_RX_5/

As a doctoral student, I was particularly impressed by the way the conceptual intelligence of her work challenged the dominant theories of the time, while engaging in dialogue with them — notably those of Edgar Schein (MIT), a leading figure at the time. This is because the authors of these works (almost all of whom were men) were the same people who had to decide on her academic excellence and, therefore, on her tenure.

Her research also stands out for its ability to foster a fruitful dialogue between management sciences and the humanities. She draws on Edgar Schein, Karl Weick, Marta Calás and Linda Smircich, as well as Clifford Geertz, Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas and Erving Goffman, to think about organisations as spaces that are at once symbolic, social and political. Her intellectual pluralism also reflects in her methodology: far from opposing qualitative and quantitative methods, she explores the complementarities between statistical rigour, ethnographic sensitivity and interpretative grounding.

Above all, Joanne Martin has been a role model and mentor to me. While I was still a PhD student, after discovering her work – particularly her 2002 book, which I consider to be the most comprehensive and insightful account ever written on organisational culture – I contacted her. And she replied! At length and systematically. Each time I sent her an email, I received a reply twice as long, full of references, reading suggestions, methodological insights and encouragement. Pure intelligence, but also heart! A rare intellectual generosity that left a deep impression on me.

I later discovered that she had played this mentoring role for several ‘second-generation’ researchers, some of whom have become academic references, such as Debra Meyerson and Mary Jo Hatch. Meyerson refers to Joanne Martin as an inspirational figure of ‘tempered radicalism’: an approach to change that she theorised and which refuses to remain silent in the face of injustice or the broader social and environmental consequences of our organisational decisions.

It is in this spirit that I now seek to continue my research and my role as a teacher and researcher with students: by promoting critical thinking and academic rigour, but without abandoning the idea that we can contribute to meaningful change from within organisations.

Your work questions the ability of companies to translate their social values into action in an environment marked by competition. What lessons have you learned from your initial analyses?

The main lesson is that effectively translating social values into organisational practices is a much more conflictual process than is often presented.

It is not just a question of individual goodwill. Even in genuinely committed organisations, we see dynamics of circumvention, reinterpretation and even neutralisation of the initial ambitions.

Competitive logic imposes its own constraints, which can marginalise the most innovative initiatives and reduce both the imagination and the capacity for critical innovation. I am particularly interested in understanding how certain ‘ethical’ practices are actually reabsorbed by competitive differentiation or reputation logic, losing their transformative potential in the process.

Hence the importance of taking a clear-eyed view, but also of supporting actors who are seeking, sometimes in fragile ways, to maintain spaces for resistance and social innovation.

You are currently preparing your HDR, the highest academic qualification in the scientific disciplines. How does this work extend your career path and shed light on your specific approach to management organisations?

Indeed, I am in the final stages and I don't want to reveal too much, not out of superstition but because I think it would be interesting to come back to it in these columns.

I can say, however, that my HDR continues an intellectual journey that began with my thesis: a desire to think of organisations not only as systems of action, but as places of tension between proclaimed ideals and concrete practices. My goal is to construct a critical framework that allows us to better understand how these tensions form, are maintained, or sometimes resolved.

What I propose is a reflection on the ‘cultural consistency’of alternative organisations: a concept I borrow from Joanne Martin's work, which I apply through the lens of critical performativity.. Where Martin rightly emphasised the analytical importance of ambiguity in organisational cultures, I am now interested in what makes it possible, despite this ambiguity, for a meaningful connection to exist between the social values put forward and the practices actually implemented.

In a context where all organisations display particularly committed and responsible value charters, the challenge is no longer to proclaim, but to ‘uphold’: to ensure that these noble values, which are easy to subscribe to, are not distorted, neutralised or simply absorbed by competitive and market forces.

This leads me to combine methodological and conceptual frameworks from organisational sciences with those from disciplines such as philosophy, anthropology, political science and organisational sociology. This interdisciplinary dialogue helps me to formulate a management approach that is both reflective and attentive to internal tensions and margins for transformation. It is not a question of denouncing, but of understanding organisational dynamics in all their complexity – an ambition which, I believe, extends the intellectual legacy of Joanne Martin.