Technologie de gestion et organisation économique. Vers une recherche applicable dans l'industrie agro-alimentaire

Résumé En Fr

Management technology and economic organization. Looking for applicable research in the agrofood sector. Coordinating plans and actions is the major task of strategic management. And this is true between the firms (suppliers, competitors,...) as well as inside the legal boundaries of the firm. This paper starts from a case study in agribusiness, an industrial sector that emphasizes the difficulty of coping with this kind of issue. First we try to understand the coordination problem the suppliers, processing and commercial firms under study face in the French butter industry, given the market conditions, the industrial process and the contracts linking these different legal entities. Then we examine two different fields of research best exemplified by the works of M.E. Porter and O.E. Williamson because they a priori seem to possibly connect with problem-solving in strategic management of real world firms. After having stressed the limits of direct use of these theoretical frameworks in an intervention context, we trace the shapes of what could be a genuine research field in applied economies. We follow an avenue opened by previous empirical work related to strategic planning, which enhances the role of management tools in implementing new kinds of coordination schemes between actors. The fundamental hypotheses underlying this research agenda can be summarized as follows : — Available management technology is a key ingredient of an efficient relationship system. — These two dimensions concerning management tools and economie organization cannot be formed into a hierarchy as far as one adopts an applied research perspective. — In a context of bounded rationality and very incomplete contracting, the efficiency of coordination arrangements actually relies upon the technical supports that allow and reinforce two processes : discussing and sharing interrelated expectations and plans at low cost as well as allowing the rapid emergence of a minimum mutual understanding of past actions, related to the previous planning exercise. — At the same time, motivation schemes can be challenged to ensure a fair contribution to these planning processes. — Model building from the key characteristics of the specific "design" (Milgrom and Roberts) problems the organization is coping with, in order to work out new planning tools is a way to intervene on the organisational structure. Although these hypotheses have as yet been discussed in very few empirical studies, they promise a future bridge between : — theoretical studies about efficient economic organization in specific stylized institutional and production environments, technical design of tangible planning and incentive tools related to the "design" attributes of the situations at hand, — understanding of the dynamic process of organizational learning and change.

La coordination des activités tant à l'intérieur des frontières juridiques de la firme qu'entre la firme et ses partenaires et concurrents est d'une façon générale un enjeu majeur en gestion ; cet enjeu revêt dans l'agro-alimentaire des nuances originales qui l'exacerbent. En prenant appui sur la demande concrète d'une entreprise, nous tentons de définir une approche de ces problèmes de coordination à même de stimuler le développement d'une véritable discipline de recherche appliquée. Dans le prolongement des travaux théoriques sur l'organisation économique, cette perspective, centrée sur les modalités concrètes d'intervention sur la transformation des relations entre acteurs, relance la réflexion sur l'architecture des modèles et des systèmes de pilotage de l'entreprise.