Organizations, Careers and New Elites (OCE)
The OCE Research Centre was founded in 2004 and is dedicated to the critical and political analysis of organizations and management. It is composed of a dozen EM Lyon permanent faculty and 10 PhD students. OCE members come from different fields of management research such as strategy, marketing and human resource management. OCE members include sociologists and economists alongside management scholars, as would be expected from such an interdisciplinary topic.
Research carried out in this centre postulates that management decisions cannot be summed up to mere technical decisions. Investigating political and organizational dynamics requires therefore the understanding of underlying struggles between actors' logics and motivations. As a special interest, the Research Centre scrutinizes the effect of organizational dynamics upon employees and their work environment. Its members postulate that managerial decisions have their dark side. The wish to legitimate managerial practices in terms of performance cannot hide the fact that they might have negative effects as well, in particular for specific kinds of populations. It is, OCE members contend, the responsibility of scholars to be watchful on these issues and to propose alternative ways to enrich the conventional discourse on management practices. Current OCE members investigate five research areas: human Resource practices across the world; new trends in employment relations and careers; new domination forms of managerial elites; new places and new forms of resistance in contemporary organizations; and the dynamics of organizational forms.