Management of organizational contradictions : a case<br />study of the re-organization of a French retailing company

International audienceFrom the sixties up until the mid nineties, french retailing industry had not been through any<br />major organizational changes; at least not any of the size of those that we have witnessed in<br />the past ten years. There have been of course organizational innovations and IT developments<br />which have enhanced in-store work as work at checkouts: gencod, EDI scanners, supplychains,<br />etc... These technical changes had however not led to such important re-organizations<br />of organizational flows.<br />But, since the beginning of the 21st century French hypermarket companies have been<br />repeatedly re-organized. This work shows through the case study of one major French<br />retailing company how this sector is fluctuating between two major organizational models<br />with at one end the client as benchmark and at the other, the optimization of processes as part<br />of an industrial logic. These two models have induced internal co-ordination modes as well as<br />new corporate cultures. During the recent changes these parameters have sometimes been<br />deliberately disrupted and also at others, unintentionally; giving way to a large number of<br />turbulences which have brought us to wonder “how have these organizational contradictions<br />contributed to the relative failure of this change?”<br />We have collected data from participant-observation, deep-interviews in two hypermarkets<br />and several meetings with managers from the headquarter of this company from 1991 to 2006.<br />From these data we can show some factors which explain the apparent setting-up difficulties<br />this re-organization has met up with, as well as its successive about turns.<br />In the company that we are focused on, the long-standing managerial stance was to consider<br />staff autonomy as the key to customer satisfaction. From very early on, this company<br />developed a “market-orientated culture” by organizing various rituals i.e. games between<br />employees in the morning before opening-time, company parties, meals etc...with the aim of<br />spreading corporate values amongst staff members and making them as much involved as<br />possible in company life. Speeches held by the CEO often underlined the essential role played<br />by front-line employees while neglecting management and back-office.<br />At the end of the nineties one major organizational change has been implemented. This one<br />has had important consequences on the corporate culture of this company and on the power<br />game inside the hypermarket. After briefly going through the context in which this change<br />occurred, we -specify our methodological approach, in this case, a longitudinal case-study.<br />We will end with a discussion of the main phenomena observed by showing how the<br />contradictions experienced by first-line staff has played a great part in radically re-orientation<br />of the initial project. Thus have we noticed that the various changes put into practice by this<br />company have modified predominant values in organization and have shifted the places and<br />modalities in day-to-day management of the contradictions inherent in commercial activity