ARRIVAL

The year was 1975, and that’s how I felt in my first few weeks at the CRG.  Like a visitor from another planet. Even though my wife and I were both born and raised on the East coast of the US, my wife in New Jersey and I in Connecticut, we were arriving in Paris from Champaign-Urbana, Illinois in the heart of the American Midwest, for me to begin a year-long National Science Foundation fellowship in the U.S.-France Exchange of Scientists Program. 

Paris was not new to either of us. We had each been to Paris on our own prior to our marriage, and we both spoke a bit of French, but surprises – both social and intellectual - awaited.  

My French research partner, Jean de Kervasdoué, was based at a place called the Centre de Recherche en Gestion, and that would be my professional home for the year. I had met Jean at Cornell in the late 60’s while we were both working on a research project on hospital innovation under the direction of Professor Gerald Gordon, and the fellowship was intended to enable us to replicate the U.S. study in France. But what was the CRG? How big was it? How well-known was it? All I knew was that the CRG was part of a place called the Ecole polytechnique.  But what kind of a “school” was that?  Lots of questions. Lots of unknowns.

To begin to answer these questions, we scouted out this “école” on foot.  It was located in a part of Paris called the Montagne Ste. Geneviève. There we found a few quite aged buildings, a swimming pool, and a tennis court. Not bad, even if a little updating seemed to be in order. But do they do research here? 

 We were fortunate to locate and rent an apartment on the rue Gracieuse, just a 10 minute walk from the Centre, an apartment with a working telephone! At the time we had no idea how lucky we were.  We just assumed everyone had a phone.  We were also fortunate that Jean and his wife Anne took us under their wing socially, introducing us to their circle of friends. So far, so good.

But what about this place they called the “labo”? What was a “labo”, and what kind of research was done there?

LIFE ON THIS OTHER PLANET

Answers to these questions emerged slowly and were not exactly what I had been expecting. The atmosphere was very relaxed; the personnel were young. But where were the professors? And what were the relationships between the people I met and the labo – and among themselves. And what was a research “project”? How were they funded?

 The more I saw, the less I understood. Until I realized that I was on a different planet. My personal struggle became not letting the mindset and experiences I brought with me completely preclude understanding what I was encountering on its own terms. That was not easy, and it took a while to realize that that was the challenge. Not to try to reproduce what I brought with me, but to appreciate the intellectual environment to which I was being introduced.

Things at the labo seemed to be relaxed to the point of being disorganized. Nobody seemed to care a whole lot about publishing what they were working on. There were meetings to discuss projects, but they often seemed to be unfocused and to allow – even encourage – musings that verged on the philosophical. But what about research design? What about empirical rigor? What about developing and/or accessing large scale data sets? What about the advantages of multivariate analysis? And what about all that research literature out there that was published in English? Don’t they realize the importance of accessing that?

INTO THE FIELD

These questions didn’t stop Jean and me from moving ahead with our research project.  We staffed up, translated our questionnaire and interview guides into French, and off we went.

What I encountered in the interviews with various personnel at the hospitals I visited, mostly with Jacques Neyret, another researcher on the CRG team, was both surprising and confusing. First of all, my French, while perhaps a cut above that of a tourist with an English-French dictionary in hand, was not sophisticated enough either to allow me to take in all I was being told or to frame pertinent follow up questions quickly and easily. And, second, the hospitals I visited were embedded in a health care system very different from the one I knew, with different structures, both financial and operational, and different internal dynamics. How to understand and then make sense of the similarities and differences became a challenge. In hindsight, this was an incredibly important introduction into the complexities of doing cross-cultural research, complexities that large-scale data bases have difficulty taking into account. And although I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, my experience on this other planet was beginning to challenge my intellectual comfort zone.

BACK TO THE LABO – THE HAGE EXPERIMENT

Our fieldwork completed, I retreated to the relative safety of the labo, and learned that a well-known American organizational sociologist, Jerald Hage, was in Paris on sabbatical.  What an amazing coincidence! He and I connected over lunch and a good red, compared our experiences with French life in general and the world of academia in particular, and agreed that there was a certain insularity in the world of French organizational research that we could perhaps help to open up. That insularity was both intellectual – very Franco-Français – and competitive – what about learning more about - and perhaps collaborating with – the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations?  Why don’t these groups, located in Paris, share their work and their insights? In retrospect, our naiveté was astounding, but at the time, we felt it was our duty to help build a network of French organizational researchers and introduce them to research that was being conducted elsewhere, particularly in the U.S. and England. Our efforts to organize joint seminars and to initiate collaborative research projects failed totally. One might have thought that our training as behavioral scientists would have been an asset in those efforts, but alas, it was not so. The CRG remained steadfastly independent and seemingly self-absorbed, and with hindsight I can imagine that Bertrand Collomb, founder and director of the CRG at the time, was smiling quietly to himself with regard to our efforts.

 IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT 

Bertrand Collomb had the wisdom to allow - even to encourage - a great deal of flexibility in the development of the labo and its approach to research, even though the institution of which it was part was well known for its work in math and science. Enter Michel Berry. Bertrand moved from the CRG to the business world and LaFarge, and was succeeded by Michel. Under his leadership, the CRG  developed a distinctive identity, based principally around the promotion of research at ground level (études cliniques, sur le terrain), field research based on interview and observational data. Seminars where we presented our research were a regular feature of life on this planet, and I eventually ginned up enough courage to present some research that I had done on county jails in Illinois. But I had to think carefully about how best to present it, and that thought process helped me realize the limitations of the work I had done. Not only was the CRG developing its unique identity, but my own intellectual identity was morphing as well. Life on this planet was having its impact.

BACK TO THE OTHER PLANET AND YALE

The year 1975-1976 in Paris passed all-too-quickly. Lots had happened. My wife and I met lots of new people and made lots of new friends. My intellectual habitat expanded. My wife became pregnant with our first child, which would alter our familial habitat profoundly. Upon our return, we moved from Champaign-Urbana, IL to New Haven, CT where I joined the founding faculty of Yale’s new School of Organization and Management. This, too, proved to be transformative for me professionally. The year 1975-76 on that other planet, in the unique environment that at the time characterized the CRG, marked the beginning of connections – intellectual and interpersonal – that have lasted nearly 50 years and many of which remain central for me. The cast of characters at the time – among them Bertrand Collomb, Michel Berry, Jean de Kervasdoué, Gérard de Pouvourville, Jacques Girin, Christophe Midler, Paul Mayer, Vincent Degot, Hervé Dumez, Jacques Sarrazin, Denis Bayart, Patrick Hontebeyrie, and others later, such as Hamid Bouchikhi and Etienne Minvielle, in one way or another, helped shape – and continue to shape - my own journey. Wow!

EPILOGUE

Is the CRG in 2023 like it was in 1975? Of course not. It has evolved and changed in ways both large and small. Overall, clearly, it has become more mainstream. In so doing, and in becoming more fully integrated into l’X, it has undoubtedly lost some – even much – of the originality that was so much a part of its earlier identity. I smile as I recall Michel Berry’s reluctance to be caught up in the publications race, in the pressure to publish in English, in the struggle to maintain the centrality of what was and is uniquely French in the work of the CRG as it became drawn into the larger world. I admire his commitment to understanding that larger world through his many adventures “sur le terrain” at annual meetings of the Academy of Management in different cities across the U.S.

I also see in the evolution of the CRG as part of the Ecole polytechnique a living example of the difficulty of maintaining innovation in the face of pressures to conform to norms embedded in a larger institutional context. I experienced similar pressures at the Yale School of Organization and Management, which initially offered an innovative new degree called a Master’s in Public and Private Management, or MPPM, but which over time, in response to market pressures, replaced the MPPM with a more recognizable MBA. And in moving from Yale to the Wharton School (which used to be called the Wharton School of Finance), I again experienced the challenges of identity transformation and legitimacy – what the change in the name of the school meant for what was put on offer and what was valued, and how slow and often painful that transformation has been.

The early days of life in the CRG were unique, and I feel fortunate to have experienced life on that planet. Michel’s successors, Jacques Girin, Christophe Midler, Hervé Dumez and currently Etienne Minvielle, have each put their own stamp on this organizational experiment, in the context of a world that has changed dramatically since its founding. Bravo! Et bonne continuation.