Governments are seeking innovative modes of action to address current social issues such as the environment, poverty, aging populations, unemployment, and violence. These issues are at the origin of "creativity of action" (Joas, 1999) in relation to companies developing original strategies surrounding social issues. Thereby analysis of these social issues and relevant strategies is at the heart of this fourth program. This program includes some theoretical dimensions that have been identified in other programs, by focusing more specifically on issues and their broad societal significance. It also supports the exploration and development of new themes. The work is organized around four themes.

A first theme deals with spaces and territories in support of research on organizational and societal creativity. With the work on clusters, the area is identified as the scale of evolution of inter-organizational coordination as sources of economic development. Most recent work has emphasized that geographical proximity is not enough in itself to facilitate such coordination. Types of questions that structure this research theme are: what role does space play in the phenomena of management, and how does space become a subject of management?

A second theme concerns the social responsibility of business and the interactions between actors of various statutes including:  businesses, social entrepreneurs such as associations, NGOs, public institutions and governments, etc. and how these interactions structure the management of social issues.

The third theme looks at "extreme" situations and how to manage them, in particular areas of nuclear safety management, crisis management and risk in high reliability organizations. In addition it looks at managing "borders" in situations of multilingualism management and intercultural transpositions of tools for management. These situations are atypical compared to the traditional management domain, by questioning the very nature of the phenomena ‘management’.

Finally, the creativity of organizations is analyzed in terms of the activities of players, considering the dynamic situation, routines, processes and practices. This perspective allows particularly awareness of innovations in complementary angles than just product innovation.