David Demortain

Bringing Public Organization and Organizing Back In

Since the late 1990s social science-based studies have allocated much less attention to public organizations. Based on the sixth Organization Studies summer workshop, this introductory paper suggests a diagnosis of such a decline as well as a research agenda. It lists some fundamental issues still to be explored such as publicness and governance. It also considers how social science-based organizational knowledge might be extended to various empirical objects and fields in public domains and set-ups such as inter-organizational arrangements, hybrid organizations, multi-stakeholder arenas, hybrid organizing, and transnationalization processes, that usually are covered by scholars – economists, historians, anthropologists, management academics, etc. – who are not using organizational theory lenses.

Standardising through concepts: The power of scientific experts in international standard-setting

This paper deals with the power of scientific experts in standard-setting. It looks at the emergence of a set of principles for food hygiene known as HACCP, and their transformation into an international standard. Scientists are key actors of standardisation, because of their ability to include potential users and standard-setters in a common process of generification and replication of practices. In the case of HACCP, this occurred through the conceptualisation of practices, that is the enunciation and encapsulation of their generic properties into an exportable formula. The paper presents the determinants and the limits of the power of scientists to undertake such inclusive tactics of standardisation. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

From drug crises to regulatory change: The mediation of expertise

Abstract This paper deals with the relation between regulatory crises and regulatory change. It considers the question of whether factors that explain how accidents or disasters escalate into a regulatory crisis also explain subsequent reforms. Looking at the evolution of post-marketing drug safety and at the crisis caused by the discovery of the fatal effects and market withdrawal of the drug cerivastatin in 2001, it investigates the conditions in which shared solutions to a regulatory crisis emerge. It argues that regulatory change is a process by which existing or emerging technologies come to be framed as a solution to the crisis. Framing means aligning the actors of the regulatory space around common schemes of interpretations of what is needed to improve the regulatory framework. The case study points at the power of scientific and medical experts to foster such cognitive alignment.