Jean Mercier

Looking at Organizational Culture, Hermeneutically

Increased international trade and competition has encouraged organizational analysts to look into the role of location, in other words the institutional frameworks, and their underlying cultural base, of competing countries. This article proposes the discipline of hermeneutics for the realization of this task. The hermeneutic tradition of taking into account context and past history in understanding the basis of institutional frameworks is presented as being particularly useful The example of French organizational characteristics serves as an illustration of this method, as these characteristics are related to history, contextual elements and other aspects of French society. Consideration is then given to the evaluation of a hermeneutic interpretation.

The Greening of Organizations

This article draws some parallels between administrative trends of the past 15 years and principles drawn from the ecology movement. This task is facilitated by the fact that ecologists have been interested in areas that go beyond questions of air, water, and soil. Both administrative practices and the ecology movement have been recommending a departure from primitive mechanics, because both advocate diversity flexibility, and human scale and recommend institutional arrangements that are based on dedifferentiation, fusion, and a less segmented view of reality A bewildring array of terms has been used to describe emerging trends in organizational life (post-Weberian, ecological postmodern, and others), but it may be reassuring to know that organization theory has always had 4 in its midst notions that help us understand these new realities.

Understanding continuity in sustainable transport planning in Curitiba

The Brazilian city of Curitiba has long been recognised as an exemplary success in urban planning, particularly its sustainable urban transport, with modal splits strongly favouring public transit. Its success was achieved principally through rigorous and detailed planning, beginning in the 1970s, using policy tools that have been described, and sometimes criticised, as technocratic. After 40 years of a quite successful experience in transport planning and implementation, Curitiba, like many world cities, faces new challenges, particularly in the form of metropolitanisation and increased aspirations for citizen participation. In this paper we investigate which policy tools are being used to face these emerging challenges in Curitiba, whether they are the same as those used in the past and which led the city to be a recognised urban transport success case, or different, more flexible and participative tools presumed to be more in tune with the emerging context of metropolitanisation and increased demands for participation. The answer, coming from interviews within Curitiba transport representatives, current literature review and limited comparisons with other successful transport cities of the Americas, suggests a continuation of Curitiba’s proactive format, one which has led to its past successes, with some modest overtures to more interactive and participatory policy tools.

» Le phénomène bureaucratique « et le Canada français: quelques données empiriques et leur interprétation

Drawing from the organizational behaviour that is described in Michel Croziers Bureaucratic Phenomenon , two similar public service organizations, one (anglophone) in Ontario, one (francophone) in Quebec are compared. Even if the type of behaviour found in The Bureaucratic Phenomenon is quite sensitive to noncultural factors (sex, organizational level, type of work), francophones correspond more closely than their anglophone counterparts to certain types of behaviour found in Croziers descriptions. Data collected are compared to those in other studies, both empirical and historical, and different hypotheses are examined to explain certain similarities that exist between organizational behaviour in French Canada and in continental France.

Three Cities of the Americas: Policies and Instruments in Seattle, Montreal, and Curitiba

This chapter traces the urban transport history of Seattle, Montreal, and Curitiba based on the respondents’ recount of the policies and instruments used by successive governments. If the three cities have historically been successful in setting the conditions for high transit ridership and active modes of transport, they are now at different stages of political and policy development. In Seattle, a strong local economy, combined with a progressive political environment, is supporting a virtuous cycle of policies and investments, creating the perfect conditions for people to choose transit and active modes. In the meantime, Montreal is experiencing a true paradigm change with a new governance structure, policy framework, cycle of investment and political makeup, which are setting the ground for an urban renaissance. As for Curitiba, policymakers facing an unfavorable political and economic environment have not been able to maintain the level of innovations and investments necessary for the BRT system to grow, contributing to its depreciation.

Conclusion on the Data

Mercier and his colleagues draw from the data on instrument use of the preceding chapter to offer some unusual and possibly innovative thoughts on the interaction between government and governance modes, two policy configurations usually seen as opposites. These two presumably opposing procedures are in fact tied together in a complex and back and forth movement of policy evolution, so that governance can even be seen as preparing and enhancing the process of proactive government. The authors then call upon notions of social sciences and economics to better understand their overall results. They find that continuity in transport policy is illuminated by the sociological notions of path dependency, historic and cognitive institutionalism, and culture, while the notion of isomorphism, the tendency to imitate successful organizations, can be called upon to explain some of the changes occurring in this policy area. The authors refrain from a prematurely normative-prescriptive position, by calling upon institutional economics to draw our attention to the transactions costs involved in the much-praised governance configuration of policy.

The Context of Sustainable Urban Transport

In this chapter, the authors look at the three main challenges that cities and metropolitan areas face in dealing with the challenge of sustainable transport. In the context of increasing liberal values and privatization policies, they face a planning challenge, at a time when government intervention is seen as lacking in efficiency. Second, the cities face an extending urban landscape, with a fragmenting spatial configuration that is not conducive to public transport. Third, cities face a public policy challenge, due to the fact that an increasing variety and number of stakeholders demand that their point of view be heard and considered. Drawing from public policy and political studies literature, Mercier and his colleagues then identify two policy configurations to deal with these challenges, the government (more top-down) mode, and the governance (more horizontal, participative) mode. Building on the differences between these two styles of public policy, the authors then propose a model of policy instruments which can be helpful in ascertaining the contribution of these two policy configuration in attaining sustainable urban transport.