Nicolas Balas

Multinational corporations’ politics and resistance to plant shutdowns: A comparative case study in the south of France

MNCs’ politics has been considered a ‘contested terrain’ and further research is needed into the dynamics between the Head Office’s drastic restructuring decisions and local responses to understand how collective resistance is performed, and on what conditions. A neo-Gramscian approach is developed to analyse two plants in France facing drastic restructuring, including shutdown. We trace the dynamics of forces significant in aligning resisting subjects. We identify two structural processes – chains of equivalence and chains of difference – which were significant to the constitution of resistance. This article contributes to the development and refinement of a neo-Gramscian approach to management and organization studies in general and to multinational corporations’ politics in particular. It refines the study of multinational corporations’ politics by explaining how collective resistance is constituted and organized, what favours and limits the possibility of creating a collective antagonistic front and the role of local managerial resistance.

La RSE, nouveau terrain pour de nouvelles formes de stratégies politiques

La RSE est-elle une nouvelle maniere pour les entreprises d’influencer le jeu politique ? L’analyse comparative de deux cas issus des industries miniere et automobile nous permet de nourrir l’idee-force selon laquelle la RSE devient un point de passage oblige non seulement pour la recherche d’opportunites marchandes, mais aussi pour les tenants de l’action publique. C’est a la mise au jour des modalites de traduction de la RSE en un carrefour faisant converger des interets economiques et politiques, transformant les interets particuliers des entreprises et des acteurs publics etudies en un universel d’interet general, que s’attache cet article.

Financialization of Global Value Chains and Implications for Local Development

This chapter analyses the ways in which financialization has transformed the territorial and organizational dynamics of innovation in global value chains, by adopting a historical perspective and focusing on Grenoble, the main French cluster in microelectronics R&D. The analysis draws on the geography of domination and neo-Gramscian approaches to (re)problematize spatial and institutional change as a political struggle in global value chains. On the basis of thirty-five interviews conducted between 2007 and 2010, archival information and secondary data, the authors identify three distinct periods in the development of the Grenoble cluster in which the specific geographical boundaries, forms of innovation, and relationship to the local territory in which its activities were embedded differed.