Jean-Claude Thoenig

Jean-Claude Thoenig is a directeur de recherche (em.) at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He is affiliated with Dauphine Recherche en Management (Université Paris-Dauphine). His contributions to social and management sciences are in the areas of sociology of organizations, of political sociology, of policy analysis, and public administration. He studies social regulation processes and inter-organizational patterns at work. How is some compatibility possible and achieved in action settings characterized by highly differentiated logics of action and ambiguous issues? How do organizations relate to their action environment? Dr. Thoenig has tested innovative approaches in the field of organizational sociology such as cross-regulation mechanisms and inter-organizational action set-ups. He has offered interpretative models of national and territorial government, intergovernmental relationships, modernization and decentralization, technocracy and politics. His current projects cover higher education and research organization issues such as the steering of national research policies and higher education institutions in EU countries, and the fabrication of academic quality by universities and their subunits (departments, schools). His contributions about business firm knowledge have tested how relevant various organizational approaches are for the theory of the firm and for the understanding of markets as social constructs. Empirically grounded projects completed in the past years have covered the running of new entities derived from mergers and acquisitions, management of operational change, and innovation process steering. Jean-Claude Thoenig has been a co-founder of several professional associations and research institutions such as EGOS (European Group for Organizational Studies), the Ecole de Paris du management, GRALE (a European network for the study of local government), and the first French public management school for city and region managers. Inside the CNRS, he also founded GAPP (the first French research center on policy analysis).