| Summary: | This article has a history. The first reason for wanting to write it was linked to the development in 2007 of a master course in sociology on the conditions associated with being able to enter organisations. To my great surprise, and in spite of my efforts during the preparation of the course, I found few texts which discussed real entry conditions. This article reflects then this disappointment. The second reason concerns repeated observations of the hardening conditions in relation with studies undertaken within organisations, whether in France or the United States. Reports I have received confirm my observations that the field of high risk organisations has become particularly more and more difficult for young researchers or doctoral students to freely organize their work. Paradoxically, whilst more efforts are undertaken so that sociologists (amongst others) have access to risk industries, researchers are confronted with conditions that are often rigid and hardly generous. As for the issues themselves that are studied, they are very aligned with the industrials’ own managerial questions. Ethnographic studies by immersion are abandoned in favour of action-research, in form de theses obliged, at the end of the day, to make propositions for improvements and recommendations about management tools. I have a feeling that what is happening in high-risk organisations is also the case for the sociology of organisations in general. In the first part of this article, I propose a partial revue of the way that the sociology of organisations has treated the question of entering into organisations. I will reflect on why there are so few works devoted to this question and on what the consequences may well be for the field itself. Secondly, I will examine the possibilities offered today as well as the efforts to make in order to, either, resolutely commit to an “implanted sociology”, or, to radically abandon the idea.
|
|---|
