This article explores the links between the management of an organization's ordinary activities and the management of crisis situations. It starts from the observation that crises, whether brutal, prolonged, or insidious, do not arise in an organizational vacuum: they mobilize the same actors, structures, and practices as day-to-day operations. The study adopts both a processual and organizational approach, considering that the ability to cope with a crisis is built and maintained in ordinary operations. Through a thematic analysis anchored in real-world cases, the article identifies five key variables linking the ordinary to the crisis: Organizational slack, the social dynamics of collective action (cooperation and trust), relational power relations, reflexivity, and abductive reasoning. We show that these collective skills, developed on a day-to-day basis, are essential for developing effective crisis management capabilities. The article concludes that crisis preparedness does not rely solely on specific plans or exercises, but on investment in ordinary practices, which shape the capacity for collective action in critical situations.
The article provides new conceptual and analytical tools to explore the relationship between platform work and the welfare state at the global level. Firstly, the article discusses how the welfare state can profoundly shape the presence and availability of platform work, as well as moderate the effects of the 'de-responsibilisation' of platforms/employers and the 'responsibilisation' of workers, thereby exacerbating or reducing workers' insecurities. The article discusses how platform work relates to global welfare security regimes, proposing a nuanced application of the dualisation theory which considers the relative position of platform workers vis-& agrave;-vis other vulnerable workers within the country. Secondly, the article indicates that the micro-level barriers faced by platform workers in accessing the welfare state depend on social policy mechanisms but also on the level of informality of platform work within a certain labour market. We illustrate the three possible strategies to develop social policy instruments for platform workers: absorption into employment status, absorption into self-employment social protection mechanisms and the development of ad hoc social policy instruments. Finally, the article discusses how the emergence of platform work unionism is generating new social policy demands, as well as a third wave of collecting bargaining that differs from traditional bargaining strategies in countries of the Global South.
Urban water remunicipalization is often expected to restore public accountability through participatory governance. Yet participatory forums created during remunicipalization are frequently narrowed or dismantled once civic actors press into allocative decisions. This article develops a meso-level explanation of participatory rollback and traces two pathways in Paris and Naples. Drawing on twenty interviews, documents, audits, and explaining-outcome process tracing (2001-2020), it shows how civic professionalization and escalating contestation make participation consequential, and how municipal executives respond when claims target budgets, investment priorities, employment, or metropolitan coordination. In Paris, participation is preserved in form but curtailed through procedural containment, agenda control, and technocratic framing. In Naples, empowered civic governance collapses through executive rupture amid fiscal stress, infrastructure decay, and distributive pressures. Across both cases, public ownership persists while civic inclusion is re-scaled and redefined. The findings recast participation as a contingent instrument of executive control in the post-privatization city.
We examine the implementation of the circular economy in an alumina plant emblematic of the French and European metallurgy - Alteo-Pechiney, in Gardanne. The alumina production generates a considerable amount of a muddy residue, loaded with heavy metals and radioactive materials: "the red mud." These residues are unwanted materials that manufacturers used to have to dispose of, but since the rise of the circular economy, they are now trying to convert them into resources. However, the question of waste valorization is neither a new one nor exclusive to the circular economy, but has historically been part of the industrial engineering outlook. Taking a step aside from the normative and techno-solutionist reading of the circular economy transition, we assume that the development of forms of circular economy would be less the result of successful technological innovation than the outcome of interdependent constraints over time: political and material. So, what does the case of the red mud in Gardanne tell us about the materiality and the governmentality of such a circular economy transition? How has such a trajectory been affected by the effects of materiality and politicization? The article shows the full value of a socio-historical analysis to reconstruct the political and material trajectory of the residues from alumina production in its historical depth. By doing so, it highlights the non-linearity of change, with a constant overlap on the long run between linear and circular logic, largely due to the materiality of residues. This also demonstrates that the materiality of a waste management system is conversely the result of intense historical political work. Our reading of materiality also opens the door to the comprehension of complementary key drivers, in this configuration of interdependence: issues of social, territorial and environmental justice - beyond the usual optimistic and prescriptive storytelling about "transition".
How do financial markets influence the green transition? Advocates of harnessing markets to foster the green transition claimed that market rationality is a reliable mechanism to channel investment into sustainable uses. Critics argued that financial markets are known not to be driven by rationality but by complicated social dynamics whose implications for the green transition can only be understood by studying the social coordination mechanisms that govern them. This paper studies credit ratings as a key coordination mechanism likely to influence the pricing of climate-related risks, and thus the chances of the green transition. It argues that rating agencies protect their epistemic authority, the bedrock of their business model, by not attempting to model long-term climate-related risks, thereby introducing a myopic impulse into the pricing of those risks. Using evidence from the official methodologies of Fitch, Moody's, and Standard and Poor's, and interviews, the paper shows that rating agencies explicitly choose to discount longer-term threats; account only for the immediate costs (but not the benefits) of mitigation, adaptation, and resiliency-building measures; and reward income-generation over proactiveness. This approach makes funding less readily available to issuers with more sustainable behavior and undermines financial stability by delaying the repricing of unsustainable assets.
