8 May 2017
Sarah, supervised by Professor Sébastien Liarte, is visiting from the University of Lorraine, France, and is currently in her 3rd year.
After a productive trip to the Business School in November 2016, Sarah has returned to continue discussions and further build relationships. Her research focuses on the coexistence of accountability and religious institutional logics and explores the case of Scouts and Guides in France.
Her research uses the neo-institutional framework and analyses the field of the biggest French scouting organisation: the Scouts and Guides of France. It is a hybrid organisation, which means several logics influence it, especially accountability and religion. She focuses on the fact that the organisation incorporates demands from different institutional logics, yet avoids conflicts. She explores the coexistence’s impact on the organisation, its discourses, the visual it produces and its functioning. Coexistence’s stakes of institutional logics with divergent demands are not limited to an organisational functioning issue. This coexistence also questions the relationship between practices and representation of each logics. How do we match them? Adapt them?
To do so, she uses multiple kinds of data. First, she collected annual reports, supports for training, from 1975 to 2016 and annual calendars from 1936 to 2016. Second, she conducted 11 semi-structured interviews, with people in charge at each level of this organisation (local, regional and national), volunteers and employees. Participant observation has been ongoing since the beginning of this research.
Thus, following the identification of logics and the practices and representations related, she is looking to analyse their interactions to figure out the way they coexist together to avoid conflicts or the organisation’s paralysis.
She is visiting Edinburgh until 1 June 2017 and would welcome discussions with other PhD candidates and academics from across the school.