Debate (2) - Michel Freyssenet

Debate Conditions : GERPISA Experience

One prevailing point that was observed during the last session of the International Encounter was that GERPISA members are sometimes involved in subjects that are linked to personal choices, opportunities or constraints, and therefore do not necessarily enter into the program GERPISA has elaborated. Hence, available time for participation within the program can vary, creating inconvenient disparities. A more modest orientation for the network would be to regroup researchers in function of their research priorities. GERPISA would therefore organize an annual colloquium presenting results and debates, a sort of GERPISA-Agora (G. Volpato).

GERPISA operated in such a manner in the first two years of its existence, from 1981 to 1983, using the principle of an annual theme. However, very rapidly (this was an initial objective and also a condition for longevity, because discussion over different subjects without links being established finished very quickly and the network became less and less attractive), GERPISA tried to function with a mobilizing program for researchers who, even though they all worked on some aspects of the carmaking industry, nevertheless had different preoccupations. Slowly but surely, conditions contributing to the fact that a research question represents a mobilizing one for a disparate group of researchers were discovered. A question appeared to be mobilizing when attempts to respond to it allowed for an update and debate of processes rendering more intelligible a series of multiple phenomena, apparently without links as observed by one or the other researcher during personal projects. This research question is going to depend on the major issue for the carmaking industry during the period under consideration.

The need to update general processes influencing subjects under consideration is obviously felt by each of us in our personal research. However, what happens when we carry them out ? Either we come up with a makeshift local explanation for the phenomena studied, and leave to other researchers, often quite far from the field and not consistently inspired, the vaster theoretical elaborations, or we try to see the interpretative capacities of available theories, or still again, we attach ourselves to a few dominant trends of the moment because of the apparent forceful conviction of their arguments. This is a particularly frustrating and feebly productive situation. It provoked our reaction when faced with the hypothesis of the unavoidable spread of lean production because it was so much in contradiction with what we had observed on the field. However, our criticism based on a demand for rigor, prevent us from individually constructing general hypotheses because of the necessarily large amount of work in order to do so, unless one decided to devote one's entire days and nights. This is why debates which never end remain, as well as endless and recurrent questions which decidedly block the theoretical debate. Maintaining an Agora of researchers in this type of situation would rapidly become useless.

The only way to escape from this dilemma is the cooperative solution, if one refuses centralizing solutions based on money (either in a market form, an IMVP form, or an administrative form such as a "goals agency"). Voluntary cooperation between researchers from the most varied cultural and theoretical disciplines around central questions seems, at first glance, to be a "mission : impossible" or simply a form of "angelic utopia". There again, GERPISA's experience has allowed for solutions to be found which are still far from being satisfying, but which clearly trace an alternative route. The First International Program allowed us to progress greatly from this standpoint because of the type of problem we had to solve and by those we had identified. We can now say that a GERPISA method exists. This alternative route consists, first of all, in accepting to formulate a common research question despite our differences, and to establish together points to be dealt with in order to receive proper responses. Next, it is important to see how it would be possible, in light of our means, to analyze these points by redistributing tasks among groups in function of our specialities and personal availability. The final activity would be to debate the shared question, even to reformulate it as work and partial syntheses progress, and to proceed with a series of theoretical hypotheses.

We have learned how to construct such work programs, to unite the means to carry them out and to more or less do so in the best conditions. We have had a sufficient number of debates in order that each person discover at the end of the program that he/she had new positions than at the start, and especially with more theoretically profound interrogations, therefore with a richer problematic framework for personal research, as can be observed in recent individual comments, presentations, and publications. On the other hand, we still do not know how to proceed collectively (as collectively as possible) towards one or several theoretical constructions deserving of that name. This is perhaps one of the challenges of our Second Program. It is within this dynamics of response (eventually, multiple ones) to a major common question that the Agora of researchers will become a living and useful reality.

GERPISA as the "cooperative network studing and discussing a major question" is not contradictory with punctual individual research because it can allow each person to construct his/her own problematic, a richer and indispensable one for his/her work. Could this be contradictory in practice, because of a lack of time? The cooperative solution is the most economical of all. It offers to each person partial syntheses by firm, country, period, themes, otherwise not feasible, thus allowing for comparisons and more pertinent explanations. It remains that not everyone can intensively invest in a project, that not everyone can carry out the specific work required by the Program. Disparities and misunderstandings necessarily result. We certainly must find solutions, of which a few have been envisioned (see the editorial of Newsletter 103). This is most probably the second challenge of the Second Program.