| La lettre du GERPISA | no 97 (novembre 1995) |
Editorial - Michel Freyssenet
La Lettre fulfils three functions today, which we would like to further reinforce. The first is to be informative. We started off by giving "Programme News" and a "Calendar of Meetings", placing these in perspective through an editorial. Information later expanded to the "Activities of the Members" and to "Conferences and Seminars" of potential interest to network members. These latter two features remain inadequate. They are too French in content and too limited. The idea behind "Activities of the Members" is twofold: on the one hand to inform everyone about all the conferences, activities or projects in which each of us is participating, with a view to potential requests for further information from interested individuals; on the other hand to present the main points made at various meetings we have attended. The value of this feature depends on information being supplied by all of us. You can easily communicate to us by electronic mail. Later, you will be able to insert information directly into La Lettre. Fulfilling the information function means ensuring regular and rapid diffusion. La Lettre du GERPISA has become almost a monthly publication. This issue of La Lettre is already available on the Internet, by the following URL : http://www.univ-evry.fr:8003 (see at Programme news...).
Later issues will be too. La Lettre will, however, retain its paper form as well, until electronic communication is sufficiently widespread and has been perfected in terms of presentation.
The second function of La Lettre is to capitalize upon and activate debates within the current research programme, through the features "Research Questions" and "Debate". The first feature is not intended to be a summary of the previous GERPISA study day, but to open up discussions on research questions must be investigated to resolve controversies. It has greatly contributed to the conceptual clarifications at which we have arrived as the programme has proceeded. Looking back over it from the start, it is clearly a rich seam of ideas. We will continue to improve it, linking the research questions still better to the main themes of the programme and to previous studies. The objective of the "Debate" feature is to permit clarification of a viewpoint brought up during a meeting but not able to be fully discussed, and which could enrich our shared research themes. Through GERPISA, you will soon be able to receive electronically the whole set of any of the feature columns published since La Lettre was started.
The third function, that of a working tool, is fulfilled by the "Book Notes", "Fact of the Month", "Firm News" , "Book Review" and "Document Centre", as well as the "Bibliography" and the "Articles Available". In each case, the goal is to permit the reader to save time in seeking out useful documents and in gathering and synthesizing particular information, especially recent information that we may come across in newspapers but do not always have the time to examine. It is in this spirit that two features have just been created.
"A Year in the Life of a Company" summarizes the main developments at an automotive company during the past year, as reported in the press.
The idea of "Factory Visit", which starts in this issue, was based on an observation. As well as in-depth fieldwork, all of us also undertake factory visits. This "lesser" type of knowledge is nonetheless a significant source of comparisons with the cases we study in-depth. So we thought it might be useful to diffuse the notes we take on these visits. By their nature incomplete, partial and sometimes uncertain, these notes always prompt useful questions, as in the case of the first factory visit note we are publishing, that of Robert Boyer's visit to Toyota Kyushu. The same factories are visited by different researchers later on. Each could utilize the notes of colleagues to enrich his/her own visit. Perhaps we could even develop a framework for factory visits permitting us to obtain and classify the most pertinent information during visits which are necessarily short and partial. In La Lettre, we can only publish extracts from these notes. The whole version would be obtainable from "Articles Available". As with the other features, the texts would be available electronically straight away.
If there is one feature which helps all of us directly, it is the monthly bibliography. We hope that it will soon become an automatic reflex for each researcher to send GERPISA, electronically, information on books published and doctoral theses in their country which concern the subject of the current programme.