Research interests
François-Xavier de Vaujany is a professor at Université Paris Dauphine-PSL and a researcher at DRM (UMR CNRS 7088). He specializes in organization studies and the history of work organization in France and the United States from the 1930s to the present day.
His research focuses on the political and societal dimensions of new forms of work organisation and management. Drawing on processual perspectives, he studies in particular the way in which the continuous and organised novelty at work in capitalism both weakens and strengthens the dynamics of our post-digital societies. He emphasizes the role of temporality as interruptions, incompleteness and non-events in new modes of value creation.
Since 2017, he has developed a research project about "global management", its americanity and its relationships with digital and post-digital societies. He relies on American Historical archives related to World War II and the after war period and coordinates a larger project (HIMO) gathering a dozen of researcher in Europe and in the US. In continuation of this research, he has beed the holder of the chair France-Brésil launched in November 2020 by Sao Paulo University on the topic of "Digitality and Management : Presence, Time and Space".
François-Xavier de Vaujany is co-editor in chief of the Journal of Openness, Commons & Organizing (JOCO), Associate Editor of Management Learning and member of the International Advisory Board of Organizações & Sociedade. He is also guest editor of a Special Issue published in Organization Studies entitled "Control and surveillance of new work practices". He is the author of more than 200 articles, book chapters, books and conference papers. His research has been published in top-tier MOS (Organization Science, Organization, Organization Studies, Organizational Research Methods, MOH, Culture and Organization, Information and Organization…) and MIS (Information Systems Research, European Journal of Information Systems, JIT, SJIS, ITP…) journals.
As an open and citizen science activist, he militates for open education and open institutions of higher education. Beyond a view focused on property issues, in particular open and free licences, he is interested in new methods likely to contribute to the joint development of common knowledge and increased capability and agentivity for citizens. Since 2016, he contributes to the design of a pragmatist urban method of problematization, a walking ethnography named OWEE (Open Walked Event-Based Experimentation). He has also initiated several experimentations focused on open education and new ways of teaching management, in particular a new course at Université Paris Dauphine-PSL entitled "Transformations du Travail et du Numérique" (TTN). He is the coordinator of TTN since 2018.
In a logic of open science, he has cofounded several alternative networks: the Organization, Artifacts and Practices (OAP) workshop, the Research Group on Collaborative Spaces (RGCS) and the Dauphine Philosophy Workshop (DPW). All these networks organize free, open to all, coproduced and collectively documented events. Between 2016 and 2023, François-Xavier de Vaujany has been the president-elect of the Research Group on Collaborative Spaces, an alternative research network exploring old and new ways of organizing work in an age of hyper-individualization. RGCS gathers 96 coordinators in more than 20 countries. He is now an elect-member of RGCS executive committee and the new VP for strategic development. He is also an active member of the European Group on Organization Studies (EGOS) and the Academy of Management (AoM), OMT and OCIS divisions.
Over the last twenty years, he has been visting professor for several leading international institutions, e.g. the University of Cambridge (JBS, 2000), the Copenhagen Business School (2005), LSE (ISIG, 2008), McGill (Desautels department, 2013), IESE (2014), the Stockholm Business School (2016) and HUJ (2017). Between August 2019 and August 2020, he has been Visiting Research Professor at New York University (NYU).
He has been the chair of several laboratory, research groups and major research projects in Saint-Etienne (Université Jean Monnet), Grenoble (UJM) and Paris (UPD). He has also been an elected member of several central or local councils, and has been several times expert for the ANR or the HCERES for which he chaired several evaluation processes.
He has been the receipient of several national or international awards, e.g. the best paper award of the Academy of Management (OCIS) in 2013, the prix de la fondation Paris-Dauphine en 2015 or the prix AIM-CIGREF en 2019.
He is the co-director of the Center for Organizational Methods, the director of the Sensorium Initiative and the director of the Observatoire des Pratiques de Consulting (OPC) at Université Paris Dauphine-PSL. He is also the co-director of the master 128 (Business Consulting and Digital Organization) at Université Paris Dauphine-PSL. This M2 explores new ways of organizing work for researchers in organization studies and consultant in management. He is part of the Programme Gradué PSL RIM, first step towards PSL PhD.
His last books are Le travail déplacé (Classiques Garnier), Apocalypse managériale (Belles Lettres), The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenologies and Organization Studies (Oxford University Press), Organization as Time (Cambridge University Press) and The Rise of Digital Management (Routledge).
Keywords: Organization of work; Management; Scientific management; Capitalism; Digital societies; Post-digital societies; Time; Space; Materiality; Democracy; Politics; Commons; Managerial apocalypse; Interruptions.
Philosophical underpinnings: Metaphysics of history; Process philosophy; Continental philosophy; American Pragmatism; Ontology of negativity.