Action-research in inter-organizational partnerships: can the institutional entrepreneur theorize his/her own institutionalization practices?

In the current context of a crisis in social regulation, the issue of institutionalisation of new forms of compromise has gained central importance. The “local” level is increasingly more often presented as one of the levers for recasting social regulation. This involves designing a new framework for interaction between the micro-economic stakeholders on the labour market. In this way, our research focused on the conditions for institutionalisation of compromises implemented at inter-company level conciliating the need for flexibility and security. We adopted a field approach, anchored in “flexicurity” practices implemented at local level. In order to do this, we set up a partnership made up of the various stakeholders on the labour market in our region, within the framework of a European action-research project. With these partners’ collaboration, we observed the existing practices and tested new practices as part of pilot projects, whose failure and/or success (qualified in terms of “desirability” of the compromises implemented) provided us with a wealth of longitudinal data. Having become veritable “institutional entrepreneurs” through spurring on and supporting these experiments, we have contributed to the development, alongside our “practitioner” partners, of a flexicurity practices analysis grid. It allows their desirability to be qualified and helps guide the implementation of such innovations. We then returned to our status of researchers, transforming this “local” knowledge into generic knowledge actionable through an abductive process that establishes links between our own theorisation and the existing knowledge in the scientific field.