Industrial research in the face of project-based organization. Inquiry into a French research centre
Résumé
This paper studies the implementation of a project-based organisation in an R&D unit in the energy sector. It shows that this ‘modernisation’ has been the transformation of the time constraints faced by researchers in their work. First, it has increased at the expense of the time devoted to scientific work. Second, the practice of running multiple projects simultaneously generates ‘coordination costs’ and a fragmentation of work, which makes the intellectual concentration essential to research very difficult to achieve, so much so that certain tasks have to be accomplished during time off. Finally, the constant adjustment to the clients’ demands leads to an engineerisation of research. While the research projects most remote from the objectives of the operations management suffer from a lack of credit, those commissioned by managers closest to the market increasingly look like work from an engineering service, taking a short-term and operational approach.