Innovation and Agility in the Digital Age [1st edition] 9781786304049

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Innovation and Agility in the Digital Age

Human Resources Management Set coordinated by Jean-Luc Cerdin

Volume 2

Innovation and Agility in the Digital Age Africa, the World’s Laboratories of Tomorrow

Soufyane Frimousse

First published 2019 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address: ISTE Ltd 27-37 St George’s Road London SW19 4EU UK

John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street Hoboken, NJ 07030 USA

www.iste.co.uk

www.wiley.com

© ISTE Ltd 2019 The rights of Soufyane Frimousse to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Library of Congress Control Number: 2018965268 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78630-404-9

Contents

Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

vii

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

xiii

Chapter 1. Disrupters, Breadcrumbs and the Managerial Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1.1. Digital disruptions of management . . . . . . . . 1.2. New and fundamental insights . . . . . . . . . . 1.3. From pyramid to platform . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4. Motivation by profit and especially by purpose

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Chapter 2. The African Continent: Laboratory Tomorrow’s World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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2.1. The frog’s leap, the leopard’s run and agility . . . . . . . . 2.2. Rebel talents and serial learners in dynamic rootedness . . 2.3. Rooted leaders/entrepreneurs, adventurers and hustlers at the service of African singularities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4. An African citizen educated and trained to think within organizations, who can speak and must be listened to . . . . .

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Chapter 3. The Mediterranean: Marrying the Future without Divorcing the Past . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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3.1. The Mediterranean: crossroads of civilizations, one-way street or dead-end street . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2. Drawing from the Mediterranean thanks to people of transposition. 3.3. Neither adoration, nor submission, but self-realization . . . . . . . . 3.4. Zones of fertility in “layer-cake” societies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

61 74 94 115

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Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Postface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

149

Foreword

Simply mentioning “Africa” as a reference in a particular model often involves a notorious misunderstanding of a continent whose land mass is larger than that of the United States, Oceania and Europe put together, whose number of languages is probably greater than 50,000 and whose cultural origins are among the most complex. We often hear “Africans are this or that”, and quite often it is a coarse approximation of an infinitely more subtle reality. However, what remains common to the African continent, without a doubt, is a lag in development compared to the rest of the world, generally described as a permanent stain whose effects continuously reappear in economic matters, in human development and in social, environmental and educational matters. It seems to me that the real difficulty is in moving away from a given context to try to draw out long-term perspectives, without necessarily relying on identified trends, but trying to identify a few weak signals which might constitute overdetermining factors in the medium term. In this regard, there is no doubt that development in Africa must experiment with new pathways, if only because current dynamics paint a picture of a continent with different characteristics: Africa will thus, like Asia, be more than others a continent of megacities, city-states whose populations will be higher than 10 million inhabitants. The UNDP thus predicts that Africa will host no less than 18 of these (out of a total of 70 by 2050). Concerning energy, Africa could well be one of the first continents to implement smartgrids on a large scale (Huawei is currently

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carrying out several experiments with these technologies in Addis-Ababa, Cairo and Nairobi), technologies in which much hope is placed to bring about a new model of electrical energy. Finally, as for flows of technology and skills, the traditional North–South axis could quickly be challenged by a South–East axis, as not only China (with its immense “One Belt One Road” initiative), but now also India seem willing to develop long-term partnerships with many countries. Yet, these three trends are only rarely emphasized by the media when Africa is discussed. However, they will inevitably lead to the emergence of a model of development which, several decades from now, will be considered very different from what is observed in the West. Consider also Korea or Japan, two countries who were not spared in the memoirs of General MacArthur: reading them shows how much the general thought them incapable of developing, particularly Korea. However, not only has their expansion been remarkable (South Korea was poorer than Mali from then until 1960), but it has involved creating their own technological and especially managerial culture. To bet that Africa might become a model for innovation and management seems very daring at first sight. Few observers would risk such predictions. As Soufyane Frimousse emphasizes in this work, the African model of management – as we perceive it – is too often one of the worst caricatures of the Western “command and control” type of model, inherited from the mills and forges of the 19th Century, which we never cease to try to eradicate in our own latitudes. However, this is to ignore vast social spaces, those of the family, those of village circles and those of the informal economy, whose organizational capacities are remarkable in more than one way. If these are not expressed in the productive base it is because the technologies, carefully imported from the West, have not been disassociated from the managerial cultures which came with them. Quite often, African management has given up on its model of interaction and consultation, faced with technologyʼs potential for intimidation. We might speak of the “magical” intimidation of technology; the technological supernatural representing a transcendent factor, situated above humanity and imposing itself on all. This is not a negligible factor: it was through taking account of a technological breakthrough – the atomic bomb – above and beyond everything known at the time, that the Empire of

Foreword

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Japan and its emperor surrendered, as fanaticized as they were by the messianic nature of their war. Although many decades ago, anthropologists identified the factors which have, in many regions of Eastern as well as Western Africa, given rise to significant social sophistication and harmony, rare are those who have risked translating this into the world of business. Yet, several factors are actually in the process of creating a new model, in Africa. The first of them is leaving the neo-colonial era behind: in many countries, particularly Francophone ones, the former master is still an economic, technical, social and political reference from the very fact of maintaining the links which were created over centuries. However, though these links remain important, they are increasingly less determining or dominant. The second consists of the emergence of a global digital culture: managerial reference points have been overwhelmed in the West as in Africa by the emergence of a culture based on open-source, collaboration, proceeding by iteration or “building to fail”, so-called “agile” processes, etc. Now, this culture is particularly powerful and acts like a wave against an aging dike: it washes it away, allowing the reappearance of local cultural characteristics which had been buried but never quite disappeared. The third consists of the nature of African innovation. Inspired by massive necessity more than by industrial sophistication, constructed mainly outside of traditional scientific laboratories, African innovation is profoundly “jugaad”, to take up the concept promoted by Navi Radjou. In a digital world dominated by the GAFAM companies and in a region where political, judicial and economic institutions are often unstable, it has developed rapidly and on a large scale, bringing forth a unique and diversified model. These three factors, non-exclusive of the others mentioned in Soufyane Frimousseʼs work, are not negligible. Whoever has the opportunity to meet African entrepreneurs, particularly in the digital field, can see that the time for condescension is gone. Organizational models, business models and techniques emerge and develop effectively: mobile currencies (M-Pesa) and their associated services (M-Kopa for payments for solar electricity); renewable energy (the municipality of Kampala has just put out a call for tenders to reduce its energy consumption to 0% gas and carbon emissions)

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and open and collaborative services for trash collection (ArClean); medical tools for access to diagnosis and care (CardioPad); applications for checking agricultural prices (M-Farm); popular social networks (Mxit) and so on. Solutions imagined and designed by individuals, entrepreneurs, students, researchers, scientists or artists may sustainably inspire the rest of the globe. The entrepreneurial energies unleashed by the African economic boom should be sustained, improved and supported so as to participate in the invention – even the re-enchantment – of the world of tomorrow. If we must globalize African innovation, we must also Africanize global innovation to instill a digital vision which is more inclusive, sustainable, creative and useful. Although Western societies are currently remarkably efficient, they remain confronted with complex challenges: how to maintain technological and innovative leadership with a population whose aging is accelerating? How can we conceive of sustainability in a model which only tolerates reformist policies with difficulty, and breaking with models even less? These questions are not insignificant. The study of history shows two impressive constants: the first is that nations have always neglected the factors that have led to their marginalization. Thus, the Chinese empire was excessively welcoming to the British and Dutch who arrived to open trade offices and free ports, without realizing that the economic power of these merchants was powerfully defended by military power that would not hesitate to impose its conditions on the Qing dynasty after the Opium Wars. The French empire did not understand that the British financial model, its legal stability, offered greater potential for development and thus a larger capacity for territorial expansion, and so on. The second is that models of innovations are systematically condemned when they appear. From the Jacquard loom, to Fordist organization, to Toyotism, to the Internet revolution, these have all been the object of critiques almost always coming from the most orthodox representatives of a generally dominant model. Here, too, new tendencies are not generally detected. However, if we watch what is happening in Africa, we can only observe that the coming generation is beginning to assert its vision, a mixture of an assumed expression of the principles of consultation belonging to ancestral cultures, a mastery of technological principles and the cultural models that this entails, a capacity to take large risks and a desire to self-emancipate from known frameworks. These are some of the factors

Foreword

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which underpin the managerial and innovation culture of Africa and, probably, of the world to come. Gilles BABINET Digital Entrepreneur. Digital Champion of France at the European Commission. Vice-President of the National Digital Council of France.

Introduction

Contemporary managerial reality is based largely on a universalist logic. This vision rests on the convergence of organizations towards a single and universal management model proclaimed to be the “one best way”. This involves Fayol’s famous “planning, organizing, commanding and controlling” and its multiple derivatives, which are based on the Taylorist and Fordist models that we can sum up in the formula “command, control and execute”. This prototypical model of traditional business is called into question in current and future contexts. In fact, the percentage of employees who feel disengaged from business never ceases to rise. According to a Capgemini study in 20141, the figure has risen to 40%. According to a study by Gallup2, the score is 80%. These figures lead us to question the foundations and practices of organizational management. In fact, among Fayol’s principles, it is command and control that are strongly challenged in their application. With the major principles remaining stable in their broad lines over a century, new models of management must innovate in every dimension while particularly taking account of developments in society, themselves accelerated by the digital revolution. These upheavals have provoked many organizations to question their mode of management, moving from a traditional pyramidal organization to an agile structure. It is now necessary to have employees who are reactive and autonomous and who possess adaptive capacities. 1 Capgemini. (2014). À l’écoute des français au travail. 2 Etude Gallup sur l’engagement des salariés (2014).

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In this context, new modes of organization emerge, copying startups in giving more freedom of action to everyone and engaging with employees in a more personalized way. Within the well-known models of the GAFA companies (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon), their Chinese equivalents, the BATX (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and Xiaomi) and the NATU companies (Netflix, Airbnb, Tesla and Uber), management is now horizontal, organized into small groups with strong autonomy. These companies which have become giants have freed themselves from most classical organizational management practices to adopt others, issuing from the digital revolution. Agility and disruptive innovation have become the key dimensions here. All these are found at the heart of many African and Mediterranean cultures and enterprises, which now explains why multiple innovations originating from Africa are beginning to be internationally exported, part of the beginning of the globalization of Africa. Africa is a unit at the level of the African Union. It is a giant continent. In contrast, there are plural Africas at the level of geography, history, economy, culture and political situations. At the managerial level, African and (southern shore) Mediterranean firms are often cited as examples not to follow. In a large proportion of the managerial literature, methods and practices deriving from the African continent and the southern shore of the Mediterranean are ignored or considered to be archaic or quaint. From these descriptions, we get the image of an Africa condemned to marginalization. Our work is opposed to this simplistic vision. We believe that the African innovations which have emerged over the past ten years are directly linked with a managerial model which responds perfectly to the digital era. Following on from the lines of research of George et al. (2016) on the specificities of management in Africa, our work thus has the goal of grasping and describing the methods and processes which allow transformations to succeed and promote innovative and agile behaviors which are likely to create value for firms and their stakeholders while improving their competitiveness. We follow the recommendations of Zoogah et al. (2015), who encourage researchers to develop an understanding of African organizational dynamics, which call for appropriate theoretical and empirical approaches to improve knowledge.

Introduction

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These advances are also potentially useful and rich in learning opportunities for non-African organizations and research. Innovation is not creativity. Being creative means having ideas. Being innovative means putting these ideas to work. Creativity involves reflection, while innovation involves action. As creativity belongs in the domain of psychology, it may be encouraged by various techniques such as brainstorming. Conversely, innovation belongs in the domain of management. It involves moving into action, ensuring that new ideas are not killed by the organization, its routines, its budgetary constraints and its power struggles, and that they find their way to the market. If creativity generally has a cost, only innovation is likely to make a profit. Practices which qualify as innovative originate from firms, leaders, entrepreneurs and citizens. They are the result of exchanges between people and of experiments. Innovation in management includes innovation in organizing people, in managing systems, communication, social relations and the organization of work. Managerial innovation is an approach which may allow firms to develop and sustain their activities. Managerial innovation is based on: the capacity to differentiate oneself from competitors; the capacity to promote agile behaviors so as to adapt to changes; and the capacity to attract and retain engaged and passionate employees. Managerial innovation consists of responding to many challenges: the development of agility; the enhancement of pleasure and well-being at work; the improvement of collaboration, cohesion and collective intelligence; the establishment of relations based on trust; the stimulation of innovative behaviors; and the improvement of engagement and loyalty. Africa is a reservoir of technological, managerial and societal innovations. In Africa, technology is not a gimmick. It responds to vital necessity. Here, we encounter jugaad, the art of innovation with limited resources proper to emergent nations of which the Indian Navi Radjou has become the guru. Africa has jugaad in its DNA, with its very collective functioning and the art of doing more with less. Innovations are rooted in territories.

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In his book Post-Capitalist Society, Peter Drucker (1993) describes the influence of major developments in the economy and society since the Middle Ages on the models of organizations. Based on this perspective, this book presents the managerial developments that emerged in organizations after the anthropological revolution and the acceleration of digitalization that is closely connected. These revolutions are discussed and analyzed. The key dimensions of new forms of organization (structures, methods of work, etc.) and innovation underlying the digital revolution within the most innovative organizations in the world are presented. Developments involve the impacts of digital technology on some organizations in Africa, which have led them to rethink their organizational and innovation models. In fact, some African firms offer products and services which are more than just copies of their international counterparts. These organizations are based on real managerial characteristics, including frugality. Do these “made in Africa success stories” not draw the outlines of a new model of management and innovation for firms in the digital era? Our reflections are based on the cultural, economic and managerial dimensions of the Africas and of the Mediterranean world, inserting them into a historical, geo-strategic and socio-political framework. With movements of challenge and revolt in the Arab countries, the Northern countries have discovered, often with amazement, that the quest for liberty and human rights also continues on the southern shore of the Mediterranean and that it is not exclusive to the northern shore. The eternal imaginary dissymmetry of East and West and the insurmountable pseudo-barriers between “them” and “us” break down. These new data offer the chance to deepen this approach to the Mediterranean as a hidden source. This work thus encourages us to discover or rediscover the Mediterranean as it is. It shows the discrepancy between Mediterranean realities and well-meaning discourses and speeches. It involves going behind the lighted stage of intercultural dialog, and dissecting the darkness of the facts. We interrogate historical and cultural fractures so as to sketch the forms of their possible supersession, as the Mediterranean may constitute a hidden source.

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We insist on the claim of the Mediterranean, which seems to be echoed in those countries with cultures strongly influenced by the varying dogmas of the dominant model: cultural, economic, societal and managerial. This claim is expressed through: a form of resistance to the society of acceleration and consumption; a need for authenticity and relationships expressed in the notions of tribe and embeddedness; a need for singularity; a quest for well-being; and a management of people and no longer of human resources.

1 Disrupters, Breadcrumbs and the Managerial Revolution

The digital revolution is one of the major turning points of humanity, at the same level as the invention of writing and the invention of printing by Gutenberg which made possible the emergence of the Enlightenment. The digital transformation is a technological revolution comparable to the appearance of electricity, except that it has changed the world in 20 years instead of a century! Google, Facebook, Amazon, Airbnb and the like have attacked and disintermediated a large number of professions which thought themselves untouchable, like booksellers, advertisers, taxis, hotels and so on. Today, instead of going to a bookstore, a 21st-Century person goes to the Amazon website. After four years, the Airbnb startup offers over 200 countries more rooms to rent every day than the Hilton group, which has built up its heritage over a hundred years. Uber, like Airbnb, shows that user experience is superior to regulation. Uber not only interacts with 10 million customers and 200,000 drivers, but also interacts with banks, payment systems, traffic information systems, social networks and so on. The more the firm interacts, the more it creates value and becomes indispensable for its users. Joël de Rosnay (2016) describes these firms as “disruptors” (or disruption). In the classical model, goods and services are distributed by networks to reach consumers and create a profit margin. In the disruptive model, platforms allow the creation of added value by customers. It is then reused by these firms to resell it to others.

Innovation and Agility in the Digital Age: Africa, the World’s Laboratories of Tomorrow, First Edition. Soufyane Frimousse. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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The art of disruption or “Uberization” thus corresponds to businesses who have accomplished the disintermediation of traditional structures through offering more personalized services and products, more rapidly. Disruption is based on technological reappropriation by citizens who create innovative systems which will change habits, ways of life and communication. It is thus not a discovery that will change things. It is rather the convergence between these elements. Gilles Babinet (2016) adds that innovation is also affected since previously, it was incremental. The best example is that of the internal combustion engine whose performance has progressively developed over a century and a half. Now, innovation also involves disruption. All these ruptures or disruptions are supported and accelerated by the development of technologies which are shaping a connected, globalized and rapid world in perpetual motion, which profoundly changes ways of thinking, communicating and working. For “Millennials”, the smartphone is not a tool of communication, but a prosthesis. They are capable of carrying out multiple activities by downloading applications. Smartphones in particular allow us to interface with transmitter–receiver tools communicating directly between the body and the machine (Internet of Things). Technologies have changed our perception of space and time! The level of sophistication of these devices is such that we interact with machines more than with people. These very fast machines lead to shorter time, which is one of the aspects of this anthropological revolution. Technologies have not reduced distances; they have suppressed them. Ways of accessing knowledge have also profoundly changed. For Michel Serres (2012), computers, including all information technology including the Internet, smartphones, etc., will affect all areas of life (law, politics, commerce, religion, education, finance, etc.). With the digital era, human beings hold the world in their hands. In fact, they hold their devices in their hands and, if they wish, they can communicate with every place in the world and access every piece of information at any moment, and they are slashers (holding down several jobs) or freelancers (in business for themselves).

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They overcome natural stupidity and move towards artificial intelligence. Thanks to smartphones, artificial intelligence, robotics and the power of interconnection between them, human beings multiply their capacities due to the emergence of increased collective intelligence. This means a real mutation of the human species. Joel de Rosnay (2016) predicts the emergence of an “increased collective intelligence” which will lead to hyperhumanism, which according to him is something much more preferable than transhumanism, which promotes the use of science and technology to improve the physical and mental characteristics of human beings. Ray Kurzweil (2005), an icon of transhumanism, believes that exponential technological innovation will allow us to conquer death and eventually give rise to machines that are more intelligent than humans. Kurzweil (2005) identifies genetics, nanotechnology and robotics as the three revolutions that will define our lives in the next few decades. The adepts of transhumanism dream of being able to transcend humanity through artificial intelligence by creating superhumans and individual supra-intelligence. This vision is far from being unanimously welcomed. For de Rosnay (2016), transhumanism is inhuman, as the transformations foreseen in the body or the brain are reserved for a privileged few, and life and death are inseparable and indispensable. However, transhumanist advances may lead, thanks to philosophical reflection on pushing the limits of the human body, to prolonging life expectancy and may contribute to positive human and social evolution. Already, connected objects act in symbiosis with humans. It is this integrated and collective symbiosis which humanity should create, and this is the challenge that current and future generations should meet. We realize through these crucial questions that digital transformation is not to be addressed solely via the technological angle of digital tools. It is also and especially a matter of human beings – but also of management and organization. 1.1. Digital disruptions of management The development of digital technology has upset the business world in its organization and its managerial system. Traditional organizations appear outdated and incapable of handling the transformations caused by this mutation. With its descending circuit of information, its centralized

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decision-making process and its very hierarchical relationships, the classical organization has proved its effectiveness for a long time. These hierarchical, functional, matrical, etc., models of operation, widely studied by Henry Mintzberg (1990), are very useful for building organizational charts, understanding the relationships between support functions and operation functions, and adapting managerial positions. A manager in pyramidal organizations favors a formal mode of reasoning which does not promote the development of intelligence, sensitivity or intuition, but rather the acquisition of automatic behavior patterns and conditioning of the “problem-solving” type. William Whyte (1956), in The Organization Man, aptly describes how pyramidal firms maintain and create conformism. These days, the need for innovation and agility, associated with the influence of digital technology on behaviors, puts into question this schema, which is proving too constraining to adapt rapidly to changes in clients, the market and employees. It is now necessary for employees to decide quickly and to be empowered to iteratively test which options are the most suited to a given context. In a few years, innovative companies, with outstanding management who break with conventional wisdom, have thus become giants of the global economy. In 2017, these groups have accumulated more than 250 billion dollars in turnover. The GAFA firms (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon) are worth 1,740 billion dollars after 23 years of existence. The NATU firms (Netflix, Airbnb, Tesla and Uber) are worth 140 billion dollars after 14 years. The Chinese BATX firms (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and Xiaomi) are worth 460 billion dollars after 14 years. It seems difficult to disconnect such results from the organizational environments that they put in place and the way in which they think about work. Is it a new managerial paradigm? What are its innovative aspects? In the next section, we will explore a few of these. Amazon’s subsidiary Zappos, an online commerce site, has enacted “holacracy”, which is a mode of organization based on shared responsibilities for employees and transversality of skills. Employees are thus asked to act like entrepreneurs and to take initiative rather than to wait for orders from their manager. Holacracy has already been adopted by more than 300 firms worldwide.

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Isaac Getz and Brian M. Carney (2012) describe another form of organization which they name “liberated companies”. These give their employees responsibility, granting them confidence and leaving very wide decision-making autonomy to their workers. This encourages mutual listening and collaborative work. Teams are motivated, involved, faithful and much more productive. In a liberated company, control is not lost; it is shared. Orangina and Michelin are engaged in this approach. Frédéric Laloux (2015) recommends establishing freedom of decision-making at all levels of the organization. Customer satisfaction derives most often from initiative, which is the result of teams being granted autonomy. Frédéric Laloux (2015) cites and analyzes the example of the Favi and Buurtzort companies, which show the importance of “empowerment” of the team which becomes responsible for its business objectives. Laloux (2015) constantly underlines the importance of continuous improvement with the influence of lean management in the sense of the Toyota Way. As part of the same movement of managerial innovation, Kazuo Inamori (2012) has developed for his group a method called “Amoeba Management”, which consists of dividing the organization into small operational units each under the authority of a leader. They are called “amoebas”. The leader is in charge of creating the goals and action plans for the amoeba with their team. The amoebas function as teams in collaborative mode. “Amoeba Management” is used by approximately 600 companies. A movement called “adaptive enterprises” or Responsive Organizations has also been created in the United States, which brings together all the features found in holacracy and liberated companies. This movement values collective intelligence. An adaptive organization is “learning”. Galindo (2017) presents the dimensions of the ideal type of human resources management in start-ups through the French acronym C.I.D. (Knowledge (Connaissances), Challenges, Conviviality / Informal, Involvement, Initiatives / Delegation, Right to be wrong (Droit à l’erreur), Distribution of incentives). Human resources are judged by their updated knowledge. They are often challenged. Thus, to avoid the excesses of individualism, maintaining conviviality is a priority. The company favors informality at the level of exchanges and monitors the degree of involvement. The spirit of initiative is encouraged.

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Employees are encouraged to become personally involved in resolving collective problems and to self-manage due to delegation of responsibilities. The right to be wrong is part of the firm’s culture. Contributions are recognized via rewards. Some observers reject these horizontal or cellular models as a fashionable phenomenon1. On our part, the authors believe it is part of a real revolution. According to Salim Ismail et al. (2014), Amazon, Netflix, Uber, Airbnb, Google and Instagram are exponential organizations (ExO), as they have been able to convert available information into competitive advantage by exploiting the network effect and the acceleration associated with this effect to create a “disruptive” model. This analytical matrix is based on the opposition between linear and exponential structures. While the world of information develops exponentially, our organizational structures are still linear. They are therefore inadequate. These exponential organizations rest on the six Ds defined by Peter Diamandis and Steve Kotler (2012) (Digitalized/Deceptive/Disruptive/Dematerialized/Demonetized/Democratiz ed). Digitalization allows rapid spread. Afterwards, there is deception because growth is virtually invisible. Then, disruption creates a new market and thus overturns what already exists. Demonetization tends to remove money from services and products, and dematerialization tends to remove the services and products themselves. Video camera, video game, dictaphone, calculator, clock… all these applications have been dematerialized and become free of charge when they once had a significant cost. Even if the applications mentioned above have become free of charge, it is necessary to pay the price of the smartphones in which they have been integrated. Democratization takes place when prices become low enough that they become accessible and affordable to the greatest number. These exponential organizations are also sometimes called “unicorns”, a term created by Aileen Lee in 2013 to insist on the link to dreams, magic, sympathy and power. The author has re-used the term “unicorn” to describe these new technological firms which have reached values of at least a billion dollars. This very small circle included, at the end of 2016, 179 companies in total worldwide. This exponential vision was theorized by 1 Collectif des MECREANTS. (2015). Entreprise libérée – La fin de l’illusion.

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Ray Kurzweil (2005), chief engineer of Google, based on Moore’s law stated in 1965, according to which the power of processors doubles every 18 months. According to Kurzweil (2005), many people think about the future linearly. They think that they are going to continue to deal with problems by using the tools and progress of today and do not take into account the exponential growth of technologies. Evolutionary processes such as technology accelerate. They function through interaction and create a capacity, then they use this capacity to pass on to the next stage. In other words, the results of faster computers are used to build even faster computers. Some traditional firms such as Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola are moving towards this type of exponential organization. For Salim Ismail et al. (2014), this evolution is based on a transformation of leadership and the progressive integration of principles. In fact, to transform organizations, it is first necessary to transform employees and in particular, managers. Leadership must thus change paradigm. Faced with the crisis of traditional models of leadership, the approach of the positive leader seems to constitute an interesting alternative. A positive leader fits into a different paradigm, that of transformation, starting from the inversion of the pyramid. It involves serving the area of value creation. In fact, the positive leader aims to transform themselves in order to better transform their organization (Frimousse et al. 2017). Following this, they should struggle at the same time against the forces of resistance while modifying the firm’s culture in a significant way. Human transformation is the indispensable complement to the digitalization of the company. In reality, the best-performing organizations apply the ambidextrous management developed by Tushma and O’Reilly (2016). They do not counterpose directive management to team autonomy. They implement both at the same time. The best-functioning organizations are total democracies led by attentive directors. The GAFA companies are known to have at their heads directive and authoritative leaders, but the high level of transparency limits the levels of vertical interaction and allows a very strong delegation of power to teams.

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1.2. New and fundamental insights All these approaches involve power-sharing, accountability, continuous improvement, decision-making autonomy, personal and collective recognition, agility, innovative behaviors, the right to make errors and the quality of interpersonal relationships. But, do they actually entail new managerial realities? In fact, these concepts are inspired by and draw from different theoretical and philosophical undercurrents, as well as the contributions of certain management gurus. First of all, let us cite the human relations schools, in particular Mc Gregor (1971) and Theory X. Here, collaborators prefer to be directed so as to avoid responsibilities. In this case, the solution is the hierarchical organizational model. In “Theory Y”, human beings aspire to satisfy their universal needs for self-realization and self-direction. An organization must therefore meet these needs in a manner appropriate to their cultural and human context, by offering an appropriate mode of organization. This involves co-construction with employees of a unique mode of organization. Next, as to the critique of Taylorist organization, let us cite Hannah Arendt (1958), Georges Friedmann (1956) and Hyacinthe Dubreuil (1929), who was the first theoretician of autonomous work teams. More recently, the sociologist François Dupuy (2013, 2016) studied the failures of Taylorist management applied to 21st-Century organizations. At the level of managerial theories, we find the systemic principles that Peter Senge (1991) has put forward under the name of The Fifth Discipline. The same goes for Deci and Ryan’s (1985) theory of self-determination. Tom Burns and G.M. Stalker (1996) and their distinctions between mechanistic and organic organizations are also a source for these new concepts. Mechanistic firms are made up of rules, procedures, operating modes, organizational charts and job descriptions. Here, organization is understood as a mechanical machine built from assembled gears. In contrast, organic organizations are understood as a living organism comprised of organs and of molecules in perpetual motion, producing what Jean-Daniel Reynaud (1989) calls autonomous regulation, referring to the rules that the members of a group spontaneously give themselves. The mechanistic logic’s control regulation designates rules defined by a third party, in particular by leaderships and managers, to prescribe behaviors.

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Let us also emphasize the contributions of such great management gurus and practitioners as Tom Peters (1992) with his book Liberation Management, or Edward Deming (1982) with quality circles. Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber (2014) – the inventors of the agile method – have shown that developers who no longer work in the framework of tasks but in that of goals perform better. General Stanley McChrystal (2015) describes how it became necessary for him to profoundly modify the chain of command when, operating in Iraq in the years 2002–2008, he realized that his army was no longer waging a conventional war against a traditional army, but that its opponent was a guerrilla movement structured into several militias. He describes his new approach as a network of teams, with a high degree of autonomy and a high level of communication. At the philosophical level, Mounier’s (1936) personalism is also a source for the principles that are being mobilized. With regard to intellectuals, the reflections of Georges Archier and Hervé Sérieyx in the book The Type 3 Company (1994), the “intelligent firm” described by Hubert Landier (1991), and Edgar Morin (1990) on complex thought should also be cited as references. We thus understand that the renewal of organizational models is an old question and that many theoreticians, thinkers and practitioners have made concrete proposals in this regard. Are current attempts at modelization therefore nothing but old recommendations repackaged for today’s tastes through clever marketing work? Actually, no. What is really convergent and innovative is the fact that these modelizations fit into a new context corresponding to the convergence of managerial ideas, anthropological evolution and a technological earthquake named digitalization, which marks a real rupture. Why did Google succeed in escaping from the design process much more quickly than the average company? Why does Airbnb have more offers per employee than its competitors? In fact, the growth of these companies does not stem from technology in itself, but from the way in which they are organized. Technology is, at the same time, a point of support and a lever of action. All of the firms mentioned have shown their capacity to take advantage of the dramatic acceleration of technology, which promotes, at the organizational level, moving from the pyramid model to the platform model, particularly with the principles of the blockchain. These models provide fundamental

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insights into aspects of the revolution in the environment of today’s firms and certainly those of tomorrow. 1.3. From pyramid to platform The exponential rhythms of the development of technologies and changes in the environment lead to the appearance of an organization structured as a network of teams and, by means of an open and collaborative platform, allowing the exchange of data between different stakeholders. At Facebook, employees all work together in an immense open space. Mark Zuckerberg himself does not have his own office, moving from station to station depending on which project he is working on. Young technological enterprises often feature an internal culture which promotes experimentation and risk-taking, and does not penalize failure. All this comes with a great deal of autonomy and little hierarchy. Exponential firms are platforms, that is, interactions with stakeholders allow them to fulfill their missions. Jean Louis Beffa speaks of platformization and of the capacity to pivot (2017). The platform is orientated, in turn, towards clients, suppliers, partners and employees. It involves allying with the multitude, with billions of educated, equipped and connected individuals, and inviting them into the company’s value chain (Colin and Verdier 2015). The Internet of Things multiplies points of contact with individuals and intensifies the collection of their personal data, allowing the firm to anticipate their needs. The platform gives information and advice. It sells the firm’s goods and/or services, while ensuring their quality. It is concerned with attracting talent and developing the employer’s brand. The platform especially allows a hyper-customized offer of service for the largest number within and outside of the firm. It is a powerful digital instrument panel. Teams can access real-time data on the use of the products and services offered (Simon 2011). HR departments may, in particular, measure the impact of a new training module on employee performance. The data collected allow them to obtain all the segmentations and information necessary for a product launch. Data which were exploited little in traditional pyramidal organizations will thus be better used to create new forms of intelligence. Digital technology changes and breaks traditional hierarchical systems. Take the example of blockchain technology, the users of which say that it increases meritocracy

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within organizations. In fact, the Backfeed startup was inspired by Bitcoin’s blockchain, except here, it involves tasks carried out by a network of contributors who collaborate on a given project. The principle of validation of transactions of Bitcoin’s blockchain becomes evaluation of contributions with Backfeed. This is “Proof-of-Value”. The latter is a mechanism allowing a whole network of contributors to evaluate the value of a collaborator’s work. Thus, the importance of an individual within a group does not correlate to a status, but to their actions. Blockchain technology allows everyone to consult the whole set of exchanges, present and past. The role of an individual thus depends on what they produce. With such a system of collaboration, individuals gain in reputation and are rewarded depending on the value that they produce. Work does not only relate to a contract, but to value. Blockchain allows a collaborative and self-managed work organization; but can we manage human relations like financial transactions? Debate is ongoing. In any case, what is certain is that work in project mode within “co-working” spaces and direct relationships between employees are favored more and more. The success of applications such as Slack or Evernote and design-thinking approaches bear witness to real expectations in this area. Design thinking is an iterative methodology based on the empathy of the creative team in collaborating with users affected by the project. These approaches are based on the free flow of information. In this configuration, the manager no longer seeks to convince, but rather to bring together a community of actors. He or she does not supervise his or her employees. He or she orchestrates and dynamizes teams. Granting responsibility to employees and having a flatter hierarchical structure promote collective intelligence, which allows firms to be more reactive and performing. We have presented these organizations while insisting on their contributions at the structural level; but how do we describe their living ecosystem composed of human beings? 1.4. Motivation by profit and especially by purpose Hamel and Prahalad (1996) argue that there are two strategies to improve a firm’s performance: the “butcher strategy”, which consists of cutting costs

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and retrenching the workforce, and the “baker strategy”, which strives to increase added value based on the mobilization of the individual and the collective intelligences of employees. Here, competitiveness depends first of all on the quality of the company’s internal and external relations, which the classical firm does not promote because it imposes a dehumanized Taylorist functioning on staff. However, employees demand a nurturing organizational environment. Remember that Deci and Ryan (2000) suggest the existence of three basic psychological needs in human beings: the need for autonomy, the need for personal development and the need for social affiliation. Exponential models and other alternative forms seem to respond to the universal needs of human beings. First of all, satisfying the need for equality and translating this into the world of work with respect, consideration and trust imply that the manager treats their collaborators as human beings endowed with intelligence and who are capable of completing a certain number of tasks by themselves. The need for personal development is translated into a desire to learn and to progress. In exponential organizations, this need is satisfied by setting up proactive activities in the field of training and symbols of recognition. Finally, the last need related to autonomy and self-affirmation requires trust and the right to make mistakes instead of punitive controls. Iteration and experimentation promote the expression of this last need. A nurturing environment is thus the first explanatory dimension of success in managing people within these firms, which offer organization, working conditions and above all, content. In this regard, they innovate more than their competitors while having the same access to the same talents, the same agencies, the same consultants, the same media and so on. In fact, these organizations answer the central question, the famous “why?” of Simon Sinek (2015), by which people do not buy what you produce, but they buy a shared conviction. These organizations know why they do what they are doing. And this “why” does not just mean making a profit. That is a consequence. This “why” is a question of purposes, causes and beliefs. These aspirations are at once a guide and a catalyst for the community of employees.

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Meaning reflects the extent to which the pursued goal is important for the individual and coherent with their values. The “why” refers to the fundamental importance of the firm’s aims as its foundation. Salim Ismail et al. (2014) speak of massive transformative purpose, that is, the objective which defines the firm’s mission, in the form of a “massive” challenge to transform society by targeting the customer. Only a disruptive objective puts the firm in a position to exploit the exponential progress of technology. These organizations are thus simultaneously profit maximizers and goal maximizers. If we observe the characteristics of the digital revolution and its consequences on organizational structures and cultures, it is easy to understand why the era of Africa has probably come: an increasingly young population increasingly urbanized in larger and larger cities with more and more urgent demands in terms of work, health, education and so on. Africa will have to invent in order to insert itself into a world order which is itself in total upheaval. Environmental constraints now require us to integrate the principles of exponential organizations, while contextualizing them through frugal approaches and dynamic rooting. The emergence of a middle class, the arrival of investors, the development of the Internet and the explosion of the mobile phone are all opportunities that certain firms have been able to seize by deploying horizontal management, organized into small groups with strong autonomy. In these organizations, agility and frugal innovation are commonplace. Thus, dozens of innovations coming from Africa are beginning to find the path towards export blazed by the four Ms (MPesa, Mkopa, MPedigre and JuMia.

2 The African Continent: Laboratory of Tomorrow’s World

Africa is the continent of the left-behinds, of misery, hunger and humanitarian aid, of poverty, terrorism and lack of access to safe drinking water and electricity, and of exotic creatures such as lions and elephants. It is the continent of desperate young people fleeing en masse in fear for their lives. This Africa exists. However, it masks another Africa, larger and more powerful. An Africa which is building the future and is already a reality for hundreds of millions of people, and an Africa which attracts many firms (Chironga et al. 2011). The economic growth of the African continent has been, on average, 5% per year for more than a decade, just behind Asia and far ahead of Europe. The Human Development Index has improved. More than 80% of the population is connected to a mobile telephone network. The population of Africa will double by 2050 to reach almost 2 billion individuals, which will make it one of the largest markets in the world. We will thus evoke this Africa of possibilities in the next section, as we are very attentive to the growth of the continent and its transformations, and we think that the African continent may be the laboratory of tomorrow’s world. At the organizational level, actors develop in a context marked by the dynamics of interweaving formal and informal dimensions (Hyden 2006; Bruton et al. 2015), as well as modern and traditional elements (North 1990; Collier 2007). These are organizations that interact across territories, which are “enchanted” in Weber’s (1964) sense; spheres of values and beliefs are juxtaposed with and mingle with the economic and managerial spheres,

Innovation and Agility in the Digital Age: Africa, the World’s Laboratories of Tomorrow, First Edition. Soufyane Frimousse. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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which are in the process of secularization (Michalopoulos and Papaioannou 2015; Frimousse and Sahraoui 2016). Gilles Babinet (2016) explains that the African countries that have experienced the most growth in recent years are those that do not sell raw materials. Excluding these, the rest of the continent has seen a major impoverishment of 37%. The reason for this is the absence of telecommunication. This constitutes a challenge for investors and entrepreneurs. By 2025, GDP per capita in Africa should follow the growth of the market for smartphones. The development of digital technology in Africa poses strong challenges because it leads us to rethink the entrepreneurial dynamic and its managerial model. Many start-ups propelled by the advent of digital technology are developing across the four corners of the continent. The Africa of innovation appears to be resolutely marching on. 2.1. The frog’s leap, the leopard’s run and agility Some African firms offer something that is not simply a copy, but a real innovation, adapted to Africa and competitive on a global scale. These are “success stories made in Africa”, whose spearheads are M-Kopa, M-Pesa, M-Pedigree and Jumia (the 4Ms). Let us turn our gaze to Kenya, and more precisely to M-Kopa Solar, a start-up with the goal of providing domestic solar installations to populations not served by national electricity networks. It is estimated that between 18% and 30% of the African continent has access to electricity today, and the cost of energy is among the highest in the world, up to $0.50 per kilowatt in some countries. To circumvent this problem, M-Kopa deploys solar kits allowing the provision of electricity bought in daily quantities by means of SMS. The operation is simple and inexpensive. The firm boasts more than 450,000 clients and receives one SMS per second. The firm has set a target of one million homes equipped by 2018. Every M-Kopa kit thus allows customer households to light three bulbs for the equivalent of about €0.43 per day. M-Kopa is a symbol of “off-grid” electricity. It democratizes access to energy. It is a frugal, decarbonized and decentralized model. M-Kopa allows the poorest people to access light without using the dangerous and polluting oil lamps, which are still present in millions of

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households across Africa. According to the African Development Bank, 600,000 Africans living “off-grid” die every year of poisoning from domestic heating oil. M-Kopa allows the generation of economic activity and social inclusion. It supplies cybercafés, cold storage and so on. Let us not forget that regular power cuts reduce the competitiveness of firms. In the agro-food sector, the absence of electricity prevents the creation of a cold chain and spoils about a third of African production. Off-grid electricity may lift 75 million people out of energy poverty in Africa. They will thus move to off-grid electricity without going through the traditional electrical network. The development of solar energy is supported by a “pay as you go” model. This is appropriate to the requirements of the most modest households and the middle classes. An M-Kopa customer makes a payment, from a mobile phone, to their telecom operator, who notifies M-Kopa. M-Kopa then sends a code by SMS, which is used to activate the solar kit. Kenya is a region conducive to development. The “Silicon Savannah” is a nickname frequently given to Kenya, in large part due to its information and communications technology sector. In many areas of innovation, Kenyans design products by viewing things first from the mobile point of view. Let us not forget that 99% of Internet users in the country use a mobile device. The success of these areas of innovation has not escaped the multinationals. Two technology giants have set up innovation laboratories in Kenya: the Nokia Research Center and IBM Research – Africa. Kenyans use M-Pesa, from the telecom operator Safaricom, to manage their bills. “Pesa” means money in Swahili. M-Pesa is an intelligent and practical system for payment via mobile phone and is the result of behavioral analysis. Safaricom discovered that in small villages, phone credit could be used to repay debts or to barter for seeds. Some farmers even use it to pay workers in the fields. The Kenyan population had begun to “hack” traditional banking with a simple telephone. Safaricom was inspired by this resulting in the creation of M-Pesa, an innovation that marvelously embodies the concept of “leapfrogging”. This system is now more effective than conventional banking because people have confidence in it. M-Pesa compensates for the absence of banks in remote areas. Ten years after its launch, the popularity of M-Pesa, a pioneer of mobile payment in Africa, cannot be denied. In just few months,

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M-Pesa boasted a million users. Today, the application claims 30 million regular users in the world, including 18 million in Kenya (70% of the country’s adult population). In 10 years, M-Pesa has transformed the Kenyan economy with fast, more secure and, above all, traceable transactions. A study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimates that 2% of Kenya has come out of poverty thanks to microcredit supported by mobile phones. According to Safaricom, the platform has allowed the generation of about 860,000 jobs and approximately $1 billion of economic activity. The director of the company claims to have contributed to a rise of 6.5% in Kenya’s GDP. M-Pesa used the problem to invent the solution. In 2016, 88% of the population owned a mobile phone (38 million users out of a total population of 43 million inhabitants)1. In comparison, in France, only 8% of smartphone users made m-payments in 20152. The Kenyan phone operator Safaricom made a simple observation: the difficulty faced by city-based populations when sending money to their families who remained in the countryside, in a country where less than 10% of the population has a bank account. The operator then put in place a system allowing its subscribers to send money to each other, both easily and quickly. After 10 years, transactions by mobile represent almost half of Kenyan GDP, and more than 90% of the population have an account on the M-Pesa mobile payment platform. The latter has also been exported to about 50 countries around the world. M-Pesa has crashed through the glass ceiling imposed by banks. By taking advantage of M-Pesa, millions of Kenyans have access to a digital bank while bypassing traditional banking institutions. Their telephone number becomes their bank account access, and their mobile phone becomes a virtual safe (Abdelkrim 2017). Every day, M-Pesa executes more microtransactions than the global money-transfer giant Western Union, although the latter employs more than half a million agents all over the world. M-Pesa has also moved into other 1 Kenyan Wall Street (2016). Kenya’s mobile penetration hits 88% to 38 million users. Available at: http://kenyanwallstreet.com/kenyas-mobile-penetration-hits-88-to-38-millionusers. 2 Deloitte (2015). Usage mobiles 2015. A game of phones. Available at:http://www2.deloitte.com/fr/fr/pages/technology-media-and-telecommunications/articles/ usages-mobiles-2015.html.

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territories, including Tanzania, Rwanda, the Republic of the Congo, India, Afghanistan, Romania, etc. It reminds us that problems are also opportunities to create value. It is demand on the ground that creates the market, and not the reverse. As well as banking, mobile technology has transformed insurance and the agricultural world. The Tanzanian start-up Jamii has developed a system of health microinsurance aimed at those living in poverty, which allows the user to pay only for what they use, and thus avoid often prohibitive costs. M-Farm, an application launched in Kenya, provides farmers real-time access to details of retail prices for their products, thus becoming better informed during negotiations with potential buyers. The African continent is particularly plagued by the scourge of counterfeiting. The World Health Organization estimates that in some countries on the continent, more than 30% of medications sold are affected and a figure of 100,000 deaths per year has been suggested. Created in 2007, the Ghanaian company M-Pedigree gives its consumers the ability to check the authenticity of a medication. Operating in five countries in English-speaking Africa, this method consists of the consumer sending an SMS to M-Pedigree containing the code featured on the label of the box of medication that they wish to buy. The company performs a verification and returns a message to the consumer to let them know the medication’s authenticity, or otherwise. This system of verification is free of charge and now accessible to more than 205 million people on the continent. Every month, more than a million requests are sent to the M-Pedigree platform. It has already authenticated more than 500 million boxes of medication. This service is truly innovative because it sets quality criteria for the entire logistic chain. At the same time, M-Pedigree helps the owners of trademarks, consumers and governments. It also provides security for spare parts for automobiles as well as agro-food products. M-Kopa, M-Pesa and M-Pedigree are models for African entrepreneurs who recognize the possibility of building world-class firms, unicorns, in Africa, with Africans. Jumia may be interesting, in this regard, as it is sometimes called the “first African unicorn”. Jumia specializes in services and online sales. It

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combines services, applications, an e-commerce site, a marketplace, a hotel reservation site, a site for small ads and food delivery. Jumia is the fourth most visited website behind Facebook, Google and YouTube. Jumia responds to Africans’ needs via the Internet. It mainly targets the middle class, which is experiencing a considerable boom: currently comprising 375 million people, it should grow to 1.5 billion by 2030. E-commerce in Africa may experience a surge to $50 billion by 2018, according to forecasts from Deloitte3. These firms are something other than a kind of American or European clone. They do not follow the mapped-out trails, but walk nimbly on the paths they have chosen themselves. They show that Africa can have the right to development without first passing through a phase of heavy industrialization. They demonstrate that Africans are capable of being agile in responding to the challenges imposed upon them (Dia 1996; Rivera-Santos et al. 2015). What is considered a given in Europe or the United States does not exist for Africa, or only in a very problematic way: electricity, transport, education, health, security and so on. They indicate that good practices and other models of management also come from the South, and not exclusively from the east coast of the United States. Certainly, these exponential organizations have many similarities with their international counterparts, but they have some characteristics that are more linked to the contexts in which they evolve: frugal innovation, leapfrogging, effectuation and anti-fragility, and the dynamic rootedness of youth in territories, which are still enchanted. African exponential organizations promote the emergence of products and services “made & designed in Africa”. By accessing 4G networks and digital services, the 4Ms show that they are “leapfrogging”, jumping over 60 years of telecommunications technology based on copper wire. In fact, they directly access the latest technologies without having to pass through intermediate stages, jumping over multiple levels of development at once. The example of M-Pesa is staggering. No bank in the world has ever succeeded in giving bank access to 22 million individuals, or 50% of Kenya, in less than 8 years. How many banking agencies would need to be set up to achieve this goal?

3 Deloitte. (2015). Africa: A 21st Century View.

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These disruptive innovations provoke new habits of consumption and use, leading to the creation of a new, radically different market. They are based on ecosystem intelligence. According to Ron Adner (2006), this is involved in the reduction of risks by means of identifying opportunities and partners. Products and services are designed according to the specific needs of populations. Ecosystem intelligence refers to this capacity to grasp the unique economic, social and technological context of African markets. This is a visceral understanding of consumers, whose habits, relationship to technology and perceptions of social status are specific. Ecosystem intelligence is supplemented by a form of “smart power”, which refers to an ingenious and astute intelligence (Clerc 2014). We must associate the frog’s leap with another image; the run of the leopard, an opportunistic hunter who knows how to crystallize its energy and mobilize its efforts with minimum waste. Here, the notions of frugality and agility are essential. The theoreticians of the “frugal” economy, Navi Radjou and Jaideep Prabhu (2015), promote a new approach to innovation consisting of doing more, or better, with less means and at lower costs, aiming at accessibility for the greatest number of people. Frugal innovation has the corollary of ingenuity. Frugal innovation allows us to economize on means and develop global solutions. This notion of frugality is central for African organizations. However, it is not natural for Northern firms that are used to designing with sizeable financial and technological means. Frugal innovation promotes inverted innovation, which consists of designing products and services in and for emerging countries, and then selling them in developed countries (Govindarajan and Ravi 2011). Stimulated by innovation, Africa is experiencing a decisive transformation. By promoting access to ideas, knowledge and technologies, the digital revolution has served as a catalyst for innovation in Africa. This movement goes beyond technological leapfrogging. Africa is not a continent seeking to “catch up” via innovation. It invents its own model, finding pragmatic and innovative solutions to its own challenges of development and growth, by using different levers including agility in particular. African firms, or firms established in Africa, must be agile because it is a question of urgency and survival. In a field that is simultaneously complex and experimental, knowing how to pivot, adapt and become adopted is an

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extremely vital approach. Winston Churchill said: “We must take change by the hand or rest assuredly, change will take us by the throat”. In Africa, users repurpose the things they are offered, redefine them and consume them in their own way. Adapting, reformulating, refreshing, listening to needs, learning about consumption, understanding habits and defining unsuspected desires are the principles for living and existing in Africa. It is very difficult to plan and predict in Africa. Most offices for research and advice on planning and perspectives produce studies on Africa, however, the day before the publication of their studies and inquiries, the needs of Africans have changed in the meantime! This tunneling effect has a cost. Hence the interest in experimentation with frugal approaches and initiatives. In Africa, people live by the rhythm of uncertainty and instability. Promoting the agile approach means reconciling Africa, the customer and the firm with productivity in the broad sense. Knowing how to adapt to the African market is a means to facilitate social change. Agility is at the heart of the chain of Africa’s innovation program (Youzan 2016). Nearly 70% of employees in Africa are ready to leave their firm if it is not favorable to innovation and “intrapreneurship”. Innovation is a strategic priority for a growing number of firms established in Africa, who rarely have the necessary internal resources and agility to transform themselves. Inspired by outside successes without seeking to copy them, and adapting to local realities to generate new projects, innovative African entrepreneurs contribute to the invention of new models. Some companies rely on the innovation potential of their employees. It is now up to firms to get involved in this kind of approach, so as to respond to the local needs of the market and to create an agile culture, which will help them to reinvent their business model. Agility fits into the logics of learning (Ingvaldsen 2015; Kayes 2015) and of change readiness (Holt and Vardaman 2013), not only at the individual level but also at the organizational level (Rafferty et al. 2013). In fact, change readiness plays all the more central a role in the success of change (Kotter and Schlesinger 2008) in ensuring that the change does not always result in a rupture. In that case, it involves learning permanent change.

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In fact, Caldwell (2013) emphasizes that “what is striking for employees is not an organizational change but rather a changing organization”. In this context, Autissier et al. (2010) offer a means to measure firms’ capacity for change. They distinguish four poles: methods and resources, practices, obtaining results and actors. In the context of our research, we propose studying more specifically the behavior of actors. In fact, the success of change largely depends on the goodwill of employees. Research on organizational agility and agile management has been carried out by several researchers. However, few of these works mention agile behaviors in a hypermodern context marked by many changes. Agility concerns strategic populations like promising young graduates, established managers, specialist workers or executive directors. It is essential to the performance of firms. Firms expect from their talents a heightened capacity for decision-making and action in new and urgent situations. This means agility in the face of exogenous events. The behaviors valued by the organization in a dynamic context are the development of new skills, creativity, knowing how to interact with others and adaptation to new contexts. These agile behaviors are considered crucial in reaching the organization’s goals. In the managerial literature, these behaviors are grouped under the name of adaptive and contextual performance (Charbonnier-Voirin 2013). Adaptive performance corresponds to the aptitude of a person to modify their behaviors to adapt to a given environment. Contextual performance refers to behaviors that contribute to organizational effectiveness by their effects on the psychological, social and organizational context of work. These performances therefore refer to behaviors valued and expected by the company. Developing agile behaviors thus conditions the competitiveness of enterprises. It thus seems essential to know their determinants. The study of organizational change has progressively developed in the form of five successive paradigms (Autissier et al. 2015). Armenakis and Bedeian (1999) highlighted the emergence of a new paradigm in which change is based on developing the change-readiness of actors through experiential processes. Rogers (1969) speaks of experiential learning, which corresponds to learning by practice.

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Experiential processes may allow us to understand and respond to the concerns of employees faced with changes. Permanent change induces a certain agility among employees. Faced with organizational change, the employees must face new challenges and develop their capacities for learning and adaptation to sophisticated technologies, for example. We believe that agile behaviors involve: a capacity to easily and quickly adjust to new events and to make decisions despite the uncertainty and ambiguity inherent in these situations; a capacity to react to avoid a danger, a crisis situation, or to deal with urgencies in an appropriate manner; a capacity to find solutions and to develop creative approaches when faced with atypical or complex situations; a proactive capacity with regard to personal development; a capacity to adjust interpersonal and intercultural behaviors; a capacity to work in difficult environments and a capacity to have extra-role behaviors. Our conception of agile behavior is a construct that includes adaptive performance and contextual performance. Studies of adaptive performance also represent significant advances in the field of work performance. Hesketh and Neal (1999) are the first to refer to adaptive performance, which they define as the capacity of individuals to adapt to dynamic work situations. A person develops their adaptive performance by adjusting their behaviors to the demands of work situations and new events (Pulakos et al. 2000). Johnson (2001) defines adaptive performance as the ability of a person to modify their behavior so as to adapt to a new environment or to a given situation. This involves the capacity of employees to show creativity, continuous learning and management of unforeseen or urgent situations, while also showing interpersonal adaptability (Charbonnier-Voirin 2013). Contextual performance allows us to expand the assessment of agility beyond the adaptation and reactivity of employees. Contextual performance involves promoting individual behaviors, which contribute to organizational effectiveness by their effects on the psychological, social and organizational context of work. Being agile thus also means improving the social and organizational context of work. Borman and Motowidlo (1997) suggested the first conceptualization of contextual performance. They distinguished five dimensions: (1) persisting with enthusiasm and deploying efforts to complete one’s tasks with success; (2) voluntarily engaging with tasks and activities that are not formally part of one’s work; (3) helping and cooperating with others; (4) following organizational rules and procedures

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and (5) sincerely approving, defending and supporting organizational objectives. Contextual performance thus corresponds to off-role behaviors – behaviours which are not listed in the job description. Thus, agile behaviors imply an interest in learning, accomplishment, development and social affiliation. Agile behaviors and allowing flexibility to actors so they may adapt to changes are part of these neglected dimensions. Actors in development will, at the same time, have to use ever-increasing masses of data to compare them with each other and to draw adequate lessons from them. In this context, Abdelmalek Alaoui (2015)4 proposes an analytical grid in the form of an “economic and political transformation matrix”, crossing the axis of strategic agility, taking into account governance and the ability to lead change, with a “strengths and weaknesses” axis that measures the level of development reached by different African countries on the basis of an aggregation of subindices (demography and urbanization, energy and infrastructure, human capital and innovation, financing growth and economic integration). By combining these dimensions, and by putting them into perspective, we can identify four groups of countries that have different issues: – African achievers, who are in the higher quadrant of the matrix, with both an (already) high level of development and significant strategic agility; – future gems, who are still at the bottom of the development scale, but who have remarkable strategic agility, generally associated with enlightened political leadership. These countries may serve as examples for the following two groups; – sleeping beauties, who have relatively good development indicators, but who are lagging behind in the field of strategic agility due to institutions that do not promote economic and political inclusivity. These countries exploit their natural resources and do not sufficiently exploit their potential; – African laggards, who suffer from many problems including both serious governance problems and chronic political conflicts resulting in 4 Alaoui, A. (2015). L’Afrique en quête d’agilité stratégique: état des lieux et scénarios. Mazars.

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low-level of strategic agility, and a lag in terms of socio-economic development. Frugality and agility mean giving power back to creativity by breaking free from cumbersome structures. This is encouraged by the digital revolution, which has democratized access to knowledge and shifted the power of innovation away from professionals towards the masses. The Millennials have understood this. Their motto could be: “I create, therefore I am.” Frugal innovation is first of all a matter of people: human ingenuity and audacity are its engine, not computer code or robots. 2.2. Rebel talents and serial learners in dynamic rootedness The African unicorns have been able to develop their capacities to learn and deeply change their model of learning. This involves a transformation of employees in their day-to-day relationship with their professional activity, with knowledge and with continuous adjustment of their skills to contexts. The success of this development is strictly linked to collective intelligence and the agility of the whole organization. This new kind of talent has a name: the serial learner. Such a person possesses the capacity to train themselves and to learn, breaking out of the marked-out project areas set up by the company. The serial learner is active in the development of their employability. They are attentive to developments affecting their career and anticipate new skills to develop. The learner is active and does not undergo training. To be a good serial learner, one must develop five qualities: proactivity, sociability, the capacity to learn, a sense of sharing and pragmatism. In the digitalized economy, it is essential to create the conditions for everyone to learn faster than their competitor. The question is no longer know “what I must learn”, but “how I can put myself into a dynamic of permanent learning”? And one of the most promising paths seems to be training on a daily basis. To make one’s employees serial learners is to help them to develop their skills and thus to ensure sustainable employability. Learning becomes continuous, collaborative and informal. Serial learning affects the three forms of learning: learning by experience, by collaborative work and finally through formal training. It allows organizations to respond in a much more efficient way to the challenges of their environment and their markets.

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Serial learning contributes to strengthening flexibility, adaptive capacity and innovative capacity through its impact on the whole value chain of training (identification of a need, creation of a means to improve skills, implementation and finally evaluation of skills acquired, etc.) Serial learning leads to acting upon temporal levers and financial levers. Learning to learn is thus the serial learner’s key competence. The “new” manager in this philosophy is responsible for organizing the flow of knowledge, not just information, skills, talents and energies. Serial learning involves the desire to learn on a daily basis. It is only when everyone learns that the firm can become a learner. It is a question of employee development through continuous learning approaches. Learning is also thinking about the system in order to better understand the interactions that comprise it. It is no longer a question of finding the means to bring knowledge to actors, but to give subjects the means to go out and find knowledge. Today, we must think in reverse and move from cyclical training to permanent learning. This practice allows, through the stimulation of exchanges and interactions, the transformation of a group composed of a number of individuals with individual talents into a team willing to learn together, to learn from each other and to learn from every employee involved in the team. Serial learning is linked to the science of questioning, as opposed to Taylorist organization, centered around the execution of solutions delivered by specialists. It involves moving out of predefined frames, interrogating its paradigms, its precepts and its typical organizational and managerial models. In this context, it must show openness of mind, willingness to listen and readiness to move towards others and their ideas. Serial learning is thus tightly linked to audacity. Within the organization, it is necessary to accept its ideas, surmount difficulties, generate cohesion and ceaselessly explore new paths in a framework with norms and rules. Faced with these challenges and the many paradoxes they generate, employees, in some cases, decide to circumvent the collective rules and norms – to transgress and therefore prove audacity. By its very nature, audacity disturbs order, which consists of a set of prescriptions that dictate a place for everything. However, audacity is the source of innovation that provokes disorder, or even rupture, within the

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organization structured by a normative scheme. This transgression is the vector of movement in organizations. Two dimensions confront each other: organization and rules/innovation, audacity and transgression. The challenge for all firms consists of mobilizing collective intelligence and stimulating creativity, while accepting audacity and positive deviance. Too much formalization caused by too many rules and procedures may be the source of blockages and stagnation. Crozier (1971) complained about these excesses in his work Le phénomène bureaucratique (The Bureaucratic Phenomenon) and agitated for creativity and non-conformism in struggling against a blocked society. Gino (2018) stresses that our organizations always prefer conformity at work. However, conformity to norms may prove to be counterproductive both for the organization and for people. Submitting to a norm may lead to a feeling of lack of authenticity, and block creativity. Organizations must encourage audacity, as it is potentially a source of innovation. This positive deviance, or rebel talent, may be a managerial action or even a value to envisage, which declares the right to error within organizations. The greatest individuals are those who fail most often, because they try and therefore learn the most. We need many bad ideas to have a few good ones (Grant 2016). Going against the current builds confidence, the feeling of authenticity and the level of engagement, and all of this translates into better performances and creativity (Gino 2018). However, departure from the norm must remain within the values and strategies of the organizations. Non-conformism at work must be constructive. The African unicorns are the fruits of these deviations and are the very example of anti-fragile structures. This neologism invented by Nassim Nicholas Taleb refers to a system that becomes stronger and develops positively in response to problems and random environments. Taleb distinguishes structures that are fragile (a shock causes a breakdown), robust (a shock causes no change), resilient (a shock is absorbed without effect on the structure) and anti-fragile (a shock strengthens the structure). According to Taleb, economic and management models are based on a predictive strategy that makes them fragile, because in the case of non-realization, the costs may be significant. However, human beings are very bad at prediction. Taleb advocates trial and error, iterations which allow the organization to improve itself to the extent that it experiences random events.

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These pragmatic approaches resemble that of Eric Ries (2011), with his “Lean Startup”, and that of Saras Sarasvathy (2009), with “Effectuation”. A Lean Startup is capable of constantly adapting its offer as well as the firm itself to market developments, following the principle of continuous innovation. This method consists of encouraging creativity and an invitation to leave the beaten track by adapting to the needs of customers, to thus change the original business model. A Lean Startup approach comprises three stages: building, measuring and learning. Building begins with developing a minimum viable product (MVP), the goal of which is to rapidly develop a first version of the product or service, responding to the basic hypothesis of the customer need that one wishes to fulfill. Measurement consists of gathering as much information as possible in the test phases of the MVP. These measurements are valuable data, which allow us to draw learning conclusions. The fundamentals of agility are well anchored in this approach, which is close to Sara Sarasvathy’s effectuation. This protocol insists on the fact that entrepreneurs begin with a very simple idea, based on the means to which they have access. They do not write business plans. They invent as they go along, taking advantage of random events. They do not study a market. They carry out tests. The “effectual” approach explores the possible effects of given means. Entrepreneurs make judgments about acceptable losses and work with several stakeholders in order to “co-build”. While strategic planning has the goal of avoiding unexpected events, entrepreneurs in effectuation mode welcome them favorably and benefit from them. The principle is: “if life gives you lemons, make lemonade”. This principle leads in particular on the African continent, in moving from a logic of prediction to a logic of invention. Here again, more than elsewhere, the role of the entrepreneur is to create a new universe and not to discover an existing universe. Action is preferred to analysis in territories which are still enchanted and feature dynamic rootedness. According to Aubert (2017), objective conditions (geography, climate, etc.), history (founding moments, trauma, etc.) and anthropological foundations (religion, family structures, languages, etc.) promote understanding of the development trajectories of a country and individual and collective behaviors, especially those influencing innovation. In fact, it means considering the spirit and character of peoples. In African societies, people develop in an enchanted world. Living means, by nature, living

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socially. Common strength is rooted in collective rituals. This societal enchantment is paradoxical in that it cohabits with the disenchantment of part of the economic world, which is increasingly secularized. Modernity and mass culture have here brought about the domination of economic and commercial logic. These original situations, sometimes the source of disorientation or shocks, lead us to simultaneously see and to think about the introduction of the modern world and its universality, and the emergence of another, much more fragmented world, made up of juxtapositions. These societies can be described as advanced primitive societies, as they preserve their traditional modes of operation (beliefs, myths, community organization) while integrating modernity (Aubert 2017). These are transcultural societies. They are not the interaction (intercultural) or coexistence (multicultural) of different elements (Bertin 2016). They are the synthesis of a cultural ethos and global dimensions. This hybrid creation corresponds to cross-fertilization (Frimousse 2016). The notions of local and global are rethought in the context of a process in motion, as opposed to being considered as fixed entities. This spiral process is based on roots with a momentum towards a constructive future (Maffesoli 1988). This dynamic rootedness promotes a struggle against sclerosis, by opening up to novelty. This form of rootedness is not a deathly confinement. This complementary ambivalence between the static and the dynamic is found in the African unicorns and Millenials, since one is a generation V – a vagabond generation – with a multiplicity of reference points, citizens of the world while still affirming their Africanness; and the others are “glocal” organizations – exponential and Africanized, responding to local demands and participating in the globalization of Africa. 2.3. Rooted leaders/entrepreneurs, adventurers and hustlers at the service of African singularities5 The entrepreneur/leader is a person who commits their “capital” and is both financially and humanly involved in their business; organizing the resources mobilized in order to build capacities which are, if possible, distinctive and/or unique in order to offer goods or services, hoping for a 5 See Frimousse (2012).

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satisfactory return. Entrepreneurs/leaders tend to create and direct their enterprise in their local environment and to sustainably establish themselves there. These behaviors can be explained particularly by the crucial role of social networks in the mobilization of the necessary resources for the creation and then the development of the enterprise. The design and the degree of engagement of the entrepreneur/leader in a CSR (corporate social responsibility) process varies based on multiple personal factors (vision/intentions, etc.) and contextual factors linked to its embeddedness, which lead to social control by the community. Here, we are talking about contextual legitimacy. In the case of personal factors, let us consider four aspirations: autonomy, the independence of capital, sustainability and growth. Starting from this base of aspirations, it is possible to suggest several logics of action. Entrepreneurs usually aim for sustainability, the survival of their business or even preserving their autonomy. This “logic of inheritance” favors the passing on of the company, considered as an inheritance. In order to ensure sustainability (S), the inheritance must remain within family circles. This implies the independence of capital (I), that is, refusing outside capital. These two dimensions are the conditions for the pursuit of growth (G). This type of leader is called a SIG. Growth occurs through stable activities, providing a regular profit. It is also possible to distinguish entrepreneurs who follow “entrepreneurial logic”, which is based on innovative activities with high potential growth (G) and the entrepreneur’s autonomy (A) of decision-making. This profile is designated GAP. GAP seeks maximum flexibility. Its management of people is based on the quest for efficiency and performance. It encourages and guides in order to improve skills, and takes on strategic risks. Aside from this binary distinction, there also exists “managerial logic”, which promotes the entrepreneur’s management qualities. Human relations are here more anonymous and procedural. Leaders tend towards a rational and formalized organization. They seek the maximization of the firm’s value. From these logics of action and these profiles, SIG and GAP, arise four types of leaders: the “activist” inserts themselves into and engages in more or less institutional networks, outside of their business; the “competitor” is centered on their organization, seeking to manage its resources, and they wish to be competitive; the “authentic” remains little integrated into networks and manages their own business, and they are motivated by a need

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for authenticity, and the “adventurer” knows how to profit from business opportunities, linked to technical or commercial novelties. They seek uniqueness. Entrepreneurs do not only act within an economic network, but also interact with other social organizations or institutions. We speak of embeddedness or rootedness, which corresponds to the penetration of a collection of social, political and social rules into the spheres of economic production and exchange. Actors make choices while considering extra-economic norms, and thus determine appropriate behaviors. In Africa, the sphere of the economy is part of the social system. In the ideal neo-classical representation, the market is envisaged as the result of atomized actions and decisions, based on utility and self-interest. In Africa, every action is socially situated and cannot be explained in reference to the individual alone. The entrepreneur is influenced by their family, their rootedness in an environment and the entrepreneurial models they encounter. Embeddedness represents the contextualization of economic action within networks, which represent a regular set of contacts or continuing social relations between individuals (relational embeddedness). Structural embeddedness corresponds to the architecture of the network formed. Territorial embeddedness consists of a mode of mobilizing of relational capital in the host territory. The territory of implantation is envisaged as the socio-economic environment favored by the entrepreneur (geographical proximity). We should also add cognitive proximity (sharing the same system of representation), social proximity (values, norms, etc.) and institutional proximity (sharing laws, rules of the institutional game). These various proximities allow a relationship–structure combination, thus forming a social capital, which facilitates the actions of leaders. A relationship– structure combination that inhibits this could result in social liability. In both cases, this involves accepted contextual legitimacy, which emphasizes the indissoluble connection of the actor with their social context. Economic sociology shows that individuals maximize their economic interests and social interests linked to the need to belong to a group, as well as the need for recognition. The two dimensions interact and influence the behavior of actors. Social norms introduce extra-economic factors into the behavior and practices of leaders. The reputation effect, a source of competitive advantage, represents a major concern. Entrepreneurs/leaders in

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Africa engage in a process of production and justification to maintain their legitimacy, or to prove it. Entrepreneurs do not necessarily adopt those practices which are most appropriate to economic demands, but rather those that seem to be the most socially accepted. In Africa, entrepreneurs live with a social responsibility of proximity, strongly rooted in a territory and its ethos. They consider natural resources, and wish to reduce negative externalities and other nuisances. Preservation and improvement of conditions of life are sought. The territory is perceived as a deposit of potential resources, from which they must draw the best advantage by offering products and services that promote the physical and mental health of individuals and respect local culture. The desire of leaders is to enhance the value of their uniqueness: unique know-how and products of quality, with rare and locally specific resources. Entrepreneurs base social approaches on their rootedness, which has an impact on their logics of action and execution. Being activists, adventurers, competitors, and networkers, entrepreneurs seek legitimacy in order to obtain the right to carry out their activities. They have an interest in maintaining contextually appropriate behavior. The leader seeks to obtain economic, social and territorial legitimacy. At the practical level, it seems interesting to develop reference points and to work on uniqueness by the means of a label – a sign of recognition of a rooted entrepreneur’s responsibility. This label shows the legitimacy of the firm, linked to its social role at territorial level. It allows us to locate the logics of the entrepreneur, and to know if they respond to the requirements of the surrounding environment. The label will testify to both rootedness (attachment to the territory/origin) and impregnation (intensity of links with the local sphere). Entrepreneurs have an interest in developing this type of label in that it may strengthen their territorial legitimacy, as well as act as an employer brand attracting customers and potential employees. The label is a vector of communication. The operationalization of such an approach calls for consultation and collective action to develop the label and then to make it legitimate. This is because its legitimacy will act upon that of the rooted and socially responsible entrepreneurs. Samir Abdelkrim (2017) has visited more than 20 countries to meet young, rooted entrepreneurs who have started from almost nothing and who

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have not expected State aid to build their business. In Dakar, “Awajieune” (“I sell fish” in Wolof) allows fishers in the market of Soumbédioune to live better by selling more fish directly to consumers without going through intermediaries. Innovations emerging from African territory have developed by constantly taking the pulse of users on the ground, based on their realities and the problems they face. These rooted innovations have known real success in terms of use and adoption by local markets. This is the case in the mobile banking sector which has seen its hour of glory in East Africa with M-Pesa, while West Africa has also taken off in large part thanks to the rise in power of Orange Money. Take the vast domain of health, and the creation of increasingly more mobile applications allowing better connect doctors to remote areas in which infant and maternal mortality is exploding, with, for example, the Karangue project, supported by Orange in Senegal, or the Gifted Mom application in Cameroon. Gifted Mom replies by SMS to questions asked by pregnant women, and supports them by arranging appointment dates for pre-natal visits to hospital. After the child’s birth, follow-up continues: Gifted Mom sends reminders several times a week of vaccination dates for the newborn. It sends information and continuous reminders in at least three SMS per week. This application, created in 2013, boasts in 2018 about 125,000 users in Cameroon. Hospitals consider it a valuable technological ally. Samir (2017) tells us how a doctor and a geek in Burkina Faso created the start-up Mos@n, a portmanteau word combining “mobile” and “santé” (French for “health”), and set up a small application to inform and advise pregnant women so they could avoid medical complications. Another example of a solution created for a common difficulty in daily life is that of the illuminated schoolbag. In Côte d’Ivoire, almost 51% of schoolchildren live in rural areas without electricity. SolarPak schoolbags, created by the eponymous start-up, contain a solar panel, which recharges the battery of the LED lamp during the day – 4 hours of exposure to daylight is enough to power the light for 3 hours at night, thus allowing young people to continue with their school work. In Kenya, Ushahidi offers to locate all acts of violence on an interactive map, in order to inform foreign media! This is crisis mapping. An SMS reports acts of violence and may save lives.

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Inequality of access to healthcare is part of daily life for Africans. Several factors explain this situation: among them the acceleration of the departure of “talent in white coats”, that is, the medical brain-drain from Africa to the West, and the weak capacity of African public authorities to invest in their national and local health systems. Faced with these situations, entrepreneurs seek solutions. For example, in Congo, José Zefu Kimpalou created WapiMED, which allows users to locate and quickly enter into contact with health professionals in surrounding areas, especially in remote areas. Africa must also face significant environmental challenges, at the level of waste management as well as setting up sustainable environmental policies. In most African countries, waste management is still very crucial. Hence, in Côte d’Ivoire, Yaya Koné launched Coliba to aid reuse of plastic waste in Côte d’Ivoire. His idea is to reduce plastic waste through a technological innovation. This challenge is quite significant when considering that Côte d’Ivoire produces 5 million tonnes of waste/year. African businesses sometimes combine “off-grid” and sharing economy to promote energy exchange between members of the same village. In one village, households that do not use all their energy can redistribute part of it to neighboring households that are not connected. In Africa, it is possible to distinguish four types of entrepreneurs: the “activist” becomes part of and engages in more or less institutional networks, outside of their own business; the “competitor” is centered on their own organization, seeking to manage its resources make it competitive; the “authentic” remains little integrated into networks and manages their own business, and they are motivated by a need for authenticity and the “adventurer” knows how to profit from business opportunities, linked to technological or commercial novelties, they seek uniqueness (Frimousse and Marchesnay 2010). In the context of this chapter, we emphasize the case of the adventurer leader. How does an adventurer leader position themselves with regard to the social, cultural, political and economic dimensions prevailing in African and Mediterranean societies? And why do they act in this way? In other words, what are the influences of the legitimacy–competitiveness binary on managerial practices? What factors lead the adventurer leader to be socially responsible?

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Our approach rests on a strategic grid, which interrelates four pillars: goals, activities, environment and organization. Our idea is to use this strategic grid in order to study socially responsible practices of small firm leaders. These pillars are considered in an interactive way. The “goals” pillar helps us to grasp the leader’s logic of action. It is essential to understanding the why. The “activities” pillar corresponds to the different fields of activity of the firm, or to the components of technologies, products and markets. What are its resources and skills? What is its know-how (business)? What is its positioning in the environment (vulnerability, dependence, aggression)? What are its key, distinctive and unique competences? Which goods and services, and for which economic and social demand (Mission/Vocation)? The “activities” pillar expresses the logics of execution. The “goals” and “activities” pole is linked to the “organization” pillar through managerial practices. What are these practices? Are they efficacious (satisfying objectives), efficient (minimizing costs) and effective (satisfying all the members of the organization)? The “context” pillar is thus important to assess the degree of legitimacy, which corresponds to adhesion/conformity with social values. The adventurer leader adds value to local resources through an innovative product. They have detected a business opportunity in their environment. Their logic of action is essentially entrepreneurial and heritage-based; risk-taking, disruptive innovation and preservation of know-how. Through their choice of activity, the leader affirms convictions linked to CSR: authenticity in approach. Their activities relate to the preservation of heritage in the broad sense: management of know-how, which is respectful of the local environment (reusable and recyclable packaging). The adventurer leader adds value to their uniqueness through entrepreneurial and managerial logic. They refer to an economic logic of competitiveness. Their argument is based on regulation, the cost savings linked to better use of raw materials. Key and unique competences are well identified, as are sources of vulnerabilities. Positioning, in relation to the market, is part of a desire to stand out by intervention in local, natural and biological needs. For a leader, CSR requires and engenders needs that represent a strong potential for development. The leader is motivated by considerations of ethics and responsibility within and outside of their business.

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Having the capacity to upset the balance of the planet and of humanity, people, and in particular business leaders, owe it to themselves to adopt ethical and moral behaviors. The very definition of CSR in small firms is informal, implicit and conveyed in the personal values of owners and leaders, without being part of an official and formal engagement. Leaders within small African firms are the lifeblood of their organization. Through their day-to-day presence, they back up their speech with actions, making their words credible and audible. The leader relies on a system of shared values. They are socially responsible in relation to their territory and their employees, working through several logics of action ranging from an activist positioning to that of an adventurer. The adventurer has a strong spirit of enterprise. They generally share the principle that CSR requires and engenders needs that represent a strong potential for development. This requires innovating, and taking advantage of “rare” resources. This has capacities specific to entrepreneurs, of seizing opportunities that no one has seen before. This uniqueness opens up a business opportunity for them. In Rwanda, Abdelkrim (2017) has observed the fundamental role of leader-adventurer entrepreneurs in the country’s social and economic reconstruction. In Kigali, travelers who use any one of 400 buses can go online free with a 4G network. A fintech application is being developed. From 2020, it will enable payments by mobile phone for electricity bills, petrol refills and bus trips, meaning the disappearance of tickets. Another initiative that is symbolic of this small, rural, landlocked country of 12 million inhabitants is that of the Ministry of Health, which has developed RapidSMS, the first telemedicine application deployed on a large scale in Africa. RapidSMS has already saved the lives of 590,000 Rwandan babies between 2009 and 2015. What leaders/entrepreneurs seek is to resolve the daily vital problems of populations: access to energy, and healthcare, banking, education and so on. Here, we are most often very far from criteria that measure the success of a project by the speed of financial return on investment. Experience shows that most project leaders in Africa create very small firms to escape from unemployment and exclusively provide for the needs of their family. This motivation for engaging in an activity seems very far from the classical vision of the realization of a project and profit. In the African

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context, we must instead think in terms of jobs. Entrepreneurs have a fundamental responsibility. When a project leader launches their business, a job is created, which allows the latter to meet the needs of their family on a daily basis. In Nigeria, entrepreneurs are above all salespeople originating from the informal economy, whose only golden rule is resourcefulness. These are hustlers, who expresses an unflinching desire to take risks and to succeed, in helping one’s family and overcoming the vagaries of life. Hustlers are creative and open to innovation. They master the “last mile”, which allows them to reach populations. The last mile symbolizes the importance of access and the cost of logistics. In Africa, this cost ruins those who misunderstand the terrain. In the work “Employees first, customers next”, Vineet Nayar (2010), former CEO of the Indian tech giant HCL Technologies, expressed a wish to transform management by restoring power to employees. He stresses the necessity to put employees, those who really create value, at the center of the company. He insists on inverting the organizational pyramid. This process of transformation must be carried out through programs that develop confidence, mobilize and empower the creators of value, and those who provide the best satisfaction to customers. The symmetry of attention must allow improvement in “customer experience” by improving “employee experience”. This reversal of perspective has stimulated reflections on the respective importance of the internal customer (the employee) and the external customer (the consumer), and changes managerial rules and practices. New positions, issues and challenges emerge. The business increasingly communicates about its human resources management by highlighting its social initiatives. In this context, it increasingly adopts a marketing approach to convince, retain and attract employees. The employee is thus considered to be a customer of the firm, whose needs and expectations must be satisfied. In a world dominated by individualistic values, by the loss of landmarks and the end of phenomena of massification, marketing moves towards an individualized offer of products, intended to respond to the specific requirements of each consumer. Offers are undergoing increasing segmentation, in order to adapt to individual uniqueness. This development is also taking place within the company, and may be designated by the term “HR marketing” (HRM) (Arnaud et al. 2009).

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In recent years, relational marketing, characterized by the establishment of lasting relationships between company and client, has supplemented transactional marketing, which focuses on the adaptation of the offer to the market. The objective is now to retain customers. We will see that this logic may be transposed onto the management of people within organizations. The concept of “marketing” refers to the idea of a market, and designates the method of performing acts of commercial management. In all firms, there is a function combining commercial operations, which allows the firm to reach potential customers, in order to get to understand their needs and to adapt products and services to their expectations. Marketing has been the subject of a continuous process of rationalization and development, inspired by other disciplines such as psychology, statistics and strategy, so as to deepen the study of the behavior of buyers, consumers and the environment (competition, market, etc.). Marketing is not fixed, and its practices and principles evolve and adapt in the face of an environment in perpetual motion. As to the market for mass products, the “traditional marketing” approach placed exchange at the center of the relationship between demand and supply. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, new ideas were expressed by the Swedish school of industrial marketing and the Nordic school of services. They replaced the concept of exchange with that of relationality. The relationship between buyer and seller becomes more important than the simple act of exchange. Notions of trust and a network of relationships constitute the basis of these approaches. In fact, the traditional paradigm of marketing no longer seems appropriate to contexts in which a firm identifies and deals with their target in an individual manner. Orientation to the customer is now at the heart of the concept of marketing and its fixed point as it evolves. This customer orientation makes the customer a fundamental and dominant reference point for the company. It is based on the needs of the customer that the company makes offers intended to satisfy them. Customer orientation now legitimizes strategic segmentation/positioning decisions and operational decisions on the marketing mix. Until the late 1980s, the classical marketing approach considered the customer as a rational being. Studies were focused on consumer behavior, which resulted in a reasoned choice between various goods and services. The emotional and affective dimensions of the consumer were not considered.

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These days, the personal experience of a potential client is considered in marketing analysis. This is an approach founded on the experience of studying consumer behavior, which essentially relies on the interaction between the consumer and the product. This new marketing approach seeks to transform the customer into a partner with whom a loyal relationship can be established. Anonymous and episodic transactions between the company and its customers are replaced by links that are tighter, constant and more “personal”. This evolution of marketing principles also marks and influences human resources management. The application of techniques from marketing in the field of human resources leads to talk of “HR marketing”. Considering the company’s employees as customers implies the necessity of individualizing HRM practices, working on positioning as an employer, segmenting offers according to targets and developing a plan to optimize the choice and retention of employees. In the recruitment phase, the firm must communicate its human resource management by promoting its social activities in order to convince and attract potential future employees. In the context of winning employee loyalty, HRM relies on listening to employees in order to grasp their demands and expectations. Like in all types of marketing, it relies on collecting and analyzing information, as well as on internal communication. Employees are thus considered one of the firm’s targets. The goal is satisfaction for the employee and optimization of recruitment and retention for the firm. Personalization of the offer is used in marketing to retain consumers. It is based on the establishment of an individualized exchange relationship over the long term between consumer and firm, as well as on trust and commitment. It seems possible to consider an application of this approach to HRM. The objective is to use these strategies to retain, no longer just consumers, but the firm’s employees. The use of such an approach can be explained by the diversity of employees (age, training, values, experiences, etc.). It is possible to distinguish collaborative, adaptive, cosmetic and transparent personalizations. Collaborative personalization is jointly conceived between the employee and the firm. The company helps its employees to express their needs. Such a practice may involve the

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participation of the employee in an individual training plan (ITP) and career management. The employee may also personalize the HRM practices offered by the firm. In this case, it is adaptive personalization. It may involve individualized schedules. It offers greater autonomy. The firm offers the same adjustments to all of its employees. However, they can adapt them to their specific needs. This strategy is no longer anonymous but individualized. Nevertheless, it remains standardized. Adaptive personalization seems appropriate for employees who wish to benefit from greater autonomy. In the case of cosmetic personalization, the firm offers the same services to all of its employees with a different presentation. It is mainly used in the case of electronic mail addressed to employees. Finally, concerning the strategy of transparent personalization, it consists of offering each employee unique benefits based on their preferences, without, however, the employee intervening in the process. They are only occasionally questioned through studies on their expectations. The company reduces employee participation while memorizing their preferences. Although the border between differentiation, individualization and discrimination is relatively porous, the application of the principles of personalization to human resources management is of great interest as it allows the proposal of strategies according to the needs of firms and their employees. A human resources manager must therefore choose from among these personalization strategies those that correspond most to their firm and its employees. Beyond the various strategies of personalization, firms now perceive the need to give meaning and perspectives to their employees in order to attract and retain skills, thus going beyond the single context of individualization of benefits. We can no longer overlook listening to the expectations of employees, which vary according to age, training, lifestyle, etc. Consideration of emotions promotes the social cohesion of employees and improves the performance of the work group. It allows us to surpass the rationalist and mechanical logic, which has as its only goals economic and financial efficiency. It is part of a perspective that includes ethical and emotional dimensions, allowing a person to acquire the status of a subject granted affectivity, and not that of an object.

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Personalization allows us to respond to a variety of expectations. Watch out! This does not mean transforming a machine-employee into a product-employee. Effective personalization is based on the preservation and enhancement of the uniqueness of the subject-employee, of “the person”. In so-called “developed” countries, management has too often abandoned the field of the social and the human, causing disorientation. People need meaning, a purpose in their work. Places of meaning creation are the company (image/culture/strategy), the workstation (conditions/workplace relations/feasibility of the activity) and the entity (career/reward). Work has today been desacralized. It is too often perceived as an alienating constraint. In most African societies, the employee strives to domesticate work by associating it with the private sphere. Work only assumes real meaning when it is translated into a social and societal result accepted by the employee. In Dakar, Senegal, Adama Kane is an employee of Sonatel, the local subsidiary of the telecom group Orange. In 2013, he realized that he had a large stock of partly used medications which he no longer needed. He then imagined a secure web and mobile application allowing more equitable access to medications6. Thus was born the idea of a virtual community pharmacy, called JokkoSanté. This virtual pharmacy allows the donation of unused medications at affiliated health centers in exchange for points, equivalent to the financial values of the medications donated. These accumulated points are used by members to acquire other medications. This is a kind of circular economy. JokkoSanté also gives companies the opportunity to increase their visibility and their social impact by financing medications for segments of the population of their choice. This approach is strongly rooted social responsibility. Adama Kane spoke of his project to his manager at Sonatel, who was convinced and helped him to present the JokkoSanté project to the management team. The support obtained helped kick start the operationalization of the project in 2015. In addition to his activities as an employee, Adama Kane relied on teams at Sonatel to develop a pilot app, being supported by the company on various levels. Capitalizing on this 6 Mazars. (2017). Afrique: les nouvelles voies de l’innovation.

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success, which gained international visibility, Sonatel decided to launch an appeal for internal innovation projects. Obviously, some initiatives ended with the departure of talented employees. In the case of Sonatel, the company was able to navigate this thanks to good communication, and capitalizing on the JokkoSanté experience by launching calls for internal projects, which might partly be deployed internally, without necessarily becoming start-ups. The injection of this culture into a large firm is a strong vector of attractiveness. The employer brand thus finds itself strengthened. At Casablanca, Larbi Alaoui Belrhiti is a Moroccan entrepreneur who manages Avito.ma, the Moroccan leader in small ads online. Without being its founder, he created the Moroccan structure after the keys were given to him by a Swedish group, a pioneer in online advertising in the early 2000s. Although Larbi inherited the concept, he then played a crucial role in adapting it to the local context, in recruiting teams and developing the activity. Innovation is the DNA of the company. The dynamic of innovation is very important for continuing to offer a better experience to users. All the employees recruited at Avito are tested for their ability to propose innovations. The innovation culture is based on the space given to innovation; allowing everybody to be able to innovate in their own unique way. Employees here are not only in the mode of operational execution and perfection; taking initiative is the norm at Avito.ma. Employees are trained in innovation processes and encouraged to innovate. Avito relies on an internal Innovation Lab, within which intrapreneurship is promoted. Innovation takes place outside Avito’s core business, and in a separate space, detached from the open-plan work space, to preserve its autonomy and freedom. A dedicated team has been set up and uses an innovation process to deal with various issues, from daily life, with no link to small ads. One of the many problems confronted by management and its theorists is to find ways of mobilizing people. “Mobilization” does not mean giving orders, but rather inciting employees to work together towards realizing a common objective or a collective project. Each employee is mobilized because they put their individual energies at the disposal of a common cause. Mobilization implies a collective force (a mass of employees).

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What does this mean for the mobilization of talent in Africa? Hyper-competition characterized by high uncertainty and instability has relaunched interest in the issue of talent management. Technologies or cost control are no longer enough to retain companies’ competitive advantages. Companies are led to research a combination of organizational dimensions and talent so as to obtain an advantage at any given moment over their competitors. The notion of talent supposes a form of excellence, a difference compared to others. Talent is the mark of the uniqueness and originality of a person (Dejoux and Thévenet 2012). Managing talents is not limited to the detection and selection of the best professionals in a given activity. Talent also calls for a dynamic of mobilization, avoiding the creation of a split between the talent and the rest of the social body of the organization. Firms expect from their talents a heightened capacity for decision-making and action in new and urgent situations. This involves agility, solidarity, creativity and adaptation in the face of exogenous events. The capacity to mobilize talents may create competitive advantage. But how do you mobilize talents? Talented African youth are ambitious. They believe in their potential and in the development of the African continent, conscious of its possibilities. This youth values above all empowerment, the desire to have an impact on things and a need for recognition7. Hence, the importance of trust. However, in Africa, the unpredictable and largely informal character of the economic environment requires a high level of control. Strategies must therefore be implemented allowing, at the same time, the building of a base of trust and managing risks to create a “safe space” where empowerment can take place. The freedom to take risks, progress and learn on a daily basis must be prioritized, and more important than financial recognition, which is certainly significant but less mobilizing (Choain et al. 2016). Trust is the key to economic success and human development. Kenneth Arrow has explained the wealth of nations by trust. Economic and social challenges are often explained by the absence of trust, as exchange contains a measure of trust. In modern economies, which are based on services and innovation, individual initiatives and cooperation play a crucial role. Hence, the importance of trust. The real causes of many organizational failures most often find their sources in relational difficulties. The omnipresence of 7 Philips. (2016). The Making of Leaders: An African Outlook. Mazars.

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practices, procedures, controls and so on based on obedience imposed on those who act by those who know or possess, turns people against each other. The opposite of trust is not only distrust, but anxiety. This capacity to cooperate with other distinguishes an open society from a society turned against itself. We must therefore dare to have trust in Africa to be able to mobilize its talents. Our conception of mobilization is similar to that developed by Tremblay and Wils (2005), who define collective mobilization as combining the behaviors of respect for the work contract, behaviors of individuals and collective mobilization. However, our approach is conceptually less dense and scarcely mentions individual mobilization, as we consider the African dynamic to be collective. Individual motivation is not a necessary condition for successful collective mobilization, but it remains a very important element. Contextual performance and balance between personal capacities, values, employee expectations and work performed is doubtlessly what best differentiates collective mobilization from individual motivation. The notion of hypermodernity applied to society refers to the idea of a society where everything is pushed to excess. Hypermodern individuals are, in particular, characterized by a new relationship with the self, marked by excess. The search for exterior visibility is more important than the quest for interiority. One must be seen, known and read particularly through blogs, Facebook and so on. What I am is absorbed into how I appear. Images thus become, gradually, the only reality that counts. In the search for intensity, the gaze turns within, in the quest for visibility, it turns outside. The hypermodern African needs to be considered in their uniqueness, while still claiming solidarity and direct relationships. They claim their diversity and their originality while still being part of a tribe. The person navigates between a search for uniqueness and being a social being, “embedded” in a community of belonging (the “tribe”). The “tribe”, that is the social group of belonging, responds to the need for “sociability”. The need for singularity thus exceeds differentiation (brand) or distinction (obtaining prizes/attributes, etc.). It corresponds to the affirmation and recognition of its own identity (this is what I am/my originality). Singularity is the quality of what marks out, characterizes and differentiates a person. Singularity is opposed to conformism. In the organizational sphere, the need for singularity refers to strategies of personalization. Talented people want to be recognized as unique subjects and no longer as objects lost

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in the mass of anonymity. Thus, in addition to key skills and distinctive skills, people seek to develop their unique skills and have them recognized. Three recurring dimensions seem to structure the management of talent: attraction, development and retention of talent. Attraction consists of reflecting on employer brand strategies to encourage talent to join the company. Development is the phase of identification, evaluation and support of talent. Retention corresponds to building loyalty among talented people. These dimensions are based on the acceleration of the use of technologies, in particular through social networks, accentuating the development of crowdsourcing (reflection and common construction) and communities. We will remember that talent management is a strategic approach that allows us to attract, develop, mobilize and preserve excellent individuals that make a difference, in order to develop a well-performing organization capable of achieving or even exceeding its objectives. For talent management in Africa to be effective, it is necessary for it to align with the company’s strategy, to be in balance with the company’s culture, to improve its employer brand and to consider the uniqueness of its talents through personalized management. Karpik (2007) deals with the conditions of commercial exchange of a certain kind of goods and services: singularities. For Karpik (2007), three categories of goods are distinguished: homogeneous goods and services, differentiated goods and services and singular goods and services. If we use Karpik’s grid and risk a parallel with HRM, drawing also on the resources and skills approach, we can identify two categories of resources: “standard” resources are defined by their interchangeable character; while “singular” resources have their own characters, claimed in particular by talent. They are most often developed through an idiosyncratic learning process (reputation, relational network, etc.). These singularities are often the basis for value creation and require an HR approach, which is itself singular! The traditional practices of mobilization are effective to obtain obedience in the framework of simple tasks: “if you do this, you get that”. However, when the task calls for an effort of conceptualization and creation, this kind of mobilization is not effective. We must then move from management of talent by compliance (respect for the rules) to self-management.

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Self-management is based on the intrinsic motivation, which is linked to choice, meaning, competence and progress. Choice is related to individual autonomy, to their opportunity to choose. Meaning reflects the extent to which the goal pursued is important and coherent with the person’s values. Competence corresponds to the use by the individual of their skills in the work. Progress refers to the idea of improvement and achievement. This new form of mobilization is possible thanks to personalized management, which is based on the satisfaction of fundamental needs and the recognition of singularities. Talents become mobilized when these conditions are met by the organization. Talents must perceive that they can have trust, receive support, and express themselves and act, and that they are recognized and valued as a singularity. Personalized management (PM) is similar to the concept of tailor-made HRM, but it differs because it is based on permission and not intrusion. It means a manager authorized by the talent to connect with them, as on social networks. It no longer means intrusion with standard messages and actions addressed to anonymous people. Personalized management entails creating a real dialog so as to motivate the company’s talents. In this context, storytelling and reliance are essential. Storytelling is the art of transmitting a representation, of sharing a vision. Based on works around the notion of storytelling, Igalens (2011) insists on the dimensions through which the manager can build stories: enunciation, dramaturgy, register, tension-building and so on. Storytelling can enable the development of reliance. Clausse (1963) is the first sociologist to have used the term “reliance”, which he defines as breaking isolation and seeking links. Bolle de Bal (2003) uses reliance to mean the creation or recreation of links between a person or a system. Reliance must not be confused with belonging or affectivity. Reliance comes into play at the moment of forming the relationship, while affectivity develops once the relationship is formed. Technologies accentuate the phenomena of social “de-reliance”. They develop technological reliance but dissolve human reliance. Modernity is built around division: divide to understand (Descartes), divide to produce (Taylor) and divide and rule (Machiavelli). Conversely, hypermodernity is characterized by the impulse to connect, with the return of tribes and singularities (Maffesoli 1988). In Morocco, LYDEC promotes the emergence of singularities and their expressions. Remember that LYDEC is an operator of public services

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managing the distribution of water, electricity, street lighting and ensuring the collection of wastewater in the region of Greater Casablanca. For some years, innovation has been set as a strategic priority for the group, an essential condition for future ownership by employees. Several purely internal initiatives have been designed and deployed to raise the awareness of the 3,580 employees of innovation and to progressively make them active stakeholders in innovation. LYDEC has trained innovation coaches, internal employees who are relays for innovation, which is simultaneously spontaneous and induced. An intranet site allows all employees to express themselves, describe their ideas – by words, a sketch, a video and so on. In the rest of the process, ideas are evaluated according to specific criteria, most importantly originality and the creation of value for the company. The evaluators are thus internal experts in the domain or the theme of the idea. If the idea is chosen, the process continues and the talents are supported. The example of LYDEC illustrates the commitment of a large group to an innovation approach, patiently constructed in a logic of co-construction. It has multiplied the innovative potential of its employees, through a structured and progressive change process8. In South Africa, Giraffe is a platform for relationship-building between job seekers and companies seeking to recruit, with a focus on the “less qualified” segment of jobs (cashiers, drivers, laborers, etc.). The founders of Giraffe found that this segment was not covered by traditional recruitment companies because of the difficulty in finding a viable economic model. The start-up therefore developed an algorithm allowing this problem to be resolved, by matching the profiles of job seekers with the needs of firms. Giraffe provides a singular response to a locally situated problem. In South Africa, S’onqoba began as an intrapreneur in a large banking group, First National Bank (FNB). Subsequently, he piloted the company’s intrapreneurship program, before switching to innovation outside the world of big business and by creating his own. FNB set innovation as a strategic axis of its development, distinguishing between two categories of innovation: “minivations”, incremental innovations aiming at reducing costs, and “full-on innovations”, more radical. 8 Mazars. (2017). Afrique: les nouvelles voies de l’innovation.

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The method used was decentralized and consisted of integrating into every part of the company’s business an innovation dimension. For this, a small group of three people, piloted by S’onqoba, based their work on “innovation champions” and worked in a collaborative way with the management and innovation teams. This model used in the organization therefore gave every employee, from juniors to the management team, the task of treating each participant in an equitable manner. It also included healthy emulation, through a competition organized in which every year three MVPs were selected, for implementation in the three years to come. On the operational level, this model of innovation was not seen as an additional workload: S’onqoba states that this type of initiative has a crucial impact, beyond simple retention, in motivating and developing talents, in a context of attracting new talents9. 2.4. An African citizen educated and trained to think within organizations, who can speak and must be listened to Africa is the youngest continent on the planet with 200 million inhabitants aged 15–24. These young Africans will be the future leaders and the motive force of the economic, social and cultural development of the continent. An educational system, which is effective and accessible to the largest number, is thus essential to allow the African youth to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills in order to face numerous challenges (Babinet 2016). Education at the heart of the relationships between knowledge, power and assets remains insufficient (both quantitatively and qualitatively) to enable Africa to be in tune with the knowledge economy (Hugon 2017). According to UNESCO, Africa must train 2.5 million scientists, technicians and IT professionals to attain the Millennium Development Goals. In countries such as Namibia, Zimbabwe and Tanzania, on average every year, universities train 1 qualified engineer for 6,000 inhabitants. In comparison, China trains 1 qualified engineer for every 200 inhabitants.

9 Mazars. (2017). Afrique: les nouvelles voies de l’innovation.

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African public research devotes less than 1% of continental GDP to investment into research and development. However, for several years, governments and large global institutions have been working on the emergence of an educational system corresponding to the challenges of the African continent. Significant efforts have improved access to basic education. Since the 2000s, fifteen sub-Saharan African countries have chosen to abolish tuition fees for primary schools, which has improved the rate of schooling. The development of practical tools such as online courses (MOOCs and SPOOCs), educational tablets, assistance to students and so on improves access to education. In English-speaking as well as French-speaking Africa, an increasing number of start-ups offer solutions which are innovative, concrete and less expensive. For example, “Succès Assuré” (Success Assured) is an educational platform in Côte d’Ivoire, which is free for students throughout elementary school and offers scholastic support by means of video clips. Content is written by a team of authors exclusively composed of current teachers in the national education service. To this day, more than 500 teachers have participated in designing courses and exercises. For each discipline, a teacher is the guarantor of pedagogical coherence. The video team creates all its teaching videos using up-to-date digital technology in film studios. In Morocco, My Virtual Learning Environment also offers a solution for schools and universities of small and medium size that are reluctant to move on to e-learning, by means of a unique product at the most accessible price. In Ghana, since 2015, thanks to a partnership with Microsoft, the teaching body and students have been equipped with tablets and laptops. The development of products and services made & designed in Africa is essential to the emergence of a contemporary educational model. Let us mention the creator of the VMK tablet, the Congolese entrepreneur, Vérone Mankou, or the Qelasy educational tablet from the Ivorian inventor, Thierry Ndoufou. Digital technology is a solution allowing a response to the challenges facing the African educational systems, like everywhere else in the world. However, it must also be a way to critically examine both the content of education and its purpose.

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Let us not delude ourselves. Currently, despite the advances and developments related to digital technology, our contemporary African school is almost incapable of ensuring real or serious education, or even suitable socialization. Through technologizing or by rendering almost all our teaching as strictly utilitarian, we have resulted in the elimination of culture and the “humanity” from the desks of schools and universities. The problem in Africa is not only educating uneducated people, but also re-educating badly educated people. It is not only students who are not ready for the careers of tomorrow, but maybe the traditional forms of education are also not ready to offer them training for the careers of tomorrow. Instrumental and immediately profitable knowledge has eradicated the knowledge of creating meaning, of creative syntheses. “Toolbox” knowledge, based on the development of reflexes for problem-solving, has taken the place of the real knowledge of intelligence and innovative capacity. The educational model is based on mechanical capacities for problem-solving, involving less reflection. However, human intelligence imagines the capacity to create original conceptual combinations, as well as and especially an idea of purpose, and meaning. There can therefore be no intelligence except where there is consciousness. We must not confuse “thought” with “calculation” and “reflection” with “analysis”. The humanities are a disturbing reminder of the pathetic and absurd destiny of the human race. They are also sources of more relativistic thought and behavior, which may be refractory to our society’s unrestrained productivist-consumerism. Contemporary education has become a sort of justification for the cynicism of neoliberal-monetarist economism. Most lessons do not lead to understanding or to asking questions, but to regurgitating readymade answers. However, Africa needs citizens who think and not citizens who only produce. Let us not forget that the main role of an educational institution is to give each person the means to become what they are, without missing the opportunity to learn, with everything that this implies of constraints, demands, efforts and often a life much more ascetic than hedonist. “Become what you are, having learned what that is”, as Pindar exhorted us (Aktouf 2002).

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Stuffing skulls full of automatic behavior and somewhat sophisticated operational thought is surely not teaching, and a diploma does not necessarily mean either culture or the capacity for judgment or discernment. It is for this reason that the African Leadership University in Mauritius trains hundreds of leaders with innovative, audacious and totally disruptive methods. The Mauritius campus is only the first step: 25 campuses will be opened on the African continent in the next 50 years, with the goal of training 3 million young African champions. The model of training is called the ALU learning model. It is based on students’ moments of discovery and questioning. Let us also mention the Durban University of Technology in South Africa, Esprit in Tunisia and the 2iE Institute in Ouagadougou. These places teach the importance of experimentation, errors, attempts and progression. Let us not forget that education comes from the Latin educere, which means “leading out of”. Education thus corresponds to leading an individual from one state to another. It is leading the child from the state of dependence so that they become a subject; a subject capable of relationships with others, as a free and responsible individual. Education is thus a path and a continuous passage that extends throughout life. This path gives direction and meaning, a path on which every point of arrival is again a point of departure, because it involves “updating oneself”, actualizing oneself and adapting to a world that is in constant change. Humane education is the path of humanity towards its realization and full humanization (Thera 2016). With schools expected to train for the needs of the market and a citizen increasingly more deprived of the capacity to think for themselves, can we envisage the arrival of intelligent-learning-inventive-democratic business in Africa? The Africas have no need of these technocrats, which are increasingly illiterate in general culture and behave like predators. The Africas need schools for meaning and the common destiny of Africans, rather than for the market and consumption. It is urgent to restore to schools, from primary to university, their main roles of community socialization for the child as a future citizen and to hone their critical minds. We must refuse to defend a human universe and nature reduced to their contribution to economic growth

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alone. Illiteracy is not only a lack of instruction, it is equally an absence of meaning and of values other than material ones. For popular African epistemologies, reality goes beyond what is seen. It is wider than logic. They build bridges between what we call the natural and the supernatural, the physical and the metaphysical, the rational and the irrational, the objective and the subjective, the scientific and the superstitious, the visible and the invisible, the real and the unreal and the explicable and the inexplicable. The real is not only what can be observed or what appeals to cognitive sense. It also encompasses the invisible, the emotional, the sentimental or the inexplicable. Epistemological imports from dominant cultures and countries have survived in Africa, more because they serve the interests of the agents of economic neoliberalism than because of any capacity to understand African situations. Those who enact educational programs based on the dominant models show very little tolerance of the critical mind, of stimulation, of provocation or of contrary opinions at any level. The responsibility is thus incumbent upon African universities, academics and researchers to fight such unfounded claims based on vested interests and hidden objectives (Nyamnjoh 2004). We wish to contribute to thinking about research in management science from a global horizon, that is, to go beyond the dominant epistemology based, in particular, on African diversity, itself a source of a concrete universalism, which creates co-constructed knowledge starting from a horizontal dialog. This demands the recognition of the importance of contextualization and the need to de-center the “dominant” paradigms. It is a matter of thinking the universality of knowledge production based on a new epistemology, that of frontier thinking. It involves producing knowledge without being compelled to conform to a limited and exclusive model. The challenge is to achieve renewal starting from the margins, and to think of diverse ways of being in the world. Let us not forget that Descartes introduced in the 17th Century the myth of the subject who thinks in place of the gaze of God. In his struggle against the Christian theological sphere, Descartes situated the “I” at the foundations of thought, in the position previously reserved for the “Christian God”. Descartes elaborated part of his philosophy in Amsterdam, a part of the Netherlands that was at the heart of global dynamism.

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This ego-policy of knowledge has allowed certain knowledges to attain universality and to exclude others from it, in particular those originating from Africa, by including them in a particularist current. Let us not forget that the Cartesian “I think” is preceded by the European “I conquer”. Thus, we get the historical context and economic conditions allowing the emergence of a thinking subject outside of time, assuming a universalist vision through progressively secularizing space. This meant an imperial being dominating and exploiting the world (Grosfoguel 2006). The concept of universality, which permeates American and European philosophy and research, is an abstract universalism. Scientifico-technical rationality has been designated as the only valid episteme. It is considered the only one capable of generating genuine knowledge. All the world’s other forms of knowledge have been relegated, ignored or considered to be obstacles. Human knowledges are therefore ranked on a scale that ranges from traditional to modern, from barbarism to civilization, from the community to the individual, from tyranny to democracy and from the East to the West. Some Latin American philosophers speak of the “coloniality of knowledge” to describe this phenomenon in which there exists in the world a hierarchy between the different systems of knowledge. For Anibal Quijano (2007), the mode of knowledge production responds to the cognitive needs of capitalism: measurement, quantification and so on. Modernity is thus part of a universalism, which is not universal, but abstract and regional thought about the whole of humanity. It is based on its own history and experiences, set up as a reference model to imitate. This universality is abstract because it favors knowledge produced by people in only six countries in the world! The experience of 6% of the world’s population claims to account for the being, thought and actions of all of humanity (Grosfoguel and Cohen 2012). In other words, the potential contributions of African organizations are neglected. It is time to decenter our gaze. In effect, what the canon does not legitimate or recognize is proclaimed to be non-existent. Non-existence here takes the form of what is ignored or poorly known. This non-existence is also determined by the dominant frame. In fact, universalism that brought to bear in particular on globalization,

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privileges that is, entities or realities that extend their influence over the whole planet. In this case, non-existence takes the form of the particular. These defined realities are imprisoned in frames that make them incapable of becoming a field of possibilities, since they are considered non-universal! These epistemicides committed in many non-Euro-American contexts are accompanied by linguicide, since these researches are doubly excluded from the discourse, being judged as having nothing to say and no words to say it (Nencel and Pels 1991). Apart from epistemicides, this abstract universalism focused on its epistemology is strongly questioned since the promises made, which were its spearhead, are only partially applied. Let us think of growth, development, progress and so on. In the worst case, it is the source of socio-cultural and environmental destruction. Ignored or dealt with too quickly, knowledges coming from Africa are often assimilated to the motley field of “cultural studies” or “ethnic studies”. Researchers who question dogma are classified as Third-World Marxists, culturalists and/or anti-universalists. So many ways of non-listening exist, which do not allow us to begin a real discussion. However, it is essential to be able to keep some distance from the evidence, which supports belief in the order of things. This distancing from a historically dominant mode of knowledge production requires gaps and transgressions to adopt a different perspective. Instead of Eurocentric modernity, Dussel (2003) argues for a diversity of proposals based on the multitude of epistemic localizations. Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2011) suggests epistemologies of the South. By epistemology of the South, he means a new production and evaluation of knowledges; meaning new relationships between different types of knowledge. With an epistemology of the South, understanding of the world will far exceed Western knowledge of the world, since diversity includes very different ways of being, thinking, feeling, perceiving, analyzing, being in relationships and so on. This epistemology of the South requires intercultural translation, as it is understood as a process of mutual intelligibility between the different available or possible experiences of the world.

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De Sousa Santos (2011) criticizes the lazy rationality, which considers itself unique and exclusive and does not make sufficient effort to look at the richness of the world and its epistemological diversity.  Sousa Santos suggests a sociology of absences, which enlarges the present to give value to the experience lost, wasted or made invisible by dominant theories. De Sousa Santos (2011) identifies several modes of production of absences: the only rigorous knowledge is scientific knowledge, and other forms of knowledge have neither the validity nor the rigor of scientific knowledge; linear time refers to the idea that history has one meaning and one direction and economic growth and productivity determine the productivity of human work or of nature, while everything else does not count. To these forms of absence correspond an absent subject: the ignorant, the residual, the inferior, the local/particular and the unproductive. Subjects so designated are not considered credible compared to practices considered scientific, advanced, superior, global, universal or productive (Grosfoguel and Cohen 2012). The sociology of emergences proposed by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2011) is based on the concept of “not yet”, for which the possible is the most uncertain and most ignored concept in philosophy. However, only the possible allows us to reveal the whole set of potentialities. “Not yet” expresses that which exists as a pure tendency, as a latent movement in the very process of emergence. The “not yet” therefore includes possibility (potentiality) and capacity (power). Upon his first encounter with France, Edouard Glissant noted that the landscape was both familiar and strange to him. Near, because he is French; distant, because this landscape did not speak to him as it would to a Norman. This shock led him to question history. However, in re-reading the work of philosophers, Glissant very quickly realized that he had been relegated to the periphery of universal history. This negation led him to confront Hegel in an oblique way based on diversity and relationship. Glissant speaks of “diversality” (2009). “Diversality” would lead us into a “pluriverse” (or a world of multiple worlds), whose subjects come from different worlds. It involves keeping a distance from the dominant epistemological currents. This does not mean rejecting their many contributions. It does not involve resisting or adapting!

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It is rather a process of co-construction and revitalization of possibilities (Hurtado López 2017). Adoption of frontier thought requires the decentering of Western thinkers and the diversification of the epistemologies that they bear, so as to escape from abstract universalism without yet falling into isolated particularisms. The understanding of the world is much wider than the Western understanding of the world (de Sousa Santos 2011).  Aimé Césaire (1955) complained of the instinctive tendency of an eminent and prestigious civilization to abuse its very prestige to create a vacuum around itself, by abusively reducing the notion of the universal to its own dimensions. The dominant epistemology was composed of a mix of a typically modern ambition seeking to redesign and rebuild society, and of a typically modern concentration of power, resources and skills. Obviously, this does not mean burying oneself in strict particularism or becoming lost in a fleshless universalism. Césaire (1955) wrote that there were two ways of losing oneself: by segregation (walling oneself up in the particular) or by dilution (in the universal). He evoked the dangers and carceral concepts of identity. We share his conception of a universal rich in everything particular, in all the particulars. This vision is not the assertion of a particularism that may lead to fundamentalism. On the contrary, it is an affirmation of a concrete universal in which all particulars are deposited. This concrete universalism is horizontal and not vertical or asymmetric, as abstract universalism can be. It becomes real when some contextualize and others de-center in a concern for pluriversalism. Khatibi (1983) performs deconstruction on the closure of binary oppositions and structures. He always thinks, works and writes in interfaces and cleavages. He deconstructs not only the system of Western thought but also that of Eastern thought. This involves decentering oneself in relation to this center, the origin that the West gives itself. Decentering oneself is the very antithesis of the adjustment that is a necessary condition for obtaining development similar to that of the center. Adjusting oneself is imitation and the act of becoming homogenous! In the logic of adjustment, other worlds have nothing better to offer.

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These can only advance on condition of imitating. Decentering oneself does not correspond to those culturalisms that rest on the assertion that every culture or people possess irreducible specificities, which determine their different histories. These withdrawals feed conformism, hatreds and false patriotisms of all sorts in the name of a supposed refuge that is not contaminated by globalization. The concept of translation, proposed by de Sousa Santos (2011), allows us to build bridges with African realities. Translation in the sense he means it is an intercultural and intersocial process. It involves translating knowledge into other knowledge, translating practices and subjects into other practices and subjects and seeking intelligibility without homogenization. Translation is the alternative to abstract universalism and to the idea of the incommensurability of the diversities of global spheres. Translation includes an emotional dimension, as it supposes a desire to learn and to be surprised by the knowledges and practices of the other, so as to elaborate knowledges that offer reciprocal benefits. It belongs to each knowledge and practice to decide who will be put into contact and with whom. However, mutual willingness to create zones of contact will not naturally lead to horizontal and reciprocal exchanges. Let us not forget that the history of humanity is made up of exploitation and conquest, in which there is little absence in the search for hegemony. It will take generations to repair this past. Translation must be at the service of global social justice, which is impossible without global cognitive justice.

3 The Mediterranean: Marrying the Future without Divorcing the Past

Partnerships between the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean used to envisage a large free-trade zone. However, we must accept disillusionment in this project. Dictatorial regimes and religiouspolitical groups of a fundamentalist and obscurantist nature both constitute threats to the relationship between the two shores. From an economic and managerial point of view, firms often appear at the top of the list of examples not to follow. In management handbooks full of canonical practices and principles, Mediterranean methods are rejected. The cultures of the southern Mediterranean are understood through an optic of archaism, folklorization or even inferiority. These descriptions produce the image of a Mediterranean condemned to marginalization. Caricatures, common assumptions, stereotypes… Such is the information conveyed by most media when discussing cultural relationships between the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean. Behind this slippage or semantic prudence, it is relations between Islam and the West which are being stigmatized. Aggravated by the events of September 11, 2001 in the United States, this phenomenon of radicalization of the discourse inevitably leads to conflicts and clashes. Violence is fueled by binary thinking opposing good and evil! These visions are reductive. So, how do we understand the Mediterranean? How to contest this false evidence?

Innovation and Agility in the Digital Age: Africa, the World’s Laboratories of Tomorrow, First Edition. Soufyane Frimousse. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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We think that the Mediterranean simultaneously exists within a logic of war and a desire for peace. It shares a common heritage which is fractured by numerous conflicts throughout the centuries. Encounters not only bring people together, but they also separate them! Assimilating this complexity in a study of relationships between the two shores allows us to better identify its development and its changes. Beyond all the fears, anxieties, rejections and concerns, is there now a new horizon in the Mediterranean? What form of managerial organization is possible in light of the Mediterranean’s cultural references and substrate of values? We believe that this sea, at the same time a border and a passage between North and South, offers possibilities. It involves more balanced and less predatory approaches towards nature and humanity. Between the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, encounters do not facilitate the discovery of the other. On the contrary, they are most often guided by “glottophagy”, which consists of the irrepressible desire to consume “the Other” as an image, to reduce it or submit it to domination (Etienne 2003). This gaze confines “the Other” in its most narrow conception, and thus becomes a source of anxiety. The Other is only tolerated or excluded. In the Mediterranean, despite the heritage of Andalusia, the only idea which has barely changed is that there is an “us” and a “them”, both well defined. These modes of thought, essentially based on cultural distinctions, lead to the separation of the European and Maghrebian shores. Each defines itself in a game of mirrors with its neighbor, who shares the same Abrahamic references whose physical/symbolic violence was marked by September 11, 2001. According to the “clash of civilizations” thesis, developed in particular by Huntington (1996), the Mediterranean is the zone of separation between the Judeo-Christian West and the Arab-Muslim Levant. These days, mental representations prevent us seeing the Mediterranean and appreciating its heritage (Morin 1999). Relations between one shore and the other of the Mediterranean are an accumulation of tensions, misunderstandings and withdrawals which crystallize around the opposition between Islam and the West. Two civilizations have clashed over several centuries. The Mediterranean, in these circumstances, could only be at best a utopia, an artificial construction.

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How to explain these multiplied fears and these unreasoned passions? Has the Mediterranean become (again) a new theater of clashes, or on the contrary could it become (again) a sea which transcends oppositions? Is it possible to go beyond these formulas which feed the dynamics of confrontation and shape the encounter between “Them” and “Us”? 3.1. The Mediterranean: crossroads of civilizations, one-way street or dead-end street1 Al-Andalus saw the co-existence of Islamic, Christian and Jewish cultures and religions for more than eight centuries in the Middle Ages. It was a privileged space of dialog and encounter. Greek culture and philosophy and sciences from India, Persia and China were transmitted to Europe. Al-Andalus was the meeting of West and East. The Mediterranean was a bridge between immense and complex worlds of meaning. Today, it is a line of fracture and division. These days, the meeting of the frozen West and the smothered East makes people feel uneasy in their skins and uneasy in their time. The Mediterranean juxtaposes worlds which are closed off from each other, with rising misunderstanding and intolerance. Andalusia is a universal message and example of sharing, of the search for meaning and responsibility. Rediscovering the heritage of al-Andalus is desirable, but is it possible in a Mediterranean context marked by such complex economic, political and geostrategic issues? Relations between the different populations of the two shores of the Mediterranean do not facilitate the emergence of cross-cultural communities. In the best cases, they generate peaceful coexistence. The essentially religious barriers of the monotheistic faiths often remain impassable. On the northern shore, for many, Islam is considered an inferior, irrational, sexist and aggressive civilization. On the southern shore, for many, Judeo-Christian Europe is considered a closed, intolerant, distrustful and aggressive world. These are practices and behaviors which, particularly through the media, generate a real civilizational conflict. The idea of a Mediterranean considered as a space of encounters and cross-fertilization took shape at the end of the 1930s within European communities in Northern Africa which were in contact with the colonized 1 See Frimousse (2011).

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Maghreb, and was in particular expressed by Armand Guibert and Albert Camus. According to Tozy (2009), the Mediterranean is an anthropological fabrication built upon a certain number of questions: family, vengeance, cuisine, relationship with time, with space and with architecture. Mediterranean unity would be based on geographical, historical and cultural strata which form a common substrate. The Mediterranean represents the common factor of the people who live on its shores. This sea produces a particular climate which offers unique landscapes, marked by the clarity of the sea, strong sunlight and unique vegetation notably including pines, vines and olive trees. Mediterranean identity is first of all geographic (climate/landscape). It then includes specific cultural habits. These are ways of life (the art of cultivating the land, culinary arts, the role of the table and the idea of God (Porcel 2000)). The city is also an element of the Mediterranean heritage. Living in the city means being a master. Living outside the city means serving a master. Mediterranean urbanism is divided between a public space reserved for men and a private space reserved for women. The Mediterranean city is the place of commerce and culture, of leisure and trade, of spectacle and prayer. The agora, the temple, the square, the church and the mosque express this urban civilization. Mediterranean cultural unity was at its peak during the Greco-Roman period, which comprised a unity shaped by the legacy of the Egyptians with the reign of the Pharaohs, the Phoenicians with Carthage and Greek domination. Sharing and trade enriched knowledge in several fields, including writing and commercial techniques, etc. Over the centuries, the Mediterranean was a “Roman lake” surrounded by the empire which called it “Mare Nostrum” (our sea). Maurice Sartre explains how cultural unification preceded political unification. Cultural osmosis essentially occurred around a Greco-Roman baseline. In daily life, local communities enjoyed wide autonomy. The Romans did not make their empire into a “colonial” society. They gave citizenship to people who were not ethnically Roman. Rome did not desire to impose a single norm. Political hegemony was not accompanied by cultural hegemony. Roman culture spread around the Mediterranean basin while promoting cross-breeding. The art of mosaic represents this capacity to generate a common culture. The Greco-Roman world arose from a real crossing over between the shores.

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According to historians, in the ancient world, no religion claimed to hold the truth. With Constantine, the empire began its conversion to Christianity. Constantine promoted the Church, but looked after the pagans who constituted the vast majority of his empire. It was not until the end of the 4th Century, in 380, that Theodosius made Christianity the official and compulsory religion of the Roman Empire. Samuel Huntington’s work (1996) on the clash of civilizations has provoked many reactions. His work insists on the importance of civilizations over states and borders. Huntington drafted his theory following Fukuyama’s work which defended the thesis of the end of history after the Communist bloc collapsed. For Huntington, ideologies have petered out but civilizations have replaced them, provoking a clash. The combat between states no longer involves ideologies (capitalism, communism) but civilizations (cultures, values, etc.). The world is now multipolar and multicivilizational. The Mediterranean is the prime location for inter-civilizational conflict in the Huntingtonian sense. Laurens (2010) considers the Mediterranean as a myth or a dream. It was first of all an imaginary fed by writers such as Nerval, Flaubert, Camus and Valery. This Mediterranean was regarded as a refuge from modernity. The literary magazine Les Cahiers du Sud has promoted the existence of a Mediterranean humanism, a civilization at the service of humanity rather than built to crush it. Several projects aimed to reconcile all the cultural heritages which were until then opposed to each other: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In 1933, at the creation of the Mediterranean University Center at Nice, Paul Valery insisted on the civilizational role of the Mediterranean which combined speech and reason. For Camus, the pensée du midi (thought at midday or thought of the South) was a light against European darkness. The Mediterranean myth was first of all a French myth, then a European one. Huntzinger states that it was never brought to the southern shore, which was rather influenced by nationalism, anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism. Remember that in Egypt, Taha Hussein, in The Future of Culture in Egypt in 1938, controversially insisted on the Mediterranean identity of his country! Reference to Western civilization was not seen as a foreign factor, but rather as a component of Egyptian culture. Thus, on the northern shore,

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Mediterranean humanism is opposed to technocratic and alienating civilization, while on the southern shore, it is a project of access to modernity. Currently, the Mediterranean as refuge of Matvejevic and Cassano is a call to a thought of the two shores, faced with an overwhelming, de-humanized and postmodern North (Huntzinger 2010). For Morin, the “mer matricielle” has become empty. The desire of the Mediterranean should be confronted with reality. Remember the sectarian murders, the caricatures, the fears, the exclusions, etc. Jean Ballard’s Cahiers du Sud and the works of Jacques Berque portrayed the Mediterranean as a land of contacts. In spite of attempts at reconciliation, the populations of the two shores do not recognize themselves as Mediterranean. For 30 years, conflicts have been multiplying. There was already Israel against Palestine; to this first arena of woe has since been added the murderous war in Lebanon, the explosion of the Balkans and the Algerian drama. On the northern shore, “Arabs”, due to the fear of unrestricted immigration, terrorism and colonial history (the Algerian war, the Suez expedition, the repatriated Europeans from Algeria, the Iraq wars), are too often considered the implacable enemy of Western European civilization. They represent an image, a class which has lost its quality of being human. They are seen as anti-democratic, anti-love, anti-woman, etc. Very few are interested in their language, their theater and their poetry. Their beliefs are generally regarded as superstitions. Some media use techniques of manipulation. There, Islam is presented as a religion of extremes, the subject of constant pressure which tends to provoke a reply. The large majority of Muslims find themselves in a defensive posture, forced to define themselves not by what they are, but by what they are not. The image of Islam is often associated with terrorism overseas and delinquency at home. A Muslim must be moderately Muslim. Too often, they become radical in the eyes of some if they wish to practice their religion. Real divisive vulnerabilities exist in the economic and demographic spheres. The southern shore of the Mediterranean nurtures, against the North, a hatred fed by poverty, a feeling of injustice and contempt. Poverty is all the more resented in that it is suffered under the eyes of the rich who live in former working-class neighborhoods transformed into luxurious riads. France, Italy and Spain alone provide four-fifths of the GDP, in other words, 80% of the wealth generated every year, in the Mediterranean.

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What seems to speak even more to the imagination is the difference in income between an Egyptian and a French person: while the first earns one euro, the second pockets more than thirty. For businesses based on the northern shore of the Mediterranean, the south and the east of the sea only represent a meager market: they only sell 10% of their exports there, no more than to Taiwan with its 20 million inhabitants. Faced with this fracture, the European Union, dominated by the Northern countries, has not yet managed to develop a policy and a well-defined strategy, despite the attempts of the Barcelona Process and the Union for the Mediterranean project. The Americans, when they want to assure their dominance in a Mediterranean with which they are unfamiliar, do not understand that their economic system and managerial model, of which they promote the alleged virtues, is not suitable to the contextual realities of this region of the world. The outlook is thus quite dark. It becomes even darker when we consider the dangers mounting on the horizon of a few years from now. Firstly, a demographic bomb may explode. Forecasts suggest that the Mediterranean population will reach the figure of 600 million people in 2025 and 900 million in 2050. This human mass may become destabilized, for two reasons. Urbanization, firstly, will destroy traditional ways of life as, from 2025, 80% of Mediterraneans will have left their villages and will crowd into congested and polluted cities. The second threat seems to be even more serious. In fact, the two shores are experiencing two opposing demographic trends. In the North, fertility is stunted: 1.3 children per woman in Lombardy; in the South: three or four children per household. Despite the reservations and fears generated by immigrants, the aging Northern countries will need labor in some areas of activity, while the Southern and Eastern countries, experiencing demographic growth, will spill over with an excess of youth. From the Maghreb to the Near East, demographic pressure leads to the need for growth, but this is hampered. Consequently, unemployment can only rise, provoking, here and there, social explosions (Frimousse and Orsoni 2010). Civilizational conflict feeds on the continuity of a long common history and the medieval religious controversy between the spheres of the two central structures of the Mediterranean: the Christian sphere and the Muslim

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sphere. Jocelyne Dakhlia (2009) believes that the fear of Islam coincides with a conscious or unconscious return to the Christian roots of Europe. From the very first contacts, the Christian sphere has had problems with Islam because it claims to surpass Christianity. According to Djaït (1989), the Western and Eastern medieval consciences take the foundations of their reciprocal representations from Islam’s expansion phase. For Islam, Europe is perceived as the barbarian world, “dar al-harb”. For the Europe of Christianity, Islam is to be rejected because of Mohammed’s prophethood and the fear of conquest. The 7th Century was that of the emergence of Islam in the Mediterranean. For 13 years, at Mecca, the prophet Mohammed preached a new religion based on divine revelation. In 622, he went into exile at Medina. According to Huntzinger, the hijra marks the transition from Islam as a religion to Islam as power. The hijra led to the emergence of a prophetic power and community (umma). The era of the first caliphs corresponds to a religious and territorial expansion of the umma. By 640, half the Mediterranean was Islamic. Two civilizations now stretched out across the Mediterranean. According to Pirenne (1937), the sea which was up until then the center of Christianity became a border between two civilizations. The historian states that the Arab conquests put an end to the unity of the Mediterranean world. The arrival of Islam caused a fracture. For Marwan Rashed et al. (2009), to interpret this event as a rupture corresponds to a historical error. The evolution of the Islamic world also led to an opening to other horizons. In contrast, in 1798 with Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt, a great tipping point occurred. From the point of view of the southern shore, colonization inverted the balance of power which had held up until the Egyptian expedition, as these previously dominant societies passed under the sway of the European powers. Colonization was quite clearly supported by ideologies which had every interest in promoting a rupture. Relations between the two shores have been characterized by conquest, which has produced systems of domination. The colonial empires ended in the Mediterranean in the mid-20th Century, with the Suez crisis and the end of the Algerian war. Independence and decolonization succeeded them. These periods of colonization and decolonization gave rise to clichés and stereotypes. Understanding these colonial periods is essential to understanding interactions between cultures and representations in a postcolonial time. Colonial societies create binary oppositions based on

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classifications. Colonial ideology was an ideology of expansion. Expansion was based on Eurocentricity. The world was divided into two: center and periphery, creativity and transfer, master and disciple. Reason against magic, logic against superstition, civilized thought against savage thought, those who think and those who act, those who plan and those who execute, those who dominate and those who are dominated. The Other is only the place of raw material, of cheap labor. This created a superiority complex in the European consciousness of the time, and an inferiority complex in the non-European consciousness (Hanafi 2004). Colonial exhibitions, travel stories, films, etc. all contributed to a silent demonstration of the division between Us and the Others. In colonial society, exchanges existed between “Arabs” and “Europeans”. However, these encounters were prisoners of social relationships which were strongly hierarchical and unequal. On the southern shores of the Mediterranean, decolonization movements were based on Arab nationalism, Marxist pan-Arabism, an Islamic movement and a Third-Worldist movement. After the postcolonial periods, the independent states lost their internal legitimacy and tried to find external legitimacy. The independent state, the product of a national independence movement, became once more dependent on external powers. Thus, if the 1950s and 1960s correspond to the decades of independence, the following decades are those of dependence. What was terrible about colonialism was not that it interrupted the history of a people, but rather than it caused that history to go backwards (Boudjera 2010). The first war against Iraq marked the real beginning of the North-South clash of civilizations. The Pax Americana introduced by the deployment of armed forces was accompanied by a psychological war supported by the media. This major event symbolizes the first great rupture, confrontation, conflict in which the cultural element had a predominant role. This was the failure of North-South, East-West dialog, emphasizing the absence of efforts to understand and to speak the languages of South and North (Elmandjra 1992). Since September 11, 2001, the reflexes of reaction and fear of the Other have been amplified, encouraging a politics of warfare and conquest.

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G. Bush spoke of a crusade against evil. The question of “why” was neglected. The only explanation given was the following: “They hate our democracy”, “We are good people” and “we are targeted because we are the brightest lighthouse of freedom”. G. Bush and T. Blair explained that this was a war for democracy and freedom (Fisk 2005). This vision was broadcast over the northern shore, thus posing violence as a factor endogenous to the Muslim religion. On the southern shore, the “jihadist” ideological discourse generated identitarian reactions and acts of violence while denouncing the will to hegemony. Following this tragedy, binary and simplistic logics have therefore returned, accompanied by “Pirennian” and “Huntingtonian” thought. The clash of civilizations is in play, dividing the world into two opposing parts doomed to armed confrontation. Some days after the U.S. invasion, Moncef Marzouki wrote an article published in an Arab newspaper entitled “the kiss of death to the Arab democratic project”. The author insisted on the catastrophic effects of this intervention in the democratization of the Arab world. It is difficult to justify among Arab peoples the American democratic vision as seen in Iraq. This action and its management increased the hostility of Arab public opinion and its tendency to reject the West and democracy, forgetting that the largest democracy in the world is India, a country belonging to the “East”. Discourse, diplomacy, books, film, the press and television are often at the service of the sword. Behind the olive branch in the hand hides a grenade in the pocket. Talk of peace in high international bodies is echoed by a volley of cannon fire. Machine guns have never been a key to comprehension. They open skulls, but they close hearts and souls. Making peace is first of all caring for oneself and rejecting the belief that death is for others, for inferior and backwards people. Behind the considerations of cultural and confessional order, financial and geo-strategic interests dictate the acts of the great powers in the Mediterranean. The two shores are only considered in terms of strategic and economic areas, and in no way as a living sphere. Quantitative approaches assess civilizations in terms of tons of oil, of markets, of kilometers of roads, of cables, without taking into account human beings. It is generally believed that the Prophet Mohammed launched his horsemen in an assault on the world of antiquity. In fact, this invasion

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was driven by conquest and not by the dissemination of religion. Remember that the Arab tribes were economically deprived. The Muslim religion happened to superimpose itself on this movement of conquest, allowing it to be coordinated. The Arab conquest did not take the character of a religious struggle. Do not forget that Christians in Egypt provided soldiers for the caliphs. On the northern shore, it was not a question of resistance in the name of faith to the horsemen of Allah. We now come to the crusades. These occurred after four centuries of the installation of Islam in the Holy Land. During this long period, no serious dispute arose between the Church and the caliphs. It was against the Muslim Turks that the first Crusade was preached. Behind these wars lay interests which concerned more than the Great Beyond. B. Obama’s speech in Cairo on June 20092 left room to hope for a shift in these imaginary borders. In Cairo, Barack Hussein Obama affirmed that he had come to seek a new beginning between the West and Islam, based on mutual respect and on the fact that the U.S. and Islam are not exclusive of one another and are not doomed to compete. The President insisted on the overlap and sharing of common principles: justice and progress; tolerance and dignity of all human beings. Despite the wishes of a few strategists, the Algerian war, the Suez expedition, the two Iraq wars and September 11, the immemorial links that the centuries have woven between the two shores resist attempts to demolish them. However, it is urgent to get rid of these systems of confrontation which have been injected into the Mediterranean. It is important to “reconcile the armchair and the mind”, “the libertarian spirit and sensitivity 2 “So long as our relationship is defined by our differences, we will empower those who sow hatred rather than peace, and who promote conflict rather than the cooperation that can help all of our people achieve justice and prosperity. This cycle of suspicion and discord must end… As a student of history, I also know civilization’s debt to Islam… It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed. Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation… Just as Muslims do not fit a crude stereotype, America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire. The United States has been one of the greatest sources of progress that the world has ever known”. Extract from speech, full transcript available online at www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/us/politics/04obama.text.html.

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to the authentic”. All people of all faiths have throughout their material and spiritual lives the same needs, the same hungers and the same desires for peace. We must no longer poison but rather fertilize the Mediterranean. No longer divide but combine the “Arab” and “European” spheres3. Journey along cultural “roads” which help establish a hybrid civilization. This perspective of reconciliation is the business of civil society on both shores. However, states also have a significant role. In fact, the nature of states is vital. It seems difficult to unite democracies and authoritarian regimes. The European Union began only after the fall of the Franco and Salazar regimes. It is good to remember that power is a temporary function and not an eternal privilege. Arabs and Israelis must make peace. It is difficult to be partners in a situation of war. More essential yet, it is imperative to put an end to double discourse and a democracy with variable geometry. The struggle against terror does not entail struggling against democracy. By rolling out the red carpet under the feet of certain regional dictators, the “Western” democracies make the very idea of democracy abhorrent to the ears of millions of Arabs. Supporting regimes which have often become foreign bodies in their own societies (for example that of Ben Ali in Tunisia), the great powers lose their credibility. Through these attitudes, the leaders of the great powers of the northern shore trap Arab democrats between the hammer of fundamentalism and the anvil of often authoritarian regimes. According to Olivier Roy (2002), supporting sclerotic regimes leads to fostering the very specters which haunt the countries of the northern shore: terrorism and emigration. Civil societies are on the path of democratization, carried forward in particular by technology, satellite television and Internet4. This movement must not be hobbled and weakened by leaders of Northern countries. This is one of the conditions of reconciliation (Marzouki 2004). To take up Etienne’s (2003) expression, the lands of the Maghreb and the western shore of Europe (Spain, France and Italy) are “pomegranate seeds”, not quite similar but side by side in the same collection. Multiple and intense exchanges have led to a common base. The characteristics of this cultural 3 We group the cultures into two major spheres knowing that these are multiple: Arab, Kabyle, Shawiya, Tashelhit, Saharian, Rifan, Corsican, Provencal, Jewish and so on. 4 Remember the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia.

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base stem from certain values: family, the role of elders, the importance of emotions, the use of speech, conversation and especially a sense of measure. Mediterranean societies have a family atmosphere. A fabric of cultural complicity allows people to know and recognize each other. According to Cassano (2005), Mediterranean thought, which he names “meridian thought”, is reflected in brotherhood and the importance given to social links. Cassano (2005) situates “meridian thought” between the immobility of the land (tradition) and the mobility of the ocean (modernity). According to Nietzsche, the sea represents discovery and the land is a chain. Uprooting oneself is therefore necessary. On the contrary, Heidegger thinks that the land relates to foundations and landmarks which guide the human being. These two opposing visions have become common in meridian thought, which positions itself on a permanent back-and-forth between uprooting and being rooted. It limits the adverse effects of the land by means of the sea, and vice versa. In the Mediterranean, the domestic-familial world often remains the dominant framework. Family and traditions-customs are still important reference points. Hierarchical positions and chains of dependence are very important. The individual cannot be dissociated from their membership in a wider social body, a group. It is a link in a chain of beings. Certainly, Mediterranean societies develop with the effects of “globalization”, the concomitant rise of individualism and the preponderance of financial considerations. However, the community dimension still constitutes the hard core of society in the regions with which we are concerned. In the Mediterranean, relationships between people have been built upon reciprocal clashes and contributions. From these interactions has resulted a common ethos which corresponds to a set of values and attitudes. Relations are more human and less mechanical. Work is not only at the service of maximizing personal profits. It aims first of all at the satisfaction of the basic needs of a group. All practices must be socially accepted. This process aims to foster a sense of belonging, of authenticity in a well-defined social network. The myth of Ulysses, the wandering seaman and archer of unequaled accuracy and precision, symbolizes the values of the Mediterranean. Ulysses’ adventures taught him the most ordinary and most common wisdom: patience.

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The irresistible desire to return to his kingdom provided all the meaning in his life. Ulysses refused the poisoned gift offered to him by Calypso: immortality, the divine condition. He preferred to return to Ithaca, remaining a mortal man. Excessiveness always begins with contempt for human life and the perverse desire to become a god. With excessiveness, the heart and the spirit dry up. A person who knows their limits knows themselves to be mortal, ephemeral and relative. This correct estimation allows us to not exceed the limits of the human! Without the imposition of limits, humanity’s desire for knowledge leads us to perdition. Ulysses is engulfed with his ships (Chabat 2002). Historically, antagonisms were and are still strong, but it should not be forgotten that moments of confrontation are also phases of trade, exchange and of building links with the Other. We must therefore at all costs cease to oppose West and East. In addition, what does the West represent? Here also, nothing is simple. If the West means the G8, then Japan must be part of it! Remember that the word “Maghreb” means West! The American historian Bernard Lewis (2005) claims that the Muslim world had no curiosity about other societies. For Jocelyne Dakhlia (2009), the Islamic world had a very advanced knowledge of European language. Alain de Libera (1991) has highlighted the Arab sources of European culture. Lingua franca was the common language used by both Christians and Muslims (Dakhlia 2009). There is too much of a tendency to forget this heritage due to dogmatic minds who appropriate the universal, claim a monopoly over it and establish a hierarchy of values, of civilizations and of cultures. Sometimes, they frankly and explicitly impose it on others. In this so-called universal posture the most natural of attitudes, without being the least dangerous, consists of reducing the horizon of the possible to one’s own point of view. The exclusive is its territory, its property; the universal, its idea. “Only their truth is true, only their own rationales are rational” (Ramadan 2010). The ideal is to go beyond the dogmatic and binary minds present on both shores, by insisting on the porosity of barriers, accessing the complexity of points of view and by introducing nuance into the analysis and reading of events. It is true that a political gap still exists between a southern shore marked by various forms of authoritarian regimes and a northern shore ruled by democratic principles. However, Abdou Filali-Ansary (2005) and

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Yadh Ben Achour (2008) detect the emergence on the southern shore of a real civil society, marking the surmounting of Arab post-nationalism and post-Islamism. These models of transition favor emerging democracies with the development of free expression, despite the non-guarantee of freedom of expression by the existing regimes. The two shores express opposing conceptions of law. Sharia or religious law to the south and “non-religious” law to the north. Political scientists prefer to use the notion of secularization rather than non-religiousness to indicate that a society considers that its law does not solely depend on its concept of transcendence. Sharia is a sacred corpus which is applied through fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), which is a human elaboration framed by strict principles. On the southern shore, economic, commercial and administrative activities are largely governed by laws close to European legislation. In the Maghreb, the legal system is highly influenced in many areas by that of the French colonial period. There is therefore a separation between the secularized areas of society and a law inspired by transcendence. Only the social sphere remains close to traditional Islamic law. This involves the legal status of women in respect of marriage, inheritance, divorce, etc. Remember that the secularization of European society did not happen without resistance (Etienne 2003). Islam would experience some difficulties with the idea of non-religiousness and its enactment in legal text. However, as Frégosi (2008) recalls, no religion has voluntarily accepted being deprived of its social influence. The image and consideration of women seems to also mark a division between the two shores. European women struggle for the full realization of principles of equality and non-discrimination. They seek to build links between the private and professional spheres. In the South, women are increasingly veiled, often fundamentally discriminated against and under the patriarchal authority of father and husband. Here also, women are infinitely diverse. A prince’s wife who spends her holidays in Corsica and spends fortunes has little in common with a Berber woman from the Rif mountains. The two shores seem far apart with the gap between European secularism and Islamic religiosity. One emerges from a religion which is in a state of “conscious religiosity”, while the other remains submerged within a

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“deep religiosity”5. However, for Tozy (2009), the southern shore of the Mediterranean features a traditional religiosity in which the political and the social are intermingled, a mystical religiosity, a radical religiosity expressing an identity shock, and a modern individualized religiosity marking the beginning of the process of disenchantment with the disassociation of the religious and the social. Secularity and religiosity are intermingled. External signs of tradition and modernity co-exist, with the explosion in the use of communication technologies (telephone, satellite dishes, Internet, etc.). On the northern shore, the presence of many populations originating from the southern Mediterranean demolishes binary thinking and their pseudo-incompatibility with secularism. The South is beginning a process of secularization and modernization, while the North continues its disenchantment and enters into hypermodernity. A South “too full” of values, and a North “too empty” with its nihilism. The two shores share a crisis of the sacred. Each part blames the other for its own crisis. On one side, a shore in which the sacred is largely immobilized. On the other shore, secularization has led to a loss of contact with the question of the spiritual meaning of existence. On the spiritual level, Islam says to the West: “Have you not dismissed the spiritual question too quickly, have you not been a bit quick to believe that God is dead?” The West says to Islam: “Have you not forgotten to regenerate yourself?” (Bidar 2009). Does the combination of these two crises of the sacred on the shores of the Mediterranean allow us to exit from dogmatic religion without losing the values it conveys? 3.2. Drawing from the Mediterranean thanks to people of transposition Modernity began in the 18th Century. It is characterized by multiple scientific discoveries and the generalized spread of well-being. Modern thought is based on the triumph of reason. Modernity leaves religious beliefs in the private sphere. People in modernity are encouraged to “sell” themselves, to be “profitable” and “competitive”. At the beginning of the 1980s, Jean-François Lyotard launched the concept of postmodernity, which he presented with the formula “the failure of grand narratives”. The great historical events of the 20th Century, including the World Wars, have 5 See Gauchet (1985).

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marked the exhaustion of modernity which wished to emancipate humanity in the name of the universal reign of rationality. In the 1950s and 1960s, mass consumption and mass communication empowered and promoted hedonist values, in particular including a cult of leisure and pleasure. Thus emerged a society centered on the individual, on well-being and self-accomplishment. Individuals freed themselves from their world of belonging and from tradition. The right to freedom is at the basis of postmodernity (Lyotard 1979). Life free of constraints and choosing one’s mode of existence marks the arrival of what Lipotevsky calls “self-service” life. In L’Ere du vide, Lipovetsky (2006) shows that the current state of developed societies is characterized by the rise of skepticism, incredulity, and a transformation of behaviors and ways of life. This marks the appearance of hypermodernity, in which the logics of singularization, slowness and the meaning of moderation are regaining major interest. In a hypermodern context, people are in search of time. They seek to cure themselves of obsession with time and to return to the meaning of moderation, and praise slowness. They seek to move less quickly. They favor quality over quantity. This involves finding a better balance between activity and rest, work and free time. It means finding what musicians call tempo giusto, a good pace, going fast when our activity demands it and allowing pauses (Honoré 2004). This is the Aristotelian “golden mean” which is so dear to non-Western socio-cultures in general, and to the Mediterranean East in particular. The emergence of Slow Food in Italy undoubtedly marks the growing interest around this notion of slowness. This movement, created in reaction to fast food, argues that our food must be cultivated, cooked and consumed in tranquility. Thus, slowly. Slow Food values everything that fast food excludes. In Italy, this movement brings together more than 1,500 restaurateurs. The Slow Food movement includes more than 100,000 members worldwide. According to Carlo Petrini, its founder, Slow Food is a refusal of speed in all its forms. Italian municipalities have also been inspired by this dynamic and have launched and signed the “Cittaslow” manifesto, which promotes development which is more respectful of the rhythms of their citizens. A snail carrying a town on its shell is used as a logo. These towns follow the principles of the reduction of noise and traffic in the city, the increase in

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green spaces and pedestrian zones, the preservation of local aesthetic and culinary traditions, and the adoption of a spirit of hospitality and good neighborliness. Thus, silent electric buses have been put into service in some towns. This concept is also present in other countries, such as Brazil or Japan. The rhythms of work within companies are also involved with slowness. Provisions have been put in place due to pressure from employees and also at the initiative of companies, worried by the effects of stress on their staff. Thus, the Marriott hotels have decided to fight against “presenteeism” by allowing their employees to leave work once their tasks are completed. Slowness, one of the characteristics of the Mediterranean, often seen as laziness, is now reclaimed by many people on the northern shore who feel stifled by speed. Is it not said on the southern shore that the peoples of the northern shore have watches, but those of the south have time! Another typically Mediterranean practice which is widely acclaimed: the siesta. In Portugal, an Association of Friends of the Siesta has been created. In Spain, a national network of cafés and salons proposes taking a small break at every hour of the day. In Japan, the Laziness Club, which promotes a calmer way of life, less aggressive towards the environment, has opened a café in Tokyo offering a resting space. Hyperactive executives and business leaders are becoming increasingly interested in this phenomenon. The Slow movement is based on the very simple idea of seeking the appropriate speed for every activity we carry out. “Slow” entails taking the time to deeply reflect on our ways of acting. The Slow movement in no way claims that everything must be done at snail’s pace, but stresses that our quality of life should find a better balance between speed and slowness. In the Mediterranean, a vast informal communication network allows people to exchange, to touch the real more closely, to resolve problems in a very spontaneous way and in real time. Relationships are simplified thanks to the elimination of formalities and procedures, allowing people to come closer together. This in fact means contact, listening and face-to-face communication. Building relationships does not require the actors to share the same interests. It requires the ability to create doorways through communication and thanks to talk. This relational fluidity allows the identification of the unsaid, which often says a lot, and easier identification of the different personalities of the group. Hypermodernity stresses the desire of individuals to no longer be seen as inhuman objects.

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Through the place of talk in Mediterranean cultures, beings express themselves. Talk finds a space to happen, while in other spaces, it is remote-controlled or even confiscated. The peoples of the Mediterranean address each other (often shouting). This is one of the basic conditions of “constitution” as a subject-person. According to Maffesoli (1991), the individual seeks their own identity while “embedding” themselves in a community of belonging (the “tribe”), thus developing within a network of personal relationships. People are increasingly embedded in a network of strong, proxemic relationships. They seek singularity. The Mediterranean is a laboratory of singularities cobbled together in a pragmatic way, taking into account the values of the group (tribe, clan, etc.). Singularity implies the idea that the person or the firm makes an effort to not resemble any other. Matvejevic (1992) stresses that being Mediterranean is a distinction. We think that being Mediterranean is also a singularity. Mediterraneans value information that they obtain through personal contact more than through formalized pathways. These are cultures in which solidarity and trust are fundamental. In this sense, actions are not only inspired by the rational decisions of maximizing actors, but also by the representations of actors inserted into a network of relationships. A Mediterranean person is embedded in networks of personal relationships. They are not an atomized actor. This mixed singularity of proximity and embeddedness seems to be desired by the northern shore, as shown by surveys on distress in firms, the wave of suicides in large firms, the need for dialog and listening, the demand for social links and protection/well-being. The importance of oral exchanges and the time spent on these exchanges is now an increasingly recognized organizational fact. Human exchange is not a system of exchange of neutral signals between equally neutral transmitters and receivers. Arkoun (2004) wonders about the possibility of identifying, in the thought and cultures of the Mediterranean, pathways which could bring back people’s human dimension. This involves a culture of transition which is capable of moving away from cultural identities which are closed to diversity, interculturality and intercreativity. This path must allow transgression and transcendence of significant oppositions and of the persistence of the polarization of two imaginaries. Hybridization corresponds to a mixing of differences. This idea of being between the two helps avoid the brutal reactions provoked by the irruption of modernity. Hybridization

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allows a dialog of cultures without the negation of the other. Hybridization recognizes both the persistence of cultural differences and the presence of universal cultural elements. The Judeo-Christian and Arab-Muslim spheres of the Mediterranean are not superimposed but entangled. They belong to a network of interdependent histories. Hybridization facilities the struggle against the binary opposition between “us” and “the others”, “good” and “evil” and “normality” and “deviance”. It reduces negative projections which are intended to disparage the other while promoting the self. Today’s people have a range of choices. They can move from one cultural area to another. They are able to make syntheses and travels. Multiple contacts between the two shores may engender phenomena of hybridization and mosaic which correspond to the scattering of plural cultures, but which form a coherent whole. The northern and southern shores are not uniform and rigid blocs. The populations of the two shores are human! Despite cultural differences, they remain human – that is, diverse, multiple, united, separated, honest, dishonest, virtuous, believers and non-believers. It is necessary not to stigmatize them based on their membership of cultural spheres. It is essential to refuse cultural determinism (Etienne 2003). The Mediterranean is confrontations and incomprehensions. It is also encounters and intermingled sources. Across this sea, for millennia, murder and also love have been exchanged. Andalusia constitutes the historic moment during which the two shores met in a single place, surpassing the pseudo-incompatibilities of culture between Judeo-Christian Europe and the Arab-Muslim sphere. Reference to Andalusia may allow us to exit from the current imaginary of fear which encircles the Mediterranean. It means joining with the wish of Jacques Berque, who called for the continuous rebirth of Andalusias. Returning to the emblematic figure of Averroes may facilitate these processes of hybridization and transcend antagonisms. Averroes (or Ibn Rushd) was a philosopher who was born in Cordoba in 1126 and died in Marrakesh. He is a central character for all three cultures – Muslim, Jewish and Christian. He produced the most important philosophical work of the Middle Ages, in particular commenting on the work of Aristotle. According to Alain de Libera, Averroes is the central figure in the intellectual approach which allowed European thought to build its philosophical identity. He insists on this Arabic element in Western culture (de Libera 1991).

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This forgotten or minimized heritage plays a deforming role in the image of the Arab world in the mirror of the West. Rossi (1970, 1976) wished to re-establish the kinship links which united Europe with a set of Arab-Muslim dimensions. He stated that Europe was the daughter of the Afro-Asiatic East. The West was, in his eyes, only the declining slope of the East. An Oriental specialist, Rossi regretted the degradation, the caricature and the quasi-burial of the Arab universe by the northern shore. Averroes made the link between religion and philosophy. This involved redefining the Islamic “I” and the philosophical other. Averroes devoted several works to this project, including the famous Tahâfut al-tahâfut (The Incoherence of the Incoherence). According to Al Jabiri (2003), Averroes is first of all an Arabic European! This characteristic is essential in the current context of the Mediterranean, dominated by relationships of opposition. He endeavored to understand, to tolerate the other according to its own system of reference, while avoiding rejecting it systematically. He recognized the right to difference, affirming that one truth does not contradict another, but agrees with it and testifies in its favor. Averroes was a man of synthesis and hybridization, a “bridge man”. He symbolizes the depth of links and the fertility of confluences between the two shores of the Mediterranean. On the northern shore, the cycles of reflection and exchanges conceived by T. Fabre in 1994 promote this heritage, while on the southern shore, the voice, the memory and the thought of Averroes sadly died with him. In fact, Averroes was exiled and rejected by theological legal scholars, as he was considered a menace to faith and religious feeling. Andalusia and Averroes constitute a heritage which can be the basis for building this optional civilization formed of cultural hybridization between the two shores of the Mediterranean. Marseilles, Tangier, Oran and Tunis will never be Granada. However, each era finds its own social form and its own Averroes and its bridge-people capable of bringing together and reconciling cultures, thanks to the translation table dear to Averroes and Louis Massignon. The colonial past and the hegemonic tendency of the northern shore are still very embedded in the imaginaries of the peoples of the southern shore, but they are also accompanied by its role as a model or example in the field of scientific progress and in that of human rights and democracy. This aspect must never be ignored. The Arab universe as a whole, technicians, managers, politicians and shopkeepers, clings to the idea of a free and democratic northern shore which is a friend of the Mediterranean.

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The questioning of traditional concepts, imaginaries, attitudes and frozen knowledge may allow the exploration of new systems of thought. “Bridge-people” between the two are the bases of the emergence of “hybridization”. They are connectors and intermediaries between universes of meaning, thanks to a multiple sense of belonging. In Europe, Muslims who are native to Europe have plural values and cultural references. They seek balance and conciliation between their two cultural matrices, Europe and the Maghreb. In their majority, they try to find a fair balance between faithfulness to heritage, to its practice and adaptation to an environment that operates according to different rules. There is a lot of intelligence in action in this adaption. They reconcile the Arab-Muslim innate and Western acquisitions. A fraction of this population wishes to adapt European society to Islam, and not the reverse. This involves conservative demands (reserved hours in swimming pools). An IFOP study allows us to distinguish: a pious Islam, a spiritual Islam, a cultural Islam which is the fruit of family heritage and an Islam of refusal. By intensity of practice, it is useful to specify ethnic differences (Maghrebi, Turkish) and linguistic ones (Arabic, Berber). Some base their beliefs on an internalized faith (Babès 2000). Others follow the conjunction of faith/law/path. Finally, according to Bidar (2006), some Muslim actors act by individualized selective reappropriation of Islam through an Islamic strategy of self. If Islam seems to be one in its corpus, it reveals itself as plural in practices and relationship to its teachings. Whatever happens, these new Arab-Europeans have plural cultural spheres with nomadic thoughts which pass from one culture to another with the ease of tightrope walkers. Cross-breeding, hybridization and crossing paths make these heirs of Averroes bridge-people capable of making links and of having a kaleidoscopic vision of the Mediterranean which thus transcends the bipolar oppositions of modernity/tradition, West/East, North/South. Despite the alternating movements of migrations of northern populations to the south of the Mediterranean and from the south to the north, examples of synthesis which allow the transcendence of cultural specificities without altering them are very rare. Interpenetration remains the exception, as opposed to colonial traits and resentment which persist. The Mediterranean separates while it may connect. For Jacques Berque, Mediterranean partnership is a “conjoined twin ignored and pushed away” from both coasts of the middle sea, “al bahr al mutawassit”. All the Mediterranean cultural spheres have the task of interpenetrating each other to enrich each other.

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Cultural dialog between the two shores must not be a debate between the wealthy and the ethnocentric. It is rather a communion of minds, a sharing without division of beings. The Mediterranean is forgotten or even humiliated by the doxa and its theoretical systems. However, in the Mediterranean, there is nothing in the intellect which has not first been sensually felt. We must re-learn “crossing the sea”. Learning about plurality requires discovery without a spacesuit (Berque 1999). The Mediterranean must (again) become a “lake of meaning”. The North indicates the direction towards which closed and resolved thinking orients itself. “Don’t forget which way is North” is moreover a synonym for keeping one’s head. The South likes to lose the North, to better enjoy being disoriented. The rule is to have no rule, to invent several of them. The “bridge-people” of the Mediterranean, unbeknownst to them perhaps, are in the process of shaping the face of a culture where the greatness of humanity will finally find its true face! Fed by several philosophical and economic sources, most of the principles and theoretical models of the managerial doxa do not take into account the new cultural and contextual realities of many firms. It involves grasping the connections made between modernity and the sphere of traditional values and taking charge of reshaping them; avoiding thinking of this geographical area as determined by immutable traditions; as well as seizing the possibilities of another way of management, insisting on the demand for an alternative which seems to be raised in countries with cultures strongly influenced by the different doxa of the dominant model: cultural, economic, social and managerial. Economic rationality is based on the empire of calculation. For Voltaire (letter to Madame d’Épinal, Ferney 1760): “When it comes to money, the whole world has the same religion…”. Money represents Ariadne’s thread. Who controls money controls links and exchange! Money separates the dominators from the dominated, and it is an instrument of the action of people upon people. For Simmel (2011), money is the absolute means and the absolute goal, a new monotheism. Simmel did not discover money; he is nevertheless the first to grasp in all its magnitude the philosophy of culture which stems from it! We value an object according to its price, considered solely as a figure, a sum or a numeric quantity of currency. This mentality dominates management which claims to have proved its excellence,

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its superiority, as having revealed itself alone as capable of producing wealth. Quite obviously, we know that things did not happen like this. What we have observed over centuries is management in the service of capitalism, which has shown its superiority based on the extermination of tribes, conflict between nations and enslavement of peoples. Rational logic has become too often a closed and therefore dogmatic rationality, that is, one which absolutely does not admit being contradicted by any argument. No one spends their life maximizing or minimizing their utilities, their profits and their costs. No consumer is aware of all the goods on the market, their qualities and their flaws, and no one could be so aware. Human beings have sensitivity, instinct… We cannot explain everything! Dostoyevsky stated that if everything happened in the world rationally, nothing would happen. Bergson and Leibniz demonstrated, against Descartes and his disciples, the insufficiency of mechanistic physics which, by its very nature, can only take into account the external appearance of things and is unable to explain anything of their true essence. Rational management is incapable of considering the play of actors, complexity, emotions, etc. Management tends too much to bow before economic rationality. In firms, the constant reference remains shareholder value, which pushes the firm to become more “competitive”, that is, to always produce faster and in greater quantity per unit of time than its peers. Self-interest is set up as a guide! This vision produces problems of tension with morale. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith (2011) indicates that people are animated by their own interests, but that they tend to put themselves in the place of the other. They have an innate desire to improve their situation and their condition. They calculate their interests, but they also seek the approval of others. Following the works of Hobbes and Locke, the classical economists adopted the principle of utility that we can take up to situate the logics of action of homo economicus, an essential component of management. This latter always acts to obtain pleasure and to avoid pain! Bentham saw human action as the consequences of a cost/benefit calculation intended to obtain for its author the maximum of satisfaction for a given effort. For Smith, it was necessary to be selfish and individualistic because individual selfishness benefits the community. The self-interest/utility pairing dominates our modalities of managerial actions. According to Marcuse (2002), we are in the area of single thinking which kills any possibility of divergence. Positive thinking is identified as the

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one-dimensional thinking which marks management. For Heidegger, most people hide themselves from the following truth: they are mortal and biodegradable. The idea of the Beyond has the great advantage of offering an option for immortality; it is a little like a metaphysical joker. Letting oneself become absorbed in the daily grind of existence and the race for profit is another way of turning our gaze away from the ultimate deadline. But the authentic person, still according to Heidegger, is the one who dares to look their own death in the face, who even dares anticipate it. For Merleau-Ponty as for Heidegger, technology is at the same time the danger and that which saves us! Homo economicus becomes numericus. It is a cyborg with a virtual identity. Management has become an instrument in the service of production and consumption. However, a society which defines good as the maximal satisfaction of the largest number of people through the greatest consumption of goods and services mutilates personal autonomy. But why pick on management? Is it the only culprit? Obviously not, it allows us to respond to our needs. We want goods because we are primed from our childhood to want them. You need only visit a kindergarten to understand this. The accumulation of goods is based on the demonstration effect. According to Schumpeter (1987): “The system is certainly cruel, unjust, turbulent, but it provides goods, and stop grumbling since it is these goods that you want”. Schumpeter was right, but the production of wealth cannot be infinite! It is very difficult to imagine that our planet will be able to support eight million homo economicus, all living for maximum growth! How was this state of mind born? Do not forget that the Church, up until the 16th Century, was the largest landowner in all of Europe, the largest investor, the greatest builder, etc. and especially that it was a great power of inhibition. The Church issued several times anathema against handkerchiefs, linen and laughter. The most terrible was its condemnation of money lending. “You cannot be both a merchant and a good Christian”, “lend without expecting anything in return”. Lending money, designated as usury, was forbidden: trading money must not create wealth. For Pope Leo I “interest on money is the death of the soul”. The Torah, the Gospel and the Qur’an all condemn lending. In the Torah, it is forbidden for the chosen people to practice lending at interest among Jews, only authorizing it with foreigners. In Luther’s tradition, Calvin was the first to re-interpret the Bible. For Calvin, the

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use of capital has a price. Lending money is a service rendered, a cost deserving recompense. Money is not sterile. In the Letter on Usury (1545), Calvin recalls that “money is not only a medium of exchange… it is also a means of business, a condition of development…”. Calvin sets himself up against the scruples of conscience which inhibit exterior activity. In the field of the economy, Calvin refuses timidity. The order of the day is to make fruitful all the gifts of God. Calvin therefore caused a dramatic shift in the economic mentality of his time, in moving from sharing the wealth to the creation of wealth, and removing economic questions from the theological sphere. The culture of dissent based on disagreement marks the need to follow one’s conscience and one’s personal reason. Through dissent, the religious sphere is queried and gradually secularized. Previously, Europe shared a culture of consent (conformity of faith, submission to hierarchy, etc.). Do not forget Luther’s cry, “I was a saint, I killed no-one, unless it be myself”, which marked the beginning of the Reformation in the 16th Century and culminated in the 17th Century. Protestants thus separated themselves from Catholicism. But why did they invent the spirit of capitalism? They threw themselves into business because they were a persecuted minority. They had no other means of subsistence. They revolutionized the economic circuit like they revolutionized faith. Everyone must take charge of themselves, accumulate merits and rely only on their own prayers. The managerial doxa is thus influenced by three sources: Protestantism, rationalism and materialism. In religion, Protestantism promoted free choice. In the philosophical domain, rationalism and materialism stipulate that reason is superior in understanding events and facts through causal relationships. The intuitive dimension is disparaged. In the name of science and of rationalism, the moderns claim to have excluded all mystery from the world. Rationalism dates back to Descartes (1637), and it is to be noted that he has therefore been, since his origin, directly associated with the idea of a mechanistic physics. The capitalist spirit has a tendency to reduce everything to the quantitative viewpoint alone. This is the reign of quantity. According to Guénon (2004), after having closed off the physical world as completely as possible, it was necessary, while allowing no

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re-establishment of communication with the higher realms, to re-open it from below, so as to allow its penetration by the forces of the lower subtle realm (desires, whims, etc.) which push towards consumption and commodification. The disenchantment of the world leaves the individual prey to their desires, agitated by passions they cannot satisfy which incite him to wish for the impossible. For Durkheim, the individual has the malady of the infinite and is in perpetual torment. However, today, belief in indefinite progress, which was still held to be a sort of untouchable dogma, is no longer generally accepted. The absence of war on American soil, the Bretton Woods system, has let us believe for too long that the success of American firms was due to their managerial superiority. However, Anglo-American economy management lives off the exploitation of almost three and a half continents! Some foresee that finance capital and the dominant model of management could well arrive one day at a breaking point, or even collapse while threatening to pull down everything with them, and lead all of humanity into the vortex of its disordered activity. Faced with these quite pessimistic ideas, fighting the division between East and West may be an alternative. In fact, after the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989 and what Fukuyama called “the end of history”, a process of globalization began, starting in “rational” Western societies and extending to so-called “traditional” societies. This phenomenon was accompanied by a discourse which was often narcissistic, ethnocentric and messianic, according to which traditional societies should modernize so as to leave behind pre-capitalist, family, clannish and/or religious structures. Failing to imitate Western societies was tantamount to remaining enclosed in irrationality, even falling into the darkness. This great dogmatic axiom is a mirage which does not take into account the complexities of the understanding and evolution of the world. It greatly contributes to the elaboration and consolidation of what Corm calls the imaginary divide between East and West. In this configuration, the East is mystical, irrational and violent, while the West is rational, secular, technological and democratic. The truth is that there have always been diverse and multiple civilizations, and each has developed in its own way. But distinction does not mean opposition. There

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must be an understanding between the two spheres, because this coming together may be truly deep and effective for management. The dominant management needs to be defended, but only against itself and against its own tendencies. It is thus the reconstruction of management that must be developed, and this would consequently lead to reconciliation with the East, because the up-to-now hegemonic West must accept sharing power with the re-emerging world. This means the end of two and a half centuries of absolute domination exerted by Europe and then by the United States over the world. During almost all the last century, Washington has dominated global economics, politics, science and culture. For the last 20 years, this dominance has not been shared. The world was seen through the eyes of the BBC or CNN. We understood it thanks to Time or Newsweek. Now, with the return of the East and the emergence of others6 (Japan, China, India), several visions of the world are emerging. During the next few decades, three of the four leading world economies (Japan, China and India) will not be Western (Zakaria 2009). The whole world takes part in the game. The data have changed, calling the old schemas into question. The same goes for Anglo-Saxon management, which we must cease to take as the unique, the only, true version. This is a subterfuge reinforced by the reflex of many researchers and theorists to systematically associate the diversity of management practices with adjectives such as “regional” or “quaint”! What the East and the Far East do better must be known, not to be copied without discernment, but to be understood in its fundamentals! This means, therefore, thinking of remodeling management based on the Mediterranean ethos: understanding how to play the game of management another way, by marrying the future without divorcing the past. The Mediterranean has been seen for centuries as the frontier between two civilizations and two worlds: the European and Christian West, and the Arab-Muslim East. For centuries, the mutual perceptions of the societies which have developed on its two shores have been characterized by a sense of otherness, developed and expressed through reciprocal “visions”. This sentiment, which has not prevented the existence of multiple and ongoing contacts – commercial, political, cultural, the latter two reserved mainly for elites – has however not disappeared, transforming and reforming itself all the more thanks to these same contacts, according to Pacini (2008).

6 “L’ascension des autres” – expression taken from Fareed Zakaria (2009).

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These encounters may become beneficial for the dominant management, restoring it to a human face. In this perspective, the Mediterranean as a concept needs to be deconstructed in order to avoid the traps of the virtual and of essentialist discourse. From Tangiers to Istanbul, from Marseilles to Alexandria, from Naples to Barcelona, what are the different strata that have shaped and are still shaping the representations of the Mediterranean? The Mediterranean was first conceived by France through a political, military and commercial vision, and also around the idea of civilization. Napoleon invented for his expedition to Egypt the idea of a civilizing mission, the military and commercial enterprise rejecting cultural and intellectual attributes. The Saint-Simonians followed in the wake of Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt: they made the journey to the East and gave shape to a Mediterranean system based on the meeting of East and West. According to Chevalier, the Mediterranean must become the nuptial bed of East and West. For the countries of the northern shore, heterogeneity of representations is the rule. The European peoples grasped the concept of the Mediterranean according to their own history and the needs of the moment, as shown by Moisseron and Bayoumi (2012). Mare Nostrum was only the sea of the Romans! The theme of Mare Nostrum was naturally exploited by Fascist Italy, which relied on the Roman myth to structure itself. The South of Italy had been long neglected by the North, which claimed to be Italy’s anchorage to Europe. Spain was built in the Reconquista, in opposition to the Arab world. For the Greeks, the Mediterranean was the arena of conflict with the Ottoman enemy. For the Southern countries, representations were marked by their own histories. For Turkey, the sea symbolized the decadence of the Ottoman Empire. The people of the countries of the Maghreb and the Mashreq considered themselves Arabs and Muslims. The concept of the Mediterranean might find relevance among the elites of the Arab world. These dynamics fed the imaginary, which is an intermediate realm between factual discourse and fictional discourse (Deleuze). Between history and fiction, the Mediterranean has become a representation too often seen from the viewpoint of its Latin substrate! However, speaking of the Latin Mediterranean often involves relegating the southern shore (the Orient and Islam) to the margins of civilization. The southern shore of the Mediterranean too often signifies underdevelopment, resistance to modernization, amoral clannism, clientelism, mafia, systematic illegality and

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inability to develop. It is a swamp full of conflicts, terrorists, superstitions and fundamentalism. Leaving is the only remedy. Arabs resist the other, the enemy, the eternal thief in an endless circle. Each party is the other’s infidel. One of the most disturbing myths of the West aims to establish a clear distinction between the values of Judeo-Christian civilization and those of the East in general and of Islam in particular. However, Islam has the same origins as Judaism and Christianity. It shares not only their origin, but also many of their values. It is difficult to imagine thinking about a Mediterranean with this East devalued and relegated to inferiority. For Camus, the Mediterranean is diffuse and turbulent. North Africa is one of the only areas where East and West co-habit. In Le Sel de la Mer, Gabriel Audisio recalls that the Mediterranean has two basins: the eastern and the western, the sunset sea and the sunrise sea. Two geographic poles, two spiritual poles. But a current may arise and circulate between the two poles. The role of the sea was always not to separate but to join. Audisio refuses to reduce the Mediterranean to the genius of the Romans! For him, Mediterranean civilization includes Greece, Egypt, Carthage, Christ, Islam, etc. The Mediterranean must not refuse the Semitic East! Why separate the Greco-Latin and Semitic worlds? Here, we are not making an apology for either one, but rather surpassing and transcending the differences to form a new management approach, which would go beyond the myth of rationality and the civilizing mission of management which must save humanity through the creation of wealth, because it holds on to truth in the face of bewilderment and incoherence. Montesquieu opposed the genius of European liberty to the spirit of Oriental servitude. Weber considered Europe as a whole to be gifted with specificities such as rationality and the economic ethic, while Oriental systems of caste and kinship as much as religious morality paralyzed this growth. This vision has been the frame of analysis of many sociologists, historians and economists. They based their reflections and works on lines marking the differences between the various parts of the world. Socio-cultural characteristics which often served as demarcations thus fueled binary thought. In fact, there are still modern and traditional societies, advanced and archaic managerial practices. However, these categories do not take into account common heritage, and have contributed to qualifying Eastern categories as “primitive”. This binary division needs to be re-examined with care, because this type of grid does

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not systematically correspond to the actual contexts. Situations, individuals and whole societies often slide from one category towards another, while intermingling. Remember that Evans-Pritchard (2002) showed that the West did not have exclusive possession of the privilege of rationality. Too often, many specialists, directly or indirectly, question the managerial skills of the countries of the southern shore: are they capable of accessing our development? This assumes treating under-developed countries like big children. It means a grotesquely warped portrait, a stereotyped representation which most often aims to keep them in an absolute state of infantilization and thus of submission. This most often corresponds to a means of disguising a desire for power. Tradition and freedom are not incompatible: with the “Arab Spring”, the peoples defied repression wrapped in the flags of their nations. They displayed their national rootedness and their universalistic openness of mind. The values they proclaimed belong neither to the West nor the East, they are universal. So, how can we shut these people away in identitarianism and archaism? Approaching management from Eastern sources through the Mediterranean may allow the reconciliation of techniques and discernment. Management must accept pooling the differences between West and East, without seeking to erase them. It must also pool the resemblances which we too often avoid highlighting. Must we recall that Eastern societies have never excluded commercial activities, and that new systems of production have appeared there (Malaysia, China, Japan, India, etc.)? Development is prevented neither by systems of values nor by a pseudo-absence of economic ethics and rationality. It is, really, not prevented by anything. There are no static societies incapable of modernity. Must we recall the temporary nature of advances, Western as well as Eastern? Goody (2010) shows, rightly, that no region can be considered to be responsible alone for the birth of modern society. If there are differences in intensity, there has never been a clear separation between given societies. The East is not lacking in economic rationality in the Weberian sense! It simply differs in its development and its forms of application. Obviously, it is essential not to confuse nostalgia for the past with a spirit of authenticity. For the East accepts the machines, the products and

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the consumption of the West. But it has some reluctance as to what the West considers their preconditions – critical thought, secularization – which many theologians consider incompatible with the foundations of religion. The great problem of the East today is therefore the divorce, which might worsen, between the positions of doctrine and the actual progress of the world or of the Muslim world itself. The East has turned its eyes to God, but has not seen the world. The West has penetrated the material world and has fled God. Muhammed Iqbal proposed to reconstruct Islam, not to get rid of its fundamental principles, but rather to revive them by replacing dogmatism with a rational, critical approach. This involves looking at the fundamental ideas of Islam in the light of the modern successes of contemporary science on nature, time, spirit, consciousness, etc. Iqbal uses the term reconstruction rather than that of reformation. Such a choice is no accident. Iqbal believes that the Reformation led to a loss of the essential values of Christianity. He does not want this process to re-occur with Islam, but for him, the world must be constructed and reconstructed through permanent action. Iqbal insists on the fact that modernity cannot be a content to imitate. This refusal includes both imitations of a tradition and of external models. Modernity is not a norm to which one must conform, but rather a mirror held out to a society. It involves moving with various advances and thus going against static habits of thought, backward-looking stubbornness and dogmatic contraction. The sphere of values must not die, it must only live. A “step” must be taken by the West towards the “encounter” with the East, so as to recognize its right to adhere to universal values which agree with its cultural references. The second approach supposes a “step” coming from the East to “come to the encounter” with the West, through which it will have to rethink its references and its spheres of values in a world in constant change. The managerial capitalist firm, like its model of management, essentially rests on the concept of performance and the idea of infinity. Infinity of the world and of surpassing oneself in the cult of urgency and always more, always faster and always perfect (Aubert 2009). The work of Peters and Waterman (2004) presents these imperatives. Being good is no longer enough. We must be the best! Now, many people are not able to keep up with this pace! They find themselves exhausted physically and mentally, consumed by this immense giving of self. Aubert speaks of self-combustion,

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whose principal indicators are the increase in requests for a reduction in distress and in speed, and the increase in need for dialog and solidarity. However, the Mediterranean ethos seems to respond to these new demands. The characteristics of the Mediterranean ethos are based on certain principles and values, including in particular the use of talk, conversation, and especially rootedness, which allows us to not exceed the limits of the human! The Mediterranean ethos may allow us to find what musicians call tempo giusto, a good pace, going fast when our activity demands it and in allowing pauses (Honoré). Homo economicus is guided by the law of self-interest and a mercantile mentality. For homo reciprocus, one wins on condition of not adopting the schema of individual self-interest, of not calculating. Gifts “create” social relationships. Gifts have a socializing force which rest on the capacity to tame the de-socializing force of self-interest. In the Mediterranean, exchange concerns not only self-interest but also the relationship that the exchange implies. There is as much reciprocity, affectivity and recognition as calculation. It is impossible to stick to a strictly monetary and strategic relationship. Exchanges between people have all the more value in that they relate to other interests (social, ecological, etc.). They consider the interests at stake, but they also address, directly or indirectly, the humanity of the protagonists. A transaction is not organized solely by instrumental rationality. It is therefore a specific transaction, since it is embedded in a social relationship. The individual is not atomized, but rather socialized in the sense given by Charles Taylor for whom every individual is social in essence. Taylor places himself in the extension of the Aristotelian doctrine of man as a social and political animal, not self-contained. Individuals only develop their properly human capacities in society, because only that gives them the conditions for the development of rationality and morality. In the Mediterranean, managerial practices are generally based on a vast informal communication network which allows people to exchange, to touch the real more closely, and to resolve problems in a very spontaneous way and in real time. Talk finds a space where it can flourish, while in the organizational configurations of the canonical managerial model, it is remote-controlled or even confiscated.

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The Anglo-Saxon managerial doxa very often promotes the absence of dialog, which marks an accentuation of the commodification of people and of the relations between people. In particular, it involves a simulacrum of “dialog”, often imposed by the hierarchy. Many employees and executives are convinced that it is useless to say what they think because they are not listened to. In the Mediterranean ethos, the notions of exchange and interaction are essential. “Talking” and “speaking one’s mind” are considered essential factors in a social climate of quality. The peoples of the Mediterranean address each other and consult each other. Among Muslims, we meet here one of the variations on the principle of shura, which can be translated as “(principle of) consultation”. Within firms, Mediterraneans value information that they obtain through personal contact more than through formal channels. Human exchange is not a system of exchange of neutral signals between equally neutral transmitters and receivers. The notions of local and global are rethought in the context of a process in motion instead of being considered as fixed entities. The problem for leaders and employees is not to remain rooted, nor even to participate in a shifting world, but rather to create a link between these two dimensions and to manage the meeting of the “rational” and the “marvelous” where the sacred prevails. Globalization is met by a return to the local. There is a shift from nomadism towards sedentarity, which corresponds to the need for firm territory in which to take root. Heidegger spoke of a “step back” to qualify this return to roots and foundations. Nietzsche used the image of the “circle of time” to express the eternal return. Maffesoli proposed the image of the “spiral” to define a return to the roots that one had believed to be transcended. A return which reminds us that we are dependent on what came before us. However, this rootedness must be dynamic, so as to struggle against ossifying habits and the loss of constructive impulse. Dynamic rootedness allows people to remain open and to take advantage of new elements. Existing means going out of oneself. Rootedness must not be a deathly confinement. A human being comes from somewhere, and their creativity comes from this place of links and references. To give meaning, it is fundamental that this substrate be interrogated or even transgressed. This means a complementary ambivalence between the static and the dynamic.

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Territory, the local, must serve as a base and not become a prison. The Mediterranean perfectly symbolizes this dynamic rootedness. It is at the same time a “bridge” and a “door”. The bridge allows one place to be connected to the rest of the world and to globalization. The door corresponds to the need to sometimes separate oneself from this world to find oneself at home. The Mediterranean testifies to this ritual of passage between closedness and openness, sedentarity and nomadism, movement and stability. In the Mediterranean, the productive fabric is essentially composed of small enterprises (SEs) which permanently adapt themselves to a changing environment. This requires permanent creativity which they do not necessarily seek to put a value on nor to formalize. SEs have an often intuitive approach based on their experience and the relation of proximity they maintain with their customers. These firms must achieve sustainability through specific capacities for innovation, including in particular maintaining internal stability of values and culture. It involves prudential innovation, which corresponds to the capacity for self-renewal without moving too far away from the competences and values shared within and by the company (Miller and Le Breton-Miller 2006; Ben Mahmoud-Jouini et al. 2010). It is necessary to preserve the essence and stimulate progress. This balance between change and continuity is at the heart of the process of many firms rooted in the Mediterranean territories. Civilizations are diverse and multifaceted. But once again, distinction does not mean opposition. No population has a monopoly on beauty, science, progress or intelligence. We must refuse the construction of hierarchies, intellectual and cultural imperialism. Let us avoid drifting into the excesses of culture or the perversion of culture. The spheres of values are not at all disembodied; they are conveyed by people motivated by all sorts of interests and living in determined historical contexts. The system always seeks to create radicalism to feed perceptions. The perversion of the intellect conditions the interpretation of self and other, a victimized self and a demonized other. In this schema, the possibilities offered are the acceptance of sinking into the dominant ideology, or imprisonment in the chains of refusal of otherness. Both are the source of failure and alienation. We must emerge and assert ourselves as forces of renewal and proactivity! We must awaken the activity of the sleeping mind.

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The Mediterranean, the crossroads of civilizations, may play a role in this awakening. It is difficult to affirm the superiority of reason over all other forms of thought or belief. It is preferable to speak of light upon light (noorun ‘alaa noor), understood as the mutual enlightenment of the lights of the East and the West. Mediterraneans must realize and assume that they currently have a decisive role to play, a treasury of experiences to transmit to serve as mediators between the two shores. The Mediterranean allows us to stand between rational thought and spiritual intuition. Let us put an end to polarization! The Mediterranean offers the possibility of thinking the relations between the sphere of values and aspirations to liberty. Do not forget that during the Arab Spring, hundreds of thousands of women and men mobilized for democracy! This should be enough to break down tired stereotypes and tenacious prejudices! We must learn, contribute and make proposals without thinking in terms of a master and a student. It is imperative to break free of intellectual straitjackets and false divisions which prevent us exploring new paths, new horizons together. Let us have the capacity for transformation instead of more adaptation. 3.3. Neither adoration, nor submission, but self-realization Following the work of Taylor and Fayol, which we will look at a little more closely, does there not appear to be (and more than implicitly) a strong “invitation to feel guilty” in the workplace? Guilty of not being a “loyal worker” or “top-class”, of “not giving a loyal day to work”, of not having shown this “automatic” attachment to the company, to its leaders, to militaristic discipline, of not being mobilized enough, productive enough, competitive enough? Everywhere and in all its forms, the leaders – directors managers, etc. – then appear as the guardians of maintaining this feeling of guilt. They can only be “motivators – responsible – deciders, etc.” when, necessarily, the “others” are incapable of being those things. Therefore, logically, constantly in a state of guilt for not so being. This is something managerial language never ceases to remind us of by designating “employees of the month”, by authorizing “rewards for performance”, promotions “on merit”, etc. It is possible to envisage a link between the concepts of a system of value judgments and of leadership. They allow us to understand how the employee–leader relationship is woven. For Nietzsche, morality is a “system of value judgments which is related to the conditions of existence of a

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being”. Morality imposed by the dominant class finds an echo in the dominated elements because it is “appropriate” for them, and it satisfies their “condition of existence”. In a firm, cultures are shaped by leaders who disseminate norms and values. They are assimilated and integrated by means of a process of organizational socialization. This value system is rarely questioned, diagnosed and/or evaluated. The “appreciation” of value does not entirely belong to the employees. Values are adopted through fear and/or imitation and they rarely change. They constitute a pseudo-solid mooring, allowing us to fit into the “herd”. This “imposed morality” promotes conservatism, duplication and the maintenance of statuses and roles (deification/reification). A rebellious and disagreeable spirit is obviously rejected. To become part of the collective dynamic and be accepted, the employee must become a lamb, glorify the herd and become harmless. The leader, the guardian of the managerial doxa (“imposed morality”), must reduce and eliminate the danger represented by an unmanageable employee, that is, one who does not respond to any known rule. In this perspective, the leader imposes rules and values on employees so as to integrate them into a known whole. Leadership is envisaged as a phenomenon which calls and leads every individual to the norms imposed by and for the mass of employees. Leadership bridles, shapes, mutilates and makes people compatible and useful for management. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche (2010) distinguishes a master morality from a slave morality. The first is characterized, among other things, by self-affirmation and freedom of the mind. The second morality has the principal traits of degeneracy and incapacity to accept one’s condition. It is the morality of “the man sick of himself” which results in “nihilism”. It is also called the “decadent morality”. In the dominant management model, the leader relies on, shapes, nurtures and promotes “decadent morality” so as to hold sway over the employees. This system of value judgment requires docile and silent employees. No singularities, just standardized originalities. This system appears as a social construction whose foundations can be found in a tyrannical compulsion which tends to impose itself on others. Despite managerial domestication, instincts continue to advance masked. They crawl in the shadows. They have not been annihilated.

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For Freud as for Nietzsche, drives and instincts are spurs which stimulate the human being. They come up against the barriers imposed by “morality”. Within companies, drives which are not completely erased by society and management can reorient themselves, become internalized and generate guilt. According to Nietzsche, this latter engenders nihilism, an appalling pathology that pushes the human being to self-disgust. For Freud, it is the source of neurosis stimulated by guilt, which corresponds to a painful conscience, a “bad conscience”. The feeling of guilt is due to those singular faculties of human beings which are the capacity for “internalization” and the repression of drives. Instincts that are not liberated externally turn inwards. The development of the internal world of the human being grows and is amplified. Nietzsche speaks of “spiritualization”. In Freudian terminology, this phenomenon is called “repression of drives”. The drive is “introjected”, that is, redirected to where it came from. It is then supported and monitored by a part of the ego (an internal section) which is opposed to the rest of the ego as to the superego. These drives are converted to become socially and culturally acceptable. This is what Freud calls “sublimation”. However, there may be a significant tension between the strict superego and the ego which is submitted to it. This opposition is named consciousness of guilt. The morality promoted by leaders is an arbitrary convention. An employee must strive to criticize the firm’s culture, and to define what values may be suitable for them. This approach relates to Nietzsche’s “transvaluation” (dissecting the values in place to create new ones, more suitable to life and to the will to power). In other words, making money, as fast and as much as possible, for a boss or for shareholders has never been and will never be a motivating, mobilizing and galvanizing “cause” in itself, in no way! When will we admit this? Until proved otherwise, “making money” just to make money not only has nothing glorious nor philanthropic about it, but has strictly no meaning, since money is only a simple means and not an end! Meaning (do not forget that the human being is a being of meaning) can only be found in the “goals” envisaged by means of making money, not in its simple accumulation.

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The dominant model of leadership thus produces anxiety, frustration and distress through attempting to permanently induce guilt in employees (it is enough to think about the epidemics of burnout, stress, depression and suicides in workplaces). To try to find new meaning, an “orientation” for leadership, we propose directing our gaze towards the Mediterranean, towards its conceptions of the world and its arts of living, which still represent a well of wisdom and virtue, despite the vices and defects which are imputed to them. “Another” leadership can be observed, through certain distinctive features, among the leaders of very small enterprises in the Mediterranean and Africa. Our observations have led us to identifying an apparently greater legitimacy… On what is this based? Why (functionality) and for what (meaning/goals) do they direct their team differently from the way to which “traditional management” has accustomed us? Is there a hidden source of inspiration for firms of larger size? There we find a management “with a more human face” which appears to enhance the involvement of employees. This “Mediterranean director” is generally considered paternalistic and/or “omnipotent”, in a meaning close to what we ascribe to a “paternal-benevolent figure”. Our objective here is to try to go beyond these feelings and to expose, if possible, other distinctive traits, insisting more on concepts such as (and we will return to this) “relational fluidity” and “social exchange”. The mode of management most frequently practiced in the Mediterranean (here we mean countries-regions around the Mediterranean basin in general, and the Maghreb in particular) does not correspond to the fundamentals of the “reference” management taught in business handbooks. The results of companies located on its banks are hardly considered attractive. And yet, the Mediterranean continues to inspire reflections from some managers who have imbibed the corporate scriptures. The Mediterranean fishbowl provides managers with examples which stimulate and reassure them. Without denying the forms of real subjugation which can exist in any company, leadership by managers of VSEs (very small enterprises) in the Mediterranean offers the possibility of integrating tasks with outcomes. This then requires relational fluidity combining presence, proximity, exchange, a capacity to deduce rules from weak and subtle signals, and mutual support.

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Managers of Mediterranean VSEs (according to observations and surveys that we have performed in approximately 50 firms in the regions of Tangiers-Tétouan, Oran and Bizerte, during periods from 2002 to 2009) are, above all, characterized by the fact of being omnipresent. They devote a lot of time to observing, questioning and listening to various people. They thus have good knowledge of the realities of daily life. They rely on a vast informal communication network which allows people to exchange, to touch the real more closely, to resolve problems in a very spontaneous way and in real time. Managing people does not only consist of establishing and refining “steering systems” and “dashboards”. The leaders we speak of not only do not confine their role to this sort of thing, but also simplify or even eliminate formalities and procedures so as to get closer and make their relationships with employees more direct, more numerous and more fluid. In fact, it means hierarchical decompartmentalization. The so-called “HRM” here is first of all a story of relationships, of contacts, of listening and of face-toface communication. Building relationships does not require the actors to share the same interests. It requires the ability to create doorways through communication and thanks to talk. This relational fluidity seems to also facilitate control of the internal environment of the firm, thanks to direct collection of information and suggestions. It allows us to identify the unsaid which sometimes has a lot to say, and to better identify the different personalities of the group. This way of being-doing may also allow better mastery of temporal rhythms, being much less involved in urgency and rushing. These leaders have a sense of measure, of seeking the Aristotelian “golden mean” which is so dear to non-Western socio-cultures in general, and to the Mediterranean-East in particular. Within large companies and in conformity with the dominant management, rapid action, even activism, appear as exalted superior values. A manager cannot take time for reflection nor for real patient listening (it is enough to recall the hyperactive frenzy of the “typical effective manager” described by H. Mintzberg in his classic The Nature of Managerial Work (1997)). Succeeding in leadership management which breaks with such an approach calls for the leader to have legitimacy. Their human qualities must be recognized and appreciated. They must understand and decipher the concerns, emotions, feelings, hopes and expectations of employees. This involves hearing and understanding, on the ground, things that dashboards cannot show.

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The ethos or behavior of people is linked to collective values and representations. These latter are, for their part, linked to a specific history. Values vary with the frictions-fusions between tradition and modernity. They determine certain types of behaviors and actions. As for ethos, it influences attitudes which relate to work, to acts of sociability and solidarity, to the expression of feelings, etc. It is thus revealed in multiple rules of conduct. We believe that the Mediterranean ethos corresponds to a set of values and attitudes. We recognize a halo of common values which make Mediterranean societies comparable: the division of gender roles, honor, shame, modesty, violence and practices of vengeance, a social and affective universe based on contact with others, a sense of measure, the cult of “saints”, “virgins” and “martyrs”. Ethnologists have contributed to defining the values which characterize social relationships in Mediterranean countries. Yet, are these values specific to Mediterranean societies? Some researchers doubt it. In our meaning, these values are particularly emphasized in most Mediterranean societies. They are more significant there, in different intensities and modulations. Despite contemporary developments, this ethos is still present as a backdrop which orients daily actions and behaviors7. Knowing that “value added”, productivity, innovation, etc., can only come from what the synergistic collective intelligence of employees is able to and “desires” to give, it seems important to identify the way in which managers incite the managed to be creative, vigilant, faithful, involved in what they do for their company. The manager/managed relationship is essential for all organizations because it contributes to improvements in the level of performance, the climate of work and the behavior of employees, or even the increase in personal commitment and accountability. Several works have studied different dimensions of the exchange between managers and managed. In contrast, it appears that relatively few works analyze the manager/managed relationship through considering the influence of ethos. It thus seems important to avoid approaches to manager/managed relationships only established on the basis of organizational activities, independent of “contextual” aspects. Our approach is opposed to the perception of an

7 Frimousse (2013).

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atomized manager, and considers them, on the contrary, as actors embedded in an ethos which shapes them. This means deepening the territory/business dimension. In particular, it involves interrogating the manager/employee relationship in the very small enterprises (VSEs) of the northern region of Morocco. VSEs are often discussed in terms of ideas of proximity. Ideas of proximity and omnipresence are not ways of operation unique to Mediterranean VSEs. The Mediterranean has no monopoly over these traits. At most, it is possible to state that Mediterranean firms do possess these characteristics and that they worry less than others about concealing this reality. Employees and managers in the Maghreb reason and experience like any other employees and managers, but they distinguish themselves by being embedded in another context, another ethos. Societies are not impermeable to each other. Ethos is not suspended outside of time. It is not destined to eternally reproduce itself. The phenomena of industrialization, rural exodus, urbanization, instruction as well as the emergence of a generation in which people progressively become detached from the group, mean we should consider the Mediterranean ethos outside of a strictly local framework. On the contrary, we must study it while considering global influences. At the moment of a transaction, the good being exchanged and its monetary counterpart is clearly defined by a contract. Exchange is reciprocal and freely consented to. The individual remains a homo economicus in search of optimization/maximization of their profits. The main limitation of this logic is the absence of consideration of non-economic exchanges. Within a company, employees generally seek symbolic and/or psychological rewards. A manager generally holds power (employment). By refusing to grant this resource, the manager exercises their power. Conversely, the employee may refuse to offer their skills to the manager. In these situations of exchange or non-exchange, the power relationship predominates. The manager has the capacity to require and/or to compel their employee without there being any reciprocal exchange. Threats and sanctions are used as modes of pressure. Exchange is thus here negative-sum, asymmetric and without reciprocity, since the configuration is more favorable to one of the parties. A stable and lasting manager/employee relationship cannot

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rely on a power dynamic, since the disadvantaged actor will seek to leave this configuration. Gift theory allows us to grasp the interaction between economic and non-economic exchanges. An individual exchanges based on self-interest. However, this interest not only concerns economic goods, but also focuses on symbolic and psychological “goods”. Gift exchanges involve an implicit contract between economic actors. The gift invokes an immediate or deferred compensation, whose nature is not defined at the time of the exchange. The procedure and the contract are informal, implicit and uncertain. Exchanges between manager and employee may involve a gift of economic goods (salaries, contributions), which may in turn engender a counter-gift of non-economic goods (protection, loyalty/faithfulness). The notions of support and reciprocity also allow us to understand the mechanisms of the manager/managed relationship. Individuals feel the need or obligation to help those who have helped them. Employees determine to which extent the company and its representatives value their contributions and are concerned with their well-being, and thus adjust their behaviors and attitudes based on this evaluation. Works of contemporary economic sociology allow us to envisage entrepreneurial activity as socially situated. The manager/managed relationship is a social practice rooted in a space-time, that is, a society, a culture and a history. The subject is never a substance separate from the world around it. Everywhere in North Africa, the sphere of values provides the atmosphere which surrounds private, social and professional life. Laws, rules, ways of living, rituals and feasts are the explicit expression of the ethos and behaviors which are allowed and culturally approved. Several currents of thought have contributed to the emergence of the notion of the Mediterranean as a frame of study. It essentially involves the humanist movement which is attentive to historical periods of encounters, tolerance and cross-fertilization symbolized by Andalusia, and the dynamic movement devoted to the appreciation of perennial elements in marriage structure, rituals, gender roles, etc. The notion of substrate emphasizes this unifying conception. Currently, the Mediterranean world is understood as a system of complementary differences. The unifying conception of the Mediterranean is based on common traits, recurrent resemblances observed over the long term. It involves the existence of a common backdrop composed of similar values and

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behaviors: (1) the role of formal structures and that of informal relationships; (2) patronage or clientelism (which corresponds to an asymmetric relationship of relative submission between a patron and client, in which the former provides protection to the latter while the latter offers their support in return); the forms of religiosity and popular devotions (pilgrimage, cult of saints, etc.); gender roles (the maternal role of women is at the heart of a system of relationships. Mothers are revered and adulated. Maternity brings status. Women are mothers-above-all and men are sons-above-all); and (3) oral literature (tales, etc.); musical traditions (polyphony, etc.). Are these values specific to Mediterranean societies? Certainly not. They are even universally distributed. However, these elements are given a singular emphasis in Mediterranean contexts. These values are more in evidence there, and more intense. They are at the same time explicit and implicit, and they guide actions and behavior. We believe that the cultural background of the Northern Morocco region of Tangiers-Tétouan is part of the common Mediterranean ethos. Social values are not eternal. However, despite the changes that Maghrebian societies have experienced, mores and attitudes persist beyond the material conditions which engendered them. The logic of allegiance, of solidarity and of the sacredness of dignity is always very present. Relationships between the community and family groups are based on social links, and more precisely on kinship. A member of the community is one who is related or allied to it. The household and the village are the units of daily life, work, ownership and management of resources. These are the most important forums of social life. To quote the Arab proverb: “Me against my brothers; me and my brothers against my cousins; me, my brothers and my cousins against the whole world”. Certainly, the ancient forms of solidarity have without doubt fallen into disuse with the rural exodus and the urbanization of life. However, at the same time, other solidarities are emerging, still articulated around ‘asabiyya, the spirit of group belonging. For Ibn Khaldun (North African historian and sociologist of the 14th Century), the spirit of belonging is only seen among people united by blood ties or by something similar. Influenced by these feelings, they support each other, and they give each other mutual aid. Averroes, the Arab-Berber philosopher of Andalusia, insisted on the notions of umma (community) and of wasat (the middle ground). These ideas are also present in the work of Ibn Khaldun, who insists on the role of guardian of organic community solidarity which the prince must assume for his people so as to avoid national dislocation.

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Averroes, the great commentator on Aristotle, strengthened and disseminated his famous distinction between economics and chrematistics. The term “economics” etymologically derives from the Greek oikos and nomia, meaning the norms of behavior for the well-being of the community. Chrematistics corresponds to the accumulation of the means of acquisition. For Aristotle, humanity is a political animal made to live together in a state of community. In the chrematistic attitude, the oikos disappears, to leave in its place khréma and atos. Chrematistic practice thus favors the financial dimension to the detriment of other dimensions, particularly the social. Aristotle feared that the unbridled pursuit of the accumulation of currency would become the main goal of human activity, dehumanizing those who engaged in it and excluding them from the community. The ideas of Aristotle, Averroes and Ibn Khaldun find an echo in all Maghrebian societies in which to exist means to be affiliated and to have honor. Someone who is ashamed wishes to hide or mask the reason for their shame. In this context, guilt and anger are the mechanisms generally used. Shame is a product of the external gaze. It involves a state of anxiety due to fear of being excluded from the group of belonging following a guilty act which calls into question the person in their entirety. Shame produces the feeling of abandonment and fleeing the gaze of others. The fundamental emotions specific to the human race are universal. However, they do not express themselves in the same way everywhere in the world. They are thus socially and culturally rooted. It is imperative to grasp the range and meaning of emotions in their socio-cultural context. Honor is a form of symbolic capital. It includes three realities: the individual feeling of one’s own value; the social conduct which stems from it and allows measurement and adjustment of this feeling; finally, a moral value which is socially defined and recognized. Honor assigns to women the conservation and preservation of the family honor through an attitude of reserve, of modesty, of avoiding places or occasions during which this honor might be put at risk. To men is assigned the restoration or maintenance of the honor of the group. Honor is thus a set of ideas and values which guide the action of individuals and groups in a given society. Honor may be analyzed in terms of challenge and counter-challenge, that is, like a system of exchange. Honorable conduct is manifested in verbal jousting, ostentatious spending and forms of violence.

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In the countries of the Maghreb and in Africa in general, the domestic world is the dominant framework. The references are family, tradition and elders. Within a firm, agents have a strong affective demand towards their superiors. In the domestic world, individuals need to co-ordinate to know themselves. The elaboration of references and of a common culture allows mutual comprehension embodied in customs, tradition and relationships of loyalty and trust. A happy person is rarely content with happiness; they also feel the need to have a right to it. Happiness wants to be legitimate. For a manager, this has several implications. First of all, power must be legitimized by those who “submit” to it. Then, if social actors recognize the legitimacy of a person’s power, this representation has an impact on their behavior. Finally, this legitimate power is considered to be a material and symbolic asset that we must systematically justify and express at the risk, in case of absence, of provoking a legitimacy crisis! In the Maghreb, this legitimacy draws on the sacred concept of baraka, which is a form of supernatural power which enables the performance of wonders and miracles. It is a divine blessing. Legitimacy therefore encompasses material interest and above all symbolic interest. Ethos is important for assessing the degree of legitimacy. This latter corresponds to adhesion and conformity with social values. Every great culture is constituted of borrowings, interference, rejection and fascination with what the Other brings to it or imposes on it. Between the two shores of the Mediterranean, there is still a tendency first of all to refuse the other, then to let oneself be seduced, not without reluctance. Each part is at the same time the double and the infidel of the other. These are the mirror games which lie between fascination and repulsion. The manager/managed relationship is not exempt from this rule. It involves a fluid relationship nested between so-called universal forms of management training originating from the northern shore and the contingencies of the southern shore. Our observations of manager/managed relationships in VSEs of the northern region of Morocco suggest that these influences interpenetrate and are embodied on the basis of the Mediterranean ethos. In general, within Moroccan companies, the leader of a VSE is often considered an exploiter, a dishonest person. They are moreover often referred to as “kersh lahram” (belly filled by theft). The manager exercises their authority in a feudalized company with their intermediaries of power and their subjects. Orders,

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omnipresence in all tasks and operations, punitive control, centralization of decision-making. Our research shows that this vision is very reductive, and that it does not reflect the current realities of a society in the midst of transformation, in which the sphere of values and the economic sphere interact. The manager/managed relationship takes place in the context of economic, social and symbolic relationships. Reciprocity, legitimacy and honor are elements of the process of interwoven and embedded exchanges. So as to articulate the challenges of the global with contingencies, the managers we met practice containment and translation, which quite often result in hybridization that gives birth to something different and new. Yet, there exists a tenacious opinion according to which management, born in Western firms, has not entirely penetrated into Eastern companies, in other words, firms belonging to the Arab-Muslim world. Thus, the disappointing results often recorded among the latter. The principal defect imputed to firms in the south and the east of the Mediterranean pertains to the mode of command practiced by directors general, in other words, the source of evil is bad exercise of leadership. In fact, according to many observers, Eastern and more particularly Maghrebian companies are ruled by a despotic command which blocks employee initiative and contributes to miring the management of these firms in mediocrity. In contrast, in Western companies, management is all the more efficient when margins of autonomy are granted to employees. Expert opinion is not always so entrenched on this question, but the negative cliché remains very common. We know that the idea of oriental despotism was born in the century of the enlightenment, with Montesquieu. Originally, the image of this mode of command was that of a beneficial addition of power due to the capacity imputed to it to mobilize all of society’s resources. Its contemporary image is quite the opposite. Despotism is considered an oppressive system which obeys the law of diminishing returns. We will see what the sources of this defect are, then we will examine how, conversely, Western management magnifies the role of liberty. They are very numerous. Some apply to defects that are supposed to be inherent in the Muslim religion. Other concerns the opposition between a quite mythical “East” and “West”. According to Henri Sérouya (1962), resignation is the characteristic most specific to Islamic society, as this

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attitude of acceptance of fate gives its name8 to the religion itself. For Sérouya, the God of Islam possesses the fundamental characteristics of omnipotence and incomprehensibility. The God of the Muslims, according to this author, is One, the Unique. However, He is more than the God of the Bible, although He is merciful. Allah is a powerful and terrible God, whose anger destroys rebels in an instant. Moreover, His designs are impenetrable to us. Man must abstain from seeking to penetrate the secrets of His majestic providence. His decrees are nothing but orders. If we consider His will to be an unshakable decision with regard to His creatures, we are led to deduce from this the dogma of predestination, for good and for evil. From this stems a fatalist doctrine. Such a divinity is beyond intelligence, reason and, of course, any affective consideration, desire or love. Allah, situated on an immeasurable height, is exempt from any analogy with His creatures that He dominates. His transcendent creative activity translates into an undetectable power, by pure, absolute omnipotence. “The austerity which proceeds from such a great height – likely with its severity to appeal to high philosophical minds – can only be discouraging for the sickly and sensitive being, who in this doctrine cannot attain God through love, and thus feels separated from him by an abyss”. It seems to this poor soul that he finds himself before an absolute despot, who arbitrarily acts on his fate. The attitude of the poor believer boils down to that of the slave who prostrates himself trembling before his master’s feet. It is not at all like this for Jews or Christians who conceive of a reasonable God, fairly rewarding people according to their freely accomplished actions. Maimonides, in the Guide for the Perplexed, says that free will, as a fundamental principle, has not been the object of any contradiction in Judaism. Jews and Christians, unlike Muslims, are not separated from God by a thick wall, they live more or less in Him and they feel Him live within them. Such a feeling can only inspire confidence. In brief, as Gauthier (1948) puts it: “the teaching of the Qur’an, like that of prior Islam is fatalist; it proclaims universal predestinations of acts of will and of destinies by the arbitrary will of God”.

8 Let us specify that Sérouya forgets that Islam comes from the Arabic root “Salama” which encompasses two orientations: (1) the act of submission (in the sense of offering one’s being to the creator); (2) the act of attaining inner peace. These two dimensions are linked. The recognition of God through submission provides inner peace.

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According to our author, the Arab world might awaken from its torpor if its politics were animated by a wide and humane spirit, and not directed by feudal lords insensitive to the happiness of their fellow citizens. To escape the sad fate reserved for the Muslim peoples, Henri Sérouya proposed, in his time, a solution which at the least, in our days, lends itself to controversy. “Instead of the hate that they preach towards certain people and in particular towards Israel, to which they are close from the point of view of monotheism, conceived by the patriarch Abraham, father of Ishmael and Isaac, they should reach out to the people of Israel, as dynamic and essentially democratic elements, who might contribute to their well-being and their development towards progress which might once again be reborn in the East, this ancient cradle of civilization”. Concerning relationships between the East and the West, we will see that Ernst Jünger has a high opinion of them, but one which is scarcely more favorable to “good management” for the benefit of the Eastern peoples than the caricature of Islam which we have just examined. We knew Ernst Jünger as one of the great German writers of the 20th Century. Attracted at one point in his life by Islam, he never had hostile words against Muslims. However, in the tradition of the German thinkers of the 19th Century, he carried out a reflection on the relationship between East and West. The text The Gordian Knot (Der Gordische Knoten) is magnificent and provokes thought, but it does not allow us to imagine that Maghrebian firms could be open in the near future to forms of managerial democracy (Jünger 1953). From the first pages, the thesis is raised: consensual discipline, inherent in Western organizations, is higher than the despotisms observed in the East. A free mind becomes master of the situation faced with arbitrary and absolute power. In fact, East and West, without the borders between one and the other being clearly defined, symbolize in the final analysis the great encounters between Europe and Asia. Since time immemorial, the two original powers have clashed: the West in every era trying to advance into the infinity of the East, and the East into the structures of the West. In all of these fights, we see Western liberty confront oriental despotism. In the first case, in the West, freedom is widespread in the ranks of combatants; in the second domain, the East, freedom only exists at the top of the organization. Liberty in the West and despotism in the East: in their alternation and reciprocal penetration lies the theme of the universal history

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which is elaborated. In general, the freedom of irreplaceable individuals manages to keep its head and to defeat the huge masses of interchangeable pawns. Thus, the sudden scattering of oriental armies after the downfall of their leaders. This flight, this total withdrawal from play, is not observed when a Western monarch falls in battle. For several centuries, the West seems to prevail over the East. However, Jünger is convinced that the last word has not yet been spoken. He thinks that everything that has happened in the East up until now has only taken place on the surface. The Western spirit, thanks to its technology, certainly is knocking hard on the closed door. It is answered by an echo, similar to its blows. But it could be “that at the moment the door opens, something incomparable will appear”. Such an event would spoil any forecasts based on calculation of balances of forces alone. It refers to the imponderable which rules over history. The stereotypes which we have just discussed aim to demonstrate, more or less explicitly, the superiority of Western civilization over the Eastern world. The latter is characterized by the submission of the greatest number to the authority of a few, this trait leading to a deficiency compared to the appetite for freedom which Westerners enjoy. Do managerial ideas, doctrines and practices confirm such a bias? Every organization, every firm, of whatever kind, surely requires for its survival that its members conform to common rules, even compelling them if necessary. Such is the first cause of command, namely the power to direct and coordinate actions. However, this power, which belongs to general management and may be absolute in small individual firms, is by necessity shared in large organizations. A certain degree of decentralization is necessary in fact for negative reasons, because total centralization itself has its obvious limits and calls for the division of power. Consequently, portions of freedom of various sizes must therefore be granted to employees. This is the first reason for power sharing in an organization. But there is a second, no less solid. Modern management postulates that no domination exercised by general management, in a “Western” firm, should content itself with “Oriental” obedience which is nothing but external submission due to reason, opportunity or obviously respect for absolute authority. It seeks to awaken

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among its members a real dynamism which is productive of efficiency. Hence, command in a managerial firm loses its disciplinary character to transform into genuine animation of the different actors. The main theoreticians of management, Taylor being the first, concerned with doing scientific work, tended to magnify the instrumental rationality of technology and bureaucratic procedures without ever worrying about the question of freedom. The organization which these pioneers built demanded highly stereotyped behavior from its members. It could only deal with the “human element” as a technological variable, quantifiable and able to be manipulated according to the needs of the abstract mechanics of the production system. Since the appearance of all the human relation movements, and especially since the adoption by firms of a managerial type of direction, this perspective has been gradually reversed. Less confined by unavoidable technological constraints and obliged to grow to develop new strategies, general managements saw themselves as obliged to better respond to the requirements arising from people. After technological constraints, human constraints could make themselves heard and should provide management with a new, less mechanical rationality. In this perspective, the managerial organization developed practices of animation which are based on a logic of motivation. This takes into account not only particular limited claims, but above all it is inspired by personalistic and democratic values centered on the freedom of participants. A sort of “managerial humanism” thus emerged built upon several “theories”: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, MacGregor’s motivation through participation, Herzberg’s satisfaction and non-dissatisfaction, organizational development, etc. We could sum up the content of such humanism in the following manner: – work can be a source of satisfaction. It is as legitimate to devote one’s energy to it as to spend it in leisure; – most people are not a priori refractory to all organizational discipline. A person can normally adhere to goals or to a strategic vision, and consequently direct and control themselves in this sense; – adhering to such goals allows self-realization;

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– a person, under normal conditions, does not shirk their responsibilities. On the contrary, they embrace them because it is the means of becoming more free; – the bureaucratic organization, and even more so the autocratic organization, inhibits people’s creative faculties. They are to be banished. Many applications of these principles have been put into practice. For example, management by objectives (MBO) involves participation in decision-making and strategic management, but almost exclusively at the level of upper management. It may be supplemented, at execution stage, by various practices of “task enrichment”. Both assume the elaboration of a strong organizational culture based on responsibility. These methods centering on the exercise of freedom have been implemented in large liberal firms. They have sometimes been accompanied by institutional changes. However, it should be noted that there is no necessary reciprocity between a democratic form of strategic or operational management and the more or less democratic form of the statutory allocation of powers. Initiatives aiming at changing the legal status of firms fall within the framework of the old conflict between capital and labor. At the same time, the former measures, those extending the spaces of freedom for employees, are primarily motivated by the desire to improve results. These theories and practices of management closely associate the desire to realize economic goals and the desire for freedom of working people, one activating the other. Such a desire for personal autonomy is located at different levels of decision-making. Participation is not only limited to “how to do it”, but also extends to “what to do”. Does the same go for Maghrebian companies? Do the characteristics of “Oriental” societies constitute obstacles to management or not? We observed earlier that the manager/employee relationship within small enterprises (SEs) in the Maghreb is often compared wrongly, or rather in an abusive manner, to a superior/subordinate relationship involving relative submission linked to the sphere of values and religion in particular. First of all, we will see that this simplistic, caricatured vision is absolutely not based on Islam. Here, we must grasp the relationships maintained between Islam and freedom. Next, we pause to understand the manager/employee relationship in SEs in the Maghreb, a relation based on notions of honor and legitimacy. The explanatory schema of the manager/managed relationship is

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as follows. The manager, fueled by Islam, terrorizes and dominates the employee who obeys him. The manager is therefore a despot legitimized by religion. The employee offers in return their support in a relationship of submission as a vassal. Obviously, the reality is much more complex and deserves finer analysis. Everyone wonders about Islam and the Muslims – without always knowing what it is all about. For more than one and a half billion faithful Muslims in the world, the Qur’an is the book which gives meaning to their existence. The Arab-Muslim culture is said to be still locked in a medieval mental space. It is true that too many generations have understood and practiced this religion in the context of particular historical and scientific conditions engendering a cultural excess, or a perversion of culture. However, we must take into account social, political and cultural changes which are rocking Muslim societies. Religion is not a museum exhibit. On the contrary, it is a living thing. We must refuse the cultural relativism which sometimes argues that the Arab world is not suited to freedom. Remember that the absence of any intermediary between the divine and the believer must allow the dis-alienation of the individual, the affirmation of their full freedom. In the Qur’an, it is written that everyone will find themselves before God, all alone, and that no one will bear another’s burden. This means that individuals must take responsibility for themselves. For Mohamed Taha, the founding principle of Islam is that everyone is free until it is demonstrated, by the facts, that they are incapable of carrying out the duties linked to the exercise of their liberty. It is the failure of individuals in matters of education, socialization and discipline which necessitates the absolute prohibitions and duties prescribed by God. In being satisfied with the commandments and emphasizing obedience to them, many are those who have spurned the task of progressing on the path indicated by the message of the faith. In the 7th Century, the application of the law evolved from the verses of accommodation which stipulate “So remind: you are only a reminder, you are not over them a controller” (the Qur’an 88:21–22), to the verses of coercion which chastise by the sword. This evolution was dictated by temporal conjunctures and by the shortcomings of human aptitude, in that era, to correctly fulfill the duty linked to the exercise of freedom. In agreement with Iqbal, many thinkers reject the experience of a subjection of the human to a transcendent external

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power which crushes them. They insist on the transcendental, interior dimension of the experience of the sacred. They wish to compete with the voice of many preachers who perpetuate a frozen religion. In the Arab-Muslim world and in particular in the Maghreb, business is part of a universe of external and internal signs of religiosity. Business admits the sacred dimension. The manager or the politician relies on the powerful implantation of the Islamic matrix in consciousness and the collective unconscious to manage and to guide. Managers and politics often prefer the masses to be docile, and thus immediately take up and disseminate shortcuts linking religion to submission and obedience. Never forget that systems of values are in no way disembodied. They are conveyed by people who are moved by all sorts of interests, and who live in specific historical contexts. Traditional solutions are so deeply rooted in consciousness and internalized among the greatest number that they have acquired the status of evidence which makes them easier to tolerate for the “victims” of the manager’s tyranny, but which makes the task of those who escape this pernicious form of alienation even more difficult. Let us insist on the fact that in the Maghreb, as elsewhere, accumulation of money may tend towards exploitation and that the exercise of power may also lead towards the abuse of power. However, society also creates antidotes to this excess: trade unions, political parties, etc. These antidotes are still lacking (despite their progression) in so-called Arab-Muslim societies and firms. Explaining and justifying forms of subservience by reference to the sphere of values is proof of a lack of intellectual courage. Do not ignore the existence in many firms around the world of acts of submission, domination, humiliation, etc. Let us then think of posing the real questions which refer to the nature and structure of the organization, the type of governance, the forms of ethics, the logics of power, the real role of religious references, the equality of rights between citizens, the nature of human resources with the level of education and training, the underlying economic ideologies, etc. In many firms observed in the Maghreb, employees neither adore, nor submit to, nor make supplications to a manager or a hierarchical superior. They seek to earn their living and, as much as possible, to realize themselves through work! The need for autonomy, development of skills and meaning is identical to that which exists in Europe or elsewhere. Only the means of

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expression are different. Young people are sensitive to the sacred and capable of questioning it. For a large majority, they wish to escape from managerial and theological-legal subjection without losing their spiritual values. Preachers, despotic managers and gurus are not their masters of truth. They want for the imam to be able to co-exist with the manager. It is the absence of reference points, fragilities, lack of training and precarity which may explain behavioral deviance, indoctrination, obedience or subjugation. In most Maghrebian firms, the employee is in no way a puppet held by the despotic hand of the manager. They are neither an idiot nor an automaton controlled by the invisible hand of tradition. There is “consent”. Do not forget that they have the right to attribute or deny legitimacy to the manager. The manager/managed relationship is thus an economic relationship, and also a social one. Reciprocal attachment is one of the rewards for two actors who enter into a relationship. It is a relationship between equals in rights, freedom and dignity, but unequal in influence. The manager/employee relationship is first of all guided by self-interest. This link is a universal factor! Let us quote Voltaire: “all which depends intimately upon human nature is the same from one end of the universe to the other” (1756, p. 322). Nonetheless, in the Maghreb, exchange involves self-interest and also the relationship that the exchange implies. It is not a protection/support relationship based on a strict logic of mutual giving. “In return” is moreover an expression which horrifies both parties. The law of economic self-interest is never ignored. But exchanges between people have all the more value in that they relate to other interests (social, ecological, etc.). Exchanges consider the interests at stake, and also address, directly or indirectly, the humanity of the protagonists. A transaction is not organized solely by instrumental rationality. It is therefore a specific transaction, since it is embedded in a social relationship. We saw in the SEs observed that communication is generally open at all levels, coupled with the absence or near-absence of any administrative formality (job descriptions, etc.), and the reduction in the number of hierarchical levels to a strict minimum. The free organization of teams and employees often governs the distribution of work. Almost permanently, small groups of people hold discussions. Where there are such positions as foremen, these are explicitly given the mission of working and helping, not overseeing or giving orders. Everyone speaks spontaneously and freely. This freedom is largely supported by the absence of formalities for meeting or

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contacting even the managers. All people working in the company use terms of closeness, of respect, of trust, to qualify the mode of relationships within the firm. Availability and humility are the words used to characterize the mode of behavior of leaders towards employees. Participation does not end only at the operational aspects of the conduct of production, but extends widely up to sharing reflections on strategies and future projects. Only the final decisions belong to managers. The managers and employees we met and observed in our research develop in a universe which is at the same time rooted and globalized! More and more often, they have taken on board the globalized teachings of the managerial doxa. However, the relationship between the Muslim religion and aspirations to freedom, even the globalized economy, are questions waiting in the future for the societies and firms of the Maghreb. Do not forget that during the Arab Spring, hundreds of thousands of women and men mobilized for freedom! That should be enough to break down tired stereotypes! The East does not reject freedom! This vision is reductive, binary and above all false. The great challenge for managers is to satisfy employees’ needs for autonomy and freedom, drawing upon a universal register and local references. Faced with this world, some managers and employees shut themselves off and take refuge in a form of essentialism or even fundamentalism. This produces a culture of reaction, of differentiation, of victimhood and disempowerment. Here, claims become identitarian and may become sectarian and murderous. Other managers and employees adapt, thus demonstrating the capacity to move. Most managers we encountered were creating a containment. This involves an approach adapted to the demands of globalization and to locally prevailing concepts of humanity and society. It involves promoting a culture of well-being, autonomy, freedom and responsibility, by breaking down barriers set up by prohibition, guilt and infantilization. The problem for managers is not to remain rooted, nor even to participate in a shifting world, but rather to create a link between these two dimensions. Some managers and employees we encountered are very clear about the shortcomings of the managerial doxa. They know very well that behind the discourse, practices are often different.

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The force of a dominant culture generally consists of presenting itself as holding a monopoly on values denied by others. Thus, it is often implicitly suggested that Western organizations present a more rational form than so-called oriental organizations anchored in the religious and the symbolic. However, we have shown that cultural norms are not disseminated to docile and passive groups! Let us thus avoid culturalist approaches, in particular concerning the role and influence of the Muslim religion. We must oppose reductive discourse and refuse the political instrumentalization of Islam to cover for discrimination and abuse. Certainly, there can be no question of denying their existence. However, too often, people seek to establish a link that would be explicitly tantamount to a rule. The absence of freedom is claimed to be an intrinsic given of Islam, which is said to pervert the management of companies in the Maghreb. This conclusion is pernicious and false. We must free ourselves from this prison image. In this country, we must not underestimate the background. We know that the manager/managed relationship is part of a dynamic of balance between respect for the shared values of a territory and considerations linked to universal needs for freedom. 3.4. Zones of fertility in “layer-cake” societies In the Maghreb countries’ organizations, as elsewhere, opposition between the sphere of values and hypermodernity is common. Globalization accelerates this process, which is often accompanied by the dissemination of external models of human resource management and the habits of the dominant economies. This globalization, inasmuch as it appears to a society to be coming from outside, causes distortion. The dominant model radiates from a so-called center of the universe, forcing many cultures and practices back to the so-called peripheries. Thanks to the development of the means of communication, this model imposes purposes, forms of speech, practices and economic imperatives which aim to be hegemonic. It also conveys forms of social relations. This phenomenon is an economic, managerial, political, technological and metaphysical event. This universal, defined by and for itself, is a source of failures and crises.

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In this context, beings may insist on rejecting a modernity that is felt to be an invasion and/or an intrusion which causes damage. They resort to reflexes of self-preservation. Here, the spheres of values collide. Identity is recuperated, often deformed and/or exploited so as to close off this supposed threat, thus provoking altercations, slippages and fractures. Victims of a mutilated modernization (the excluded, etc.) take refuge in this archaic and destructive option, favoring dogmatism and obscurantism. However, no civilization can be content with its own values and its own heritage. Cultural and managerial self-sufficiencies, etc. are a thing of the past. Others succumb to the allure of modernity and only grasp its superficial elements (the lure of profit, consumerism, competition, degradation of self and others, generalized brutalization, etc.). Another alternative seems possible: dialog between the local and the global, which through the regulation of gaps can create creative tensions. In fact, some cultures do not look at themselves, do not speak of themselves and are ignorant of themselves. Differences lead to an image of self based on a logic of integration, classification and arrangement and not of discoveries. Now, as Jullien (2012) suggests, between cultures there is a space of reflexivity where possibilities are deployed. These gaps are zones of fertility. A gap is a figure not of arrangement but of disturbance, and this disturbance brings to light not an identity but rather a fertility. In his work The Book of Eternity, Iqbal (1962) indicates that fixing the ideal present and future in a past is an aberration. He also emphasizes that improvement of conditions of life is not enough to give existence all its meaning. Iqbal invites us to be dissatisfied with both one and the other. He invites us to reject them. Our rejections fit into this philosophical framework and encourage us to seek elsewhere, to go beyond the global and the local. Understanding the difference consists of identifying representations in both self and others. For Schopenhauer, they are partial, subjective interpretations presented as evidence. They represent the prisms through which people see the world. Assimilating the variety of representations allows us to acquire mastery in relationship and not mastery over others. Cultural differences, value conflicts, influence of stereotypes… these sources of misunderstandings related to culture are considerable in management. Cultural diversity is manifested in particular through attitudes to hierarchy, approach to work and equity. The challenge is to analyze differences so as to enrich the firm in three dimensions: the market,

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the organization of work and the decision-making process. Thus, there appears a management of cultural diversity which may be considered a global management approach based, on the one hand, on recognizing the existence of different cultures, whether these be national cultures or organizational cultures; and on the other hand, on integrating and combining these values in the exercise of the different functions of businesses. In the framework of the Mediterranean space, two cultural blocs divided between the northern and southern banks dominate: the Arab-Muslim and Western blocs. This duality has been defined as a clash between these two civilizations. This opposition was first developed on the two shores, northern and southern, of the Mediterranean, then all over the geopolitical sphere. A vision of the Arab-Muslim world founded on hostility and distrust has been presented to the West. Beside these erroneous perceptions of the Arab-Muslim world, there also exists a perverted image of the West, atheist and materialistic, dominated by imperialism, and thus just as demonized, in the Muslim world. From the viewpoint of the internationalization of firms, this diversity of cultures and representations calls for a specific kind of management. Intercultural competence, which corresponds to the capacity to understand, to meet and adapt oneself to different cultures, thus becomes a major asset in an increasingly globalized context. Culture never ceases to stand out from the trend to standardization through its will to diversity. It is difficult to decode because it involves a question of interpretation and context. Firms are not only embedded in a culture; they are themselves producers of a culture. National culture must not be considered a level of analysis superior to all others. Culture has multiple sources (professional, scholarly, etc.). Other contexts provide codes to understand and interpret reality. These codes complement the national culture. These are local dimensions. It is a junk-shop universe of meaning which is a link between the symbolic, the imaginary and the real. The pursuit of innovation must therefore not content itself with the instrumental dimension, and must take part in the quest for meaning, that is, putting the human where the inhuman is. We must identify paths that might return to people their human dimension. This involves a culture of transition which is capable of moving away from cultural identities which are closed to diversity, interculturality and intercreativity. This path must allow transgression and transcendence of significant oppositions and of the persistence of the polarization of two imaginaries.

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In the Mediterranean, the different religions, cultures, demographics, economic and political realities strengthen interest in the management of diversity within firms. This is particularly the case in the three main countries of the Maghreb. The Mediterranean is a natural line that separates two worlds, and at the same time unifies each of them. In this context, the management of diversity must allow us to take the path of hybridization, so as to reconcile convergence and contingency and to build a relationship between two universes of meaning. We invite the cultures to make room for each other, so as to take advantage of mixing and crossing over. Hybridization corresponds to a cross-fertilization of differences. This idea of being between the two helps avoid the brutal reactions provoked by the irruption of modernity. Pluriversalism allows us to legitimize all cultures, giving meaning to the Other’s culture starting from one’s own culture. Pluriversalism allows a dialog of cultures without the negation of the other. Firms in the Maghreb are directly concerned by the hypothesis of hybridization. Hybridization may allow them to realize an adjustment between inevitable globalization and local realities. Hybridization may facilitate the convergence of “best practices”. This latter only shows itself to be really productive if an effort to train and adapt to contextual diversity is made. Development failures of certain multinationals in Africa have been due to mis-estimation of the cultural, religious and ethnic rootedness of African populations. Hybridization leads firms in the Maghreb to selectively borrow what suits them, while grafting this onto their cultural core. The social environment of the three main countries of the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) is identical: a communitarian and clannish feeling, the ’asabiyya spirit of belonging, patriarchal domination, respect for ancestors, faithfulness to tradition, male domination, women’s role in education and socialization, an art of living founded on hshuma (shame and modesty) and a feeling of honor. Personal expression is reduced and relegated to the background. The force of the other’s gaze and group opinion influences individual behavior. Dependence of the individual on the group is strong. In return for this pressure, the group provides solidarity and a place for its members. Custom and tradition dictate the rules. Non-respect for these latter leads to grave consequences. Culture thus equates to a collective pact

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suppressing individuality in uniformity and conformity. The Maghreb thus resembles pomegranate seeds, not all alike but side by side in the same collection. Multiple and intense exchanges have led to a common Maghrebian background9 which surpasses ethnic diversity. This common cultural background acts on relationships with work and on individual and collective working relationships. Certainly, culture is in constant evolution, under the influence of globalization and the development of communication technologies in particular; however, basic values remain strongly rooted. This notion of cultural background is close to the concepts of “culturebound” and “culture-free” developed in marketing. The “culture-bound” represents the hard core of a culture. It undergoes very little influence from its environment. It is very well rooted and strongly influences society. On the contrary, the “culture-free” varies and is subject to external environmental fluctuations and influences. The firm is dominated by informal networks based on often regional affinities. Recruitment procedures remain strongly influenced by blood ties and affinities with the dominant group. At the structural level, the firm is generally characterized by a hierarchy with fluid boundaries. At the organizational level, management is centralized. In the minds of actors, respect for hierarchy and symbols is very important. Consideration of the human component appears to be a decisive criterion in the context of Maghrebian firms. Within the firm, employees often have a strong affective demand towards their superiors. These latter are leaders who exercise power over the other members of the firm. This power is close to the traditional authority developed by Weber. In this type of model, the notion of respect for superiors is essential. Management of human resources in Maghrebian firms, as in other countries, has often been underestimated or even ignored. Now, in the most structured companies, it is guided by an operational and also strategic vision. People are considered to be a resource to be valued so as to improve performance. Nevertheless, the worker is understood through a local prism. Beyond the collectivism often mentioned in various studies on international comparisons, we suggest a hypothesis of balance to characterize the Maghrebian firm.

9 The characteristics of this cultural background are based on certain values: family, the role of elders, the importance of emotions, the use of words, conversation and, above all, common sense.

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In the Maghreb, human resource management is concerned, above all, directly or indirectly, with maintaining social and societal cohesion. Thus, firms not do necessarily adopt those human resource practices which are most appropriate to economic demands, but rather those that seem to be the most socially accepted. The Maghrebian cultural background corresponds to a coherent system of shared beliefs, values and rules in the life of African communities. In all the countries studied, this system appears as an organizational model, inherited from the ancestors. All African societies are characterized by the circulation of goods, services and information between people. This principle ensures the social cohesion necessary for the survival of the community. From it emanate the values and norms of life in society, such as solidarity and the primacy of the community over the individual. This set of norms is directly transposed into companies. This model was used by Lafarge Morocco during the closure of one of its factories. Layoffs were managed with the help of the creation of new activities based on family networks. Consideration of the Maghrebian cultural background allowed the discovery of an original and effective solution faced with a critical situation. This hybrid approach allowed adaptation to the local contextual dimension and to better respond to the aspirations of the local employees. It also facilitated the modernization of the productive apparatus which was imposed by globalization. Lafarge reconciled the global dimension with local realities. The former factory in Tétouan, Morocco, had insufficient production capacity to respond to market needs let alone the perspectives of development of the Northern provinces. Due to its obsolescence, its productivity was too weak to be able to face external competition, and its facilities did not conform to environmental standards which came into force in 2003. Thus, obsolescence, and urban development around the factory, made any effective and financially profitable modernization impossible. To cope with the inevitable closure of the cement plant, the firm could either increase the capacity of its other factories, and thus provide for Tétouan’s market, or build a new unit locally. The two proposals were studied deeply, and the firm’s board of directors chose the construction of a new cement plant, Tétouan II. The automation of the new cement plant and the desire of the firm to concentrate on its core business meant that today it employs a very qualified staff, whose numbers are limited. For this reason, only those employees of

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the old Tétouan factory who had a high technical level were integrated into the new unit, after having received the necessary training. The closure of the Tétouan factory forced the company to let some of its workers go. But this departure was carried out with respect for those workers who were not rehired in another part of the group or did not take retirement, with the primary objective of promoting their reinsertion into one of the company’s sub-contractors or another company established in the region, or of allowing them to create economic activity. Each employee of the factory not transferred to the new Tétouan II cement works or to another unit of the group was offered reinsertion into another firm or help in creating an activity. In the first case, the person concerned received a payout in conformity with legal provisions and common practice. It was flexible and based on personal efforts towards reinsertion. In the second option, the employee received an additional payout and Lafarge Morocco participated in financing the project. The sum was capped at 80% of the overall cost of the project (according to the number of jobs created). This financial contribution was awarded after study of the viability of the project by Lafarge Morocco’s services. The company’s financial support was paid out gradually over the process of realization of the project. Help in creating a business directed towards Tétouan employees also, in some cases, benefited their children or their spouse. The employee created their activity in a field of their choice or chose an activity which was part of a range of projects studied by the firm’s consultant: cultivation or livestock production, agriculture, services (coffee, dairy, etc.), commercial, agriculture (livestock, beekeeping) or industrial (carpentry, electricity, etc.). A six-person team, implanted in the factory, was set up to help with reinsertions. Note that, on average, every person involved in this redeployment created 2.2 jobs in the region. The phenomenon of community solidarity is not inherently an African cultural trait, but a consequence of the strategies of actors in a given context with a universe of meaning and representations. Through the example of Lafarge Morocco, we see that it is possible to reconcile universal management practices with local diversities. This firm in no way copied international practices of effective management models. It has shaped an original style of management, finding its meaning for employees in national contexts. The goal is to ensure that globalization is a

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source not of immobility, but of renewal. It involves knowing how to make the meeting of the global and the local fertile, in particular at the level of managing the mobilization of employees. In territories which are enchanted in Weber’s sense, the communitarian structure of thought is always present. The challenge for many organizations is to make this sphere of values cohabit with the managerial spheres of modernity and the demands of autonomy. Within these firms, the employee has a need for consideration in their uniqueness, while still claiming solidarity and direct relationships. The need for social affiliation accompanies the need for singularity. These transformations confirm the need to offer a new approach to mobilization, in which tribes and singularities intermingle, and inherited and acquired values combine. Cohabitation can be all the more difficult in contexts where accelerated modernization has retained a traditionalist corollary, and where reading of values is ambiguous and difficult because their base is sometimes traditionalist, sometimes of a modernist character. The clash between managerial and social/individual values is of great intensity. In enchanted contexts, firms wishing to accelerate modernity are faced with values which are inherited and not easily readable. If the objectives promoted are those of equality, this is conditioned by respect for tradition and for social values considered to be the moral values of society. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber (1964) states that every domain of private and public life has undergone a process of rationalization. Thus are created different forms of rationalization, determined by systems of values and modes of representation. These systems of values constitute differentiated spheres which may enter into tension. Weber shows us how the religious sphere is opposed to the economic, political and also intellectual spheres. Furthermore, the rationality of this intellectual sphere is the origin of the “disenchantment of the world”. The first meaning of the “disenchantment of the world” is found in Science as a Vocation (1956) where Weber evokes a detachment of the hold of religion over the mental representations of humanity and their relationship with the world (Mazuir 2004). Growing intellectualization and rationalization means a belief in the mastery of things through forecasting and anticipation. This involves a different understanding

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and a different approach to a world now devoid of meaning. From this loss of meaning is born the polytheism of values, which engenders a multiplicity of values and also of paradoxes. Values enter into the domain of “differentiated spheres”. Polytheism is not meant in its religious sense but as a heuristic concept of sociology. In modern societies, the decline of monotheism provokes the dispersal of opinions into a pluralism of values, each one claiming a legitimacy competing with that with others. In the societies of the Maghreb, the community of faith has not deteriorated. It is not rivaled by the economic sphere. Let us say simply that these spheres are juxtaposed with antagonisms. According to the works of Durkheim (1912) and Weber (1956, 1964), societies develop according to a gradual process moving from mechanical solidarity to organic solidarity, from a religious phase to a scientific phase, and from a traditional society to a modern society. Although very useful, these frames do not reflect the complexity of the development and realities of societies in which the global meets the local. In the context of traditional societies, solidarities are mechanical. Individuals gather together because they are similar. They respect identical prohibitions and values. In the context of modern society, solidarities are organic. The cult of the individual replaces the cult of the group. Modern society is oriented towards economic rationalization and relationships based on calculation in all domains. In modern, secularized societies, churches are separated from political structures. Being a believer or not is an essentially private question. In Christian society, belief is an option, while this is not the case in Muslim societies. People develop in an enchanted world. Atheism is inconceivable! Living means, by nature, living socially. Defense is here collective, manifesting a power achieved as a community. Common strength is rooted in collective rituals. This universe is torn by anxiety and great fears: fear of death, of sin and of judgment. This porous human being appears in societies with strong religious values. In the countries of the Maghreb, this societal enchantment is paradoxical in that it cohabits with the disenchantment of part of the economic world which is increasingly secularized. Modernity and mass culture have here brought about the domination of economic and commercial logic which tends towards standardization. A society of solitary people turns the quest for salvation into a quest for profit. Instead of grace, we seek utility. Feelings of isolation and of being left

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behind exist. Beings may consider themselves as in a prison, as lacking something and as experiencing malaise. In the enchanted world, the excess of meaning may be troubling. In the disenchanted world, our actions may lack any deep resonance. There may be a form of the malaise of immanence (Taylor 1989). Disenchantment leaves the individual prey to their desires, agitated by passions that they cannot satisfy and which incite them to desire the impossible. For Durkheim, the individual has the malady of the infinite and is in perpetual torment. Between the excesses of modernity and traditional confinement, the quest is for balance! This ambivalence is the origin in Maghrebian societies of a culture of consent (conformism of faith, submission to the hierarchy, etc.) and of dissent (following one’s conscience and personal reason). In fact, individuals seek autonomy, authenticity and conformity. The ideal of autonomy is an ideal of self-determination and empowerment and emancipation from traditions. The ideal of authenticity supposes that our real self expresses itself, as every individual has their own way of being human. The ideal of conformity refers to the sacred rites and beliefs which inspire from their members’ adherence and respect. Deviants are discouraged and conformists are encouraged. “Invent, and you will die persecuted as a criminal; copy, and you will live as happy as a fool” (Balzac). All crimes and punishments are instruments of cohesion. In Maghrebian societies, socially conforming means following religion, which has the function of informing and supervising all of common life. It is an example of heteronomy: the law of the other. This principle of organization translates into four, very specific practical provisions: the organization of society under the sign of obedience to the past founder, indebtedness to ancestral models, the importance of hierarchy, and a type of relationship between the individual and their group based on submission to the collective whole (Hussein 2009). Although useful, this type of analysis leads to a fragmentation of knowledge. Indeed, do not forget that Islam is multiple. What are we talking about… The Islam of the towns, of the Arabs, of the elite, of the ulemas, of the countrysides, of the Amazighs with its pagan and magical substrate? Do they all live under the sway of the scripture? Are we dealing with herds of believers?! Does no one question the scripture?! Does no one reconcile spirituality and freedom?! Do not

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forget that everyone believed that there was a homo sovieticus who was there for eternity. Similarly, many feel that there exists a homo islamicus. However, it would be very surprising if the development of liberty and rationality in these countries did not lead to transformations! Todd (2011) recalls correctly that reading and writing are the first parameters of the engine of development. There thus comes a moment when the parents know how to read, and the children do not. This leads to a rupture of relations of authority, not only at the family scale but implicitly at the scale of a whole society. This means that the world moves. There is no contradiction between the Muslim world experiencing a movement of secularization and an important resurgence of religious practices (Ramadan, daily prayers, etc.). Fundamentalism is only a transitory aspect of the shaking of religious belief, whose new fragility leads to behaviors of reaffirmation! These changes disqualify the essentialized vision of cultures and religions. We must admit that, beyond appearances, Muslim countries are also experiencing a massive shaking of traditional beliefs! Individuals thus evolve in an environment where freedom and equality are promoted in parallel with the acceptance of difference. And this does not mean a Westernized surface coating. This autonomy is opposed in every way to heteronomy. Obedience to the past of tradition gives way to the practical invention of the future. The power of domination gives way to the representative power of society. Hierarchical dependence gives way to equality of nature between beings seen as independent. These original situations, sometimes the source of disorientation or shock, lead us to see and to think about, at the same time, the introduction of the modern world and its universality, and the emergence of another, much more fragmentary, made up of juxtapositions. It is this living complexity which is the challenge confronting the manager who wishes to mobilize their employees within organizations in the Maghreb. In fact, the managerial doxa imposes itself on all societies on the planet, including spiritual traditions and religious civilizations which did not necessarily contain in the core of their ethos those elements predisposing to this process. Faced with disorientation, and seeking balance amidst the juxtaposition, the model to follow is important. Actors will adopt strategies of mimicking a model which they will follow to compensate for uncertainty and to consolidate decisions and choices.

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In neoliberal economic thought, homo economicus ignores uncertainty to the extent that the behavior of other agents is predictable and has no effect on their behavior. Faced with this postulate, different currents, inspired by philosophy, sociology and anthropology, have endeavored to propose innovative approaches. They agree in considering that a firm is not just a space consisting of individual, utilitarian actions. Exchanges are not solely based on calculation ruled by economic determinism. These different schools reveal the presence of cultural and contextual elements which regulate social relationships within organizations. Research has shown in particular several forms of internal arrangements or shared agreements which explain collective and individual action. Among these models, the sociological model of the theory of conventions proposes substituting classical rationality with a form of mimetic reflex (Husser Par 2009). According to Salais (1989), convention is a collection of elements towards which the actors involved share a common agreement and reciprocal expectations. The theory of conventions definitively acquired an international dimension with the writings of Gomez and Jones (2000). It involves the deep structures of firms, which are not accessible in an immediate and obvious way. According to the sociological branch of the theory of conventions, the context in which actors perform their activities is not risky, but uncertain. However, in a situation of uncertainty, the individual makes choices not in an autonomous fashion, but through adapting their behavior to what they presume to be normal. They conform to the regularities that they observe, that they anticipate or that they have previously integrated. Convention becomes a system of rules in which actors find themselves when they have to make a choice (Gomez 1997). Individuals can only decide because conventions exist, and conventions only exist because individuals adopt them. De Montmorillon (1999) speaks of mimetic rationality. Conformity reveals the need for social affiliation which corresponds to the need to belong to a given environment. Conformity means adopting one’s behavior to what one knows to be commonly accepted. Its legitimacy is based less on its intrinsic relevance than on its generalized adoption (Amblard 2009). There is therefore a study of the dominant behavior as the normative reference.

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One could oppose it, but this would not be in one’s interest because this submission provides one with several advantages (conformity, recognition, integration into a group, a feeling of belonging, etc.). In contrast, conventional dissent provokes sanctions (loss of status within the group, exclusion, etc.). A feeling of belonging and the need for normality thus reinforce individuals in their imitative behavior. For some, mimetic rationality is conscious and strategic in that actors mobilize behavioral regularities to conform with it and to thus resolve the problems of uncertainty related to social and economic life. It is unconscious for others, in that our conduct is largely guided by social norms and behavioral patterns engraved in our mental structures, to the point that we forget their existence. Paicheler and Moscovici (1984) followed by Dupuy (2003) linked imitation to a form of fascination, often unconscious, with a model. This statement agrees with the thesis defended by Rene Girard. In Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Girard 1961), Rene Girard refers to the importance in his theory of the mimetic desire of imitating a model. Among human beings, imitation is very important, even fundamental. Imitating is in fact what makes learning possible among humans. In a general way, we learn by imitating others. For the learner, others serve as models. Learning, from the most elementary to the most complex, requires imitation of models up to the moment when, this learning having been mastered, the models may disappear. Models fit into conventions. Mimicry is a way of finding one’s bearings. The content of the rules is essential for understanding the logic of individual behavior. The individual is constrained and enlightened by the existence of others. In enchanted societies, this truth is yet more pronounced, pushing the person to articulate individual liberty and the existence of common rules. In the context of liberal societies, the individual is autonomous and their actions take place in under-socialized societies. In over-socialized societies, the individual becomes the plaything of social forces which are beyond them. In layer-cake societies, the challenge is to find the junction between the social and the individual, in Granovetter’s (1985) meaning. This means they position themselves as free actors in a social space which only exists because they freely adhere to it.

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According to Foucault (1975), norms are prescribed by a repressive power. This postulate may be questioned, because the individual is, at the same time, the guardian of the rules and guarded by them. Convention is not imposed. It exists because it is adopted generally to progressively become a norm. The conventionalist model limits the absolute autonomy of actors. This limit is not imposed. Power, norms, discipline and models are collective constructions supported by the acceptance of actors of binding rules and references. Individual freedom is not incompatible with the conventionalist model, as individuals can try to change the conventional system in place. Attempts to modify the rules of the game and the models emphasize the tension between individual and normative frame: between the desire to belong and the desire to change. The natural power of a convention is to appear to be self-evident. Effective convention is that which is the most convincing. Conventions are thus dynamic processes (Gomez 1996). The logic of adherence through mimicry leads to the creation of the convention. Questioning mimetic convictions may also cause their modification or their disappearance. A society can only recognize globalization as its own by taking ownership of it, that is, giving something of itself to the game. Every firm acts in several spheres: technological, economic, social and that of values. These spheres are part of a movement which is at the same time differential and global, like a fan. The state of the world and of peoples, their practices and their opinions do not carry on in a uniform manner. Transformation and/or permanence? What balance to make between one and the other? These challenges particularly relate to joint practices within Moroccan organizations. HR managers have to transgress in order to move towards wider horizons, but while still respecting the values of restricted contexts. They must take into account the history of the human and not silently pass over the daily confrontations between rooted values and new opportunities. It means trying to change the existing conventional system. Attempts to modify the rules of the game and the models emphasize the tension between the individual and normative frames: between the desire to belong and the desire to change.

Conclusion

Alongside classical organizations with very formal roles and rules, very structured processes and a chain of command, new models of organizations are emerging which have been brought forth and facilitated by the development of digital technology. They are especially based on sharing information, processing data and autonomy. These organizations reflect the search for alternative forms which indicates that the traditional, so-called hierarchical form, with organizations in silos and Taylorist management, severely handicaps competitivity. In them, every initiative seems to be stifled by a kind of invisible, but very real, veil. The consulting firm BCD evaluates the cost of hierarchy at 30% of all fixed costs in a firm. Too many opportunities are lost due to inability to make decisions at the right time because of lack of delegation and slowness. Hierarchy is a pillar of the 20th-Century company. Agility is a pillar for the 21st Century! Thus, the iconic GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon), BATX (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi) and NATU (Netflix, Airbnb, Tesla, Uber) apply agility to create more open and collaborative structures. Some African organizations have many similarities with their international counterparts, but they have a few of their own characteristics. Our work has endeavored to present the main ones. Several dimensions have thus been identified: frugal innovation, leapfrogging, effectuation, antifragility and dynamic rootedness. These dimensions certainly explain why many innovations coming from Africa have begun to be exported internationally, part of the beginning of the globalization of Africa.

Innovation and Agility in the Digital Age: Africa, the World’s Laboratories of Tomorrow, First Edition. Soufyane Frimousse. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Propelled by new digital advances, some African organizations have “leapfogged” and “raced like a leopard” by relying on free possibilities to express themselves and on low-cost natural energies. However, this dynamic should not obscure the major challenges that must be taken into account. In fact, the digital alone cannot trigger a virtuous cycle of creation of value. Crossovers between several dynamics are necessary: the development of high-performing research and knowledge centers, as well as the attraction and retention of talent. Cultural and contextual references are not erased by inevitable globalization. Quite often, they resist by isolating themselves, at the risk of confining and burying themselves. Sometimes, they evolve in the face of global complexity, and take new forms which influence organizations and their managerial practices. Assimilating this complexity allows us to better identify ongoing developments and changes. Beyond fears, anxieties, rejections and worries, this work invites you to discover a new managerial and cultural horizon in Africa and in the Mediterranean. These new organizations show that good practices and models of management also come from the South, and not exclusively from the east coast of the United States. Understanding these dynamics holds major interest on theoretical and practical levels at a time when many companies are striving to grasp the opportunities for growth offered in Africa (Babarinde 2009). Africa is a laboratory of managerial and social innovations made up of pragmatic arrangements and taking into account group values (tribe, clan, etc.). Company cultures emerge from an economy of relationships, which complements and is different from a purely transactional economy based on market principles. Management can no longer only be interested in the speed of production, earnings, profit and servitude to money. The law of “always more” and the desire to possess cannot go on forever. The classical conception of management both uses and abuses human beings. It thus seems necessary to complement the traditional and dominant management model. In this perspective, the Africas offer an interesting frame for analysis.

Postface

Postfaces are an ambiguous genre, almost a false one. While a foreword may announce the book, underline its strong ideas, salute the intellectual advance that it promotes, serve as a frame and praise the thought of the author, the writer of a postface risks being exposed to ridicule as someone trying to substitute themselves for the reader who has come to the end of the book, daring to say what they should think of it while the reader, whoever they are, has already decided what they think of it and the reasons for that opinion. In contrast, the writer of a postface, by giving their point of view on what they have taken from their own reading, may help some readers, whether the latter agrees or not with the opinions given, to further open and deepen new debates. From Soufyane Frimousse’s formidably dense, original and inspiring book, I would like to extract five major points which particularly spoke to me: – There is first this permanent reminder: management is not a science. It is a praxis that depends on many fluctuating elements which interact with each other; management means ensuring that in a shifting external context and within a given type of organization, the employees available – such as they are – are led to sustainably produce the expected results. This thus firstly depends on the degree of VUCA (according to the US Army’s acronym: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) of the organization’s environment in which management must operate; this also depends on the type of organization which is favored (vertical and

Innovation and Agility in the Digital Age: Africa, the World’s Laboratories of Tomorrow, First Edition. Soufyane Frimousse. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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hierarchical, transversal and collaborative, dome-shaped or corolla-shaped, etc.), and still more, it depends on the culture shared or not shared by employees, on the determinants of their positive or negative attitudes, determinants which are deeply linked to their history and their individual and collective practices. – As has been theorized most particularly in the United States and in Europe, management has appeared as a Western corpus of advice and practices with universalist pretentions. All those who have spent a large part of their professional life on other continents have been able to judge the extent to which such a claim has been reductive. Several works have abundantly shown how much other, very different cultures could considerably enrich our managerial approach through different ways of working together, creating and innovating according to collective schemas1. Soufyane Frimousse’s book, in this regard, offers a rich profusion of examples which, individually and collectively, may usefully give new life to practices of management which, evidently, have a clear need of it today. – Traditional management works less and less well. Designed to help the functioning of organizations where power is vertical, or employees are supposed to be obedient (principle of subordination), and where information is distributed drop by drop and sparingly (“power belongs to those who keep information for themselves and do not give it out at all!”), management loses much of its effectiveness when people are increasingly wary of all Great Leaders, when a growing number of employees are disengaging and when the digital revolution is multiplying horizontal exchanges of information to infinity. In The Rebel2, Albert Camus distinguished two types of effectiveness: that of the typhoon which blows away all in its path and that of sap, which generates growth. Without doubt it is excessive to pair the image of a typhoon with vertical and hierarchical power, in that the latter sometimes proves heavy in transmission and slow to produce effects; but it is precisely because, often, it blows out of its path a good amount of the autonomy of actors, their creativity and their capacity to contribute intelligently to

1 For example, in Chartier, L. and Sérieyx, H. (2008). Dix leçons chinoises pour managers occidentaux. Maxima. 2 Camus, A. (1951). The Rebel. Gallimard.

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collective work: “Quand les talons claquent, l'esprit se vide” (“when the heels click, the mind empties”, Louis Hubert Lyautey, 1854–1934)3. Naturally, this type of power has many virtues: it brings order, maintains it and allows the leaders of the organization to believe that they are capable of directing their base in the direction of their choosing, or to abruptly reorient it if they consider it necessary. In various distinct versions, more or less liberal, open and informed, we find the persistence of the military model where, from the general to the private, the famous instruction prevails: “discipline is the main strength of armies, it is important etc.”. This type of power presumes the quasi-mechanical obedience of good little soldiers, the almost blind trust in the competence of the leaders and above all the acceptance of abandoning one’s own singularity. Today, in any case, the effectiveness of the sap which generates growth may tomorrow no longer be a possible organizational choice but a clear obligation. When we know the richness of his work, the rigor of this sociology professor at the University of Paris Descartes and his distaste for verbal excess, we understand how much Roger Sue’s recent book La contresociété4 is truly revolutionary. Recalling the reasons which are accelerating before our eyes, particularly in France, moving from a vertical and hierarchical society to a horizontal and associative society, he underlines how the effects of this change will be significant in the political, economic and social domains. Furthermore, as is increasingly emphasized5, it was senseless to launch the digital revolution, which aims to multiply through networks the synergies between the greatest number of actors, if it was to preserve pyramidal and strongly hierarchical organizations of Taylorist functioning – with the addition of separate jobs – according to a mechanistic schema incapable of multiplying interactive intelligences around shared goals: only a climate of trust and horizontal functioning allow us to obtain the high level of performance of collaborative management.

3 This is a military saying that refers to the blind obedience that is expected of a soldier when they salute (click their heels) “as discipline is the main strength of armies, it is vital that every superior receives total obedience from their subordinates, etc.”. 4 Sue R. (2016). La contresociété. Les liens qui libèrent. 5 Vakaloulis, M. (2018). Du pouvoir vertical aux pouvoirs partagés. Éditions de l’Atelier.

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This climate is all the more necessary in that permanent, recurrent and multidimensional innovation – technological, commercial, financial, logistic, ecological, managerial, etc. – will become the key to staying on the market and maintaining the capacity to attract and retain skills and talents. As illustrated through many approaches and several examples in a remarkable issue of the magazine Cadre of the workers’ union CFDT6 (the largest union in France in the private sector), the eruption of the digital has had the effect, among others, of opening an almost unlimited field for innovation, a polymorphous and continually renewed innovation which must ceaselessly satisfy the changing expectations of multiple stakeholders (customers, workers, subcontractors, shareholders, neighbors of the company, etc.). However, particularly internally, innovation is a collective process in which everyone only gets involved if they feel like it and if they benefit from it. Here again, the creation of a climate of trust and horizontal operation is no longer a choice, a humanistic flourish, but a burning obligation. Every leader who abstains from it from now on commits a serious professional error. – This is moreover one of the most exciting features of Soufyane Frimousse’s book, a feature which he illustrates through many original and convincing examples: in the field of management, the digital revolution reshuffles the deck. Countries, even continents, who historically and culturally are predisposed to work collectively in networks, may find themselves not at the back, but a lap ahead. This is supported in a way by this assertion by Felwine Sarr: “Africa has no one to catch up to. They need no longer run along the trails indicated to them, but nimbly walk along the paths that they choose themselves”7. – Another characteristic which gives the present book a large part of its uniqueness is that Soufyane Frimousse does not center his reflections on Africa alone8 but is also interested in the major developments of the vast multicultural melting pot that is the Mediterranean, particularly, but not uniquely, its southern shore. It is a complex crucible, troubled by so many historical conflicts, exclusive religions and fights to the death, but sharing 6 Revue Cadres, June 2017; issue devoted to “Taste for innovation”. 7 Afrotopia; Felwine Sarr; Philippe Rey; 2016. 8 “Management: 10 leçons d'Afrique” by Amadou Diaw (founder of the Senegalese Institute of Management at Dakar and creator of the Saint Louis Forum) and Hervé Sérieyx (Editions EMS) is entirely focused on the “Africas”.

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between its shores has led, most often without its peoples realizing it, to the birth of cultural characteristics which distinguish them considerably from the Northern countries. There is no doubt that Soufyane Frimousse’s work is a great book; to only mention frugal innovation, leapfrogging, effectuation, antifragility and dynamic rootedness, here, with many other dynamic, significant and fertile concepts, new paths which will nourish reflection and managerial research in months to come: a fresh breeze of intelligence and innovation in a field which was beginning to become a sad hell for too many received ideas. Thank you, Soufyane, and I wish great success to your book and to the rich debates that it will undoubtedly open up. Hervé SÉRIEYX National Vice-President of France Benevolat Lecturer and essayist. Columnist in several journals. Former director of several firms and groups, associate university professor, inter-ministerial representative for youth entering the job market. Advisor to many economic leaders. Author of approximately 30 works including the best-sellers Lʼentreprise du 3ème type and Le Zéro mépris.

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Index

4Ms, 13, 16, 20 A, C, D anti-fragile, 20, 28 change readiness, 22, 23 digital transformation, 1, 3 doxa, 81, 84, 92, 95, 114, 125 E, F, H effectuation, 20, 29, 129, 135 epistemologies of the South, 55 experiential learning, 23 exponential organization, 6, 7, 12, 13, 20 frugal innovation, 13, 20, 21, 26, 129, 135 homo reciprocus, 91 hybridization, 77–80, 105, 118 L, M, P

motivation by profit, 11 by purpose, 11 platform, 1, 9, 10, 18, 19, 48, 50 positive leader, 7 R, S, T rebel talent, 26, 28 relational fluidity, 76, 97, 98 rootedness, 20, 26, 29–33, 89, 91–93, 118, 129, 135 serial learner, 26 sphere of values, 90, 94, 101, 105, 110, 112, 115, 122 transposition, 74 W, Z work performance, 24 zones of fertility, 115, 116

leapfrogging, 17, 20, 21, 129, 130, 135

Innovation and Agility in the Digital Age: Africa, the World’s Laboratories of Tomorrow, First Edition. Soufyane Frimousse. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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2018 BURKHARDT Kirsten Private Equity Firms: Their Role in the Formation of Strategic Alliances CALLENS Stéphane Creative Globalization (Smart Innovation Set – Volume 16) CASADELLA Vanessa Innovation Systems in Emerging Economies: MINT – Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey (Smart Innovation Set – Volume 18) CHOUTEAU Marianne, FOREST Joëlle, NGUYEN Céline Science, Technology and Innovation Culture (Innovation in Engineering and Technology Set – Volume 3) CORLOSQUET-HABART Marine, JANSSEN Jacques Big Data for Insurance Companies (Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Data Analysis Set – Volume 1)

CROS Françoise Innovation and Society (Smart Innovation Set – Volume 15) DEBREF Romain Environmental Innovation and Ecodesign: Certainties and Controversies (Smart Innovation Set – Volume 17) DOMINGUEZ Noémie SME Internationalization Strategies: Innovation to Conquer New Markets ERMINE Jean-Louis Knowledge Management: The Creative Loop (Innovation and Technology Set – Volume 5) GILBERT Patrick, BOBADILLA Natalia, GASTALDI Lise, LE BOULAIRE Martine, LELEBINA Olga Innovation, Research and Development Management HÉRAUD Jean-Alain, KERR Fiona, BURGER-HELMCHEN Thierry Creative Management of Complex Systems (Smart Innovation Set – Volume 19) IBRAHIMI Mohammed Mergers & Acquisitions: Theory, Strategy, Finance LATOUCHE Pascal Open Innovation: Corporate Incubator (Innovation and Technology Set – Volume 7) LEMAÎTRE Denis Training Engineers for Innovation LÉVY Aldo, BEN BOUHENI Faten, AMMI Chantal Financial Management: USGAAP and IFRS Standards (Innovation and Technology Set – Volume 6) MILLOT Michel Embarrassment of Product Choices 1: How to Consume Differently Embarrassment of Product Choices 2: Towards a Society of Well-being

PANSERA Mario, OWEN Richard Innovation and Development: The Politics at the Bottom of the Pyramid (Innovation and Responsibility Set – Volume 2) PRIOLON Joël Financial Markets for Commodities RICHEZ Yves Corporate Talent Detection and Development ROGER Alain, VINOT Didier Skills Management: New Applications, New Questions (Human Resources Management Set – Volume 1) SACHETTI Philippe, ZUPPINGER Thibaud New Technologies and Branding (Innovation and Technology Set – Volume 4) SAMIER Henri Intuition, Creativity, Innovation TEMPLE Ludovic, COMPAORÉ SAWADOGO Eveline M.F.W. Innovation Processes in Agro-Ecological Transitions in Developing Countries (Innovation in Engineering and Technology Set – Volume 2) UZUNIDIS Dimitri Collective Innovation Processes: Principles and Practices (Innovation in Engineering and Technology Set – Volume 4) VAN HOOREBEKE Delphine

The Management of Living Beings or Emo-management

2017 AÏT-EL-HADJ Smaïl The Ongoing Technological System (Smart Innovation Set – Volume 11)

BAUDRY Marc, DUMONT Béatrice Patents: Prompting or Restricting Innovation? (Smart Innovation Set – Volume 12) BÉRARD Céline, TEYSSIER Christine Risk Management: Lever for SME Development and Stakeholder Value Creation CHALENÇON Ludivine Location Strategies and Value Creation of International Mergers and Acquisitions CHAUVEL Danièle, BORZILLO Stefano The Innovative Company: An Ill-defined Object (Innovation Between Risk and Reward Set – Volume 1) CORSI Patrick Going Past Limits To Growth D’ANDRIA Aude, GABARRET

Inés Building 21st Century Entrepreneurship (Innovation and Technology Set – Volume 2) DAIDJ Nabyla Cooperation, Coopetition and Innovation (Innovation and Technology Set – Volume 3) FERNEZ-WALCH Sandrine The Multiple Facets of Innovation Project Management (Innovation between Risk and Reward Set – Volume 4) FOREST Joëlle Creative Rationality and Innovation (Smart Innovation Set – Volume 14) GUILHON Bernard Innovation and Production Ecosystems (Innovation between Risk and Reward Set – Volume 2)

HAMMOUDI Abdelhakim, DAIDJ Nabyla Game Theory Approach to Managerial Strategies and Value Creation (Diverse and Global Perspectives on Value Creation Set – Volume 3) LALLEMENT Rémi Intellectual Property and Innovation Protection: New Practices and New Policy Issues (Innovation between Risk and Reward Set – Volume 3) LAPERCHE Blandine Enterprise Knowledge Capital (Smart Innovation Set – Volume 13) LEBERT Didier, EL YOUNSI Hafida International Specialization Dynamics (Smart Innovation Set – Volume 9) MAESSCHALCK Marc Reflexive Governance for Research and Innovative Knowledge (Responsible Research and Innovation Set – Volume 6) MASSOTTE Pierre Ethics in Social Networking and Business 1: Theory, Practice and Current Recommendations Ethics in Social Networking and Business 2: The Future and Changing Paradigms MASSOTTE Pierre, CORSI Patrick Smart Decisions in Complex Systems MEDINA Mercedes, HERRERO Mónica, URGELLÉS Alicia Current and Emerging Issues in the Audiovisual Industry (Diverse and Global Perspectives on Value Creation Set – Volume 1) MICHAUD Thomas Innovation, Between Science and Science Fiction (Smart Innovation Set – Volume 10) PELLÉ Sophie Business, Innovation and Responsibility (Responsible Research and Innovation Set – Volume 7)

SAVIGNAC Emmanuelle The Gamification of Work: The Use of Games in the Workplace SUGAHARA Satoshi, DAIDJ Nabyla, USHIO Sumitaka Value Creation in Management Accounting and Strategic Management: An Integrated Approach (Diverse and Global Perspectives on Value Creation Set –Volume 2) UZUNIDIS Dimitri, SAULAIS Pierre Innovation Engines: Entrepreneurs and Enterprises in a Turbulent World (Innovation in Engineering and Technology Set – Volume 1)

2016 BARBAROUX Pierre, ATTOUR Amel, SCHENK Eric Knowledge Management and Innovation (Smart Innovation Set – Volume 6) BEN BOUHENI Faten, AMMI Chantal, LEVY Aldo Banking Governance, Performance And Risk-Taking: Conventional Banks Vs Islamic Banks BOUTILLIER Sophie, CARRÉ Denis, LEVRATTO Nadine Entrepreneurial Ecosystems (Smart Innovation Set – Volume 2) BOUTILLIER Sophie, UZUNIDIS Dimitri The Entrepreneur (Smart Innovation Set – Volume 8) BOUVARD Patricia, SUZANNE Hervé Collective Intelligence Development in Business GALLAUD Delphine, LAPERCHE Blandine Circular Economy, Industrial Ecology and Short Supply Chains (Smart Innovation Set – Volume 4) GUERRIER Claudine Security and Privacy in the Digital Era (Innovation and Technology Set – Volume 1) MEGHOUAR Hicham Corporate Takeover Targets

MONINO Jean-Louis, SEDKAOUI Soraya Big Data, Open Data and Data Development (Smart Innovation Set – Volume 3) MOREL Laure, LE ROUX Serge Fab Labs: Innovative User (Smart Innovation Set – Volume 5) PICARD Fabienne, TANGUY Corinne Innovations and Techno-ecological Transition (Smart Innovation Set – Volume 7)

2015 CASADELLA Vanessa, LIU Zeting, DIMITRI Uzunidis Innovation Capabilities and Economic Development in Open Economies (Smart Innovation Set – Volume 1) CORSI Patrick, MORIN Dominique Sequencing Apple’s DNA CORSI Patrick, NEAU Erwan Innovation Capability Maturity Model FAIVRE-TAVIGNOT Bénédicte Social Business and Base of the Pyramid GODÉ Cécile Team Coordination in Extreme Environments MAILLARD Pierre Competitive Quality and Innovation MASSOTTE Pierre, CORSI Patrick Operationalizing Sustainability MASSOTTE Pierre, CORSI Patrick Sustainability Calling

2014 DUBÉ Jean, LEGROS Diègo Spatial Econometrics Using Microdata LESCA Humbert, LESCA Nicolas Strategic Decisions and Weak Signals

2013 HABART-CORLOSQUET Marine, JANSSEN Jacques, MANCA Raimondo VaR Methodology for Non-Gaussian Finance

2012 DAL PONT Jean-Pierre Process Engineering and Industrial Management MAILLARD Pierre Competitive Quality Strategies POMEROL Jean-Charles Decision-Making and Action SZYLAR Christian UCITS Handbook

2011 LESCA Nicolas Environmental Scanning and Sustainable Development LESCA Nicolas, LESCA Humbert Weak Signals for Strategic Intelligence: Anticipation Tool for Managers MERCIER-LAURENT Eunika Innovation Ecosystems

2010 SZYLAR Christian Risk Management under UCITS III/IV

2009 COHEN Corine Business Intelligence ZANINETTI Jean-Marc Sustainable Development in the USA

2008 CORSI Patrick, DULIEU Mike The Marketing of Technology Intensive Products and Services DZEVER Sam, JAUSSAUD Jacques, ANDREOSSO Bernadette Evolving Corporate Structures and Cultures in Asia: Impact of Globalization

2007 AMMI Chantal Global Consumer Behavior

2006 BOUGHZALA Imed, ERMINE Jean-Louis Trends in Enterprise Knowledge Management CORSI Patrick et al. Innovation Engineering: the Power of Intangible Networks

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