This paper discusses the emergence and reinforcement of organizational political regimes based on domination and centralization in French organizations. Domination and power are old concepts in organizational sociology, but the confrontation of two well-known approaches to politics in organizations, that of Weber and that of Crozier, suggests that an `archaic' notion such as domination is still very useful for understanding how business leaders `govern' organizations today. Based on empirical studies, the paper proposes that organizations should be seen as `soft bureaucracies', in which centralization and entrepreneurial forms of governance are combined. Thus, choosing a Weberian point of view, this paper simultaneously describes organizations as `structures of domination' and as `structures of legitimacy'. It defends the idea that, in spite of the success of the network form utopia, the re-emergence of bureaucracies is a sign that organizations are more and more politically centralized and governed.

R esearch has recognized the transformative dimension of resistance in the workplace. Yet resistance is still seen as an adversarial and antagonistic process that management can accept or reject; thus, understanding how resistance can actually influence workplace change remains a challenge for research. In this paper, we offer an analysis of two situations of resistance wherein resisters, organized in temporary enclaves, are able to influence top management's decisions and produce eventual change. Whether or not resistance becomes productive depends on the skillful work of resisters and the creation of powerful "objects of resistance" that enable resisters to modify temporarily the power configuration of a situation and oblige top management to listen to their claims and accommodate to the new configuration. This paper shows that resistance can be better explained by what resisters do to achieve their ends rather than by seeing resistance as a fixed opposition between irreconcilable adversaries.

For the past decade, project organization has become increasingly central to management and organization studies, particularly as these seek to discern the contours of post-modern organizations. Yet, these contours frequently seem to be sighted without bearings on the current realities of project management. In this paper we take such bearings, using data derived from detailed qualitative, ethnographic enquiry into the experience of project management. From this data we construct the contours of project management more sharply. Rather than being a harbinger of an autonomous and more democratic future, free from extant bureaucratic organization controls, we find that project management has distinct modalities of control that we outline in the paper: reputational, calculative, and professional. Indeed, rather than foreshadowing a future transformational form, we find traces of a much older design: that of de Tocqueville. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004.

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The meaningfulness of the physical place within which resistance is nurtured and enacted has not been carefully considered in research on space and organizations. In this paper, we offer two stories of middle managers developing resistance to managerial policies and decisions.We show that the appropriation and reconstruction of specific places by middle managers helps them to build autonomous resisting work thanks to the meanings that resisters attribute to the place in which they undertake resistance. We contribute to the literature on space and organizations by showing that resistance is a social experience through which individuals shape physical places and exploit the geographical blurring of organizations to develop political efforts that can be consequential. We also suggest the central role played by middle managers in the subversion of these meaningful places of resistance.