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Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- The Tunisian general labor union : a uniquely Tunisian organization -- Unionists recount the December 17, 2010 uprising from the outbreak of the revolt to efforts to organize the movement -- The UGTT's polarizing role during the transition -- The Tabarka congress : revolutionary zeal tests the UGTT's unity -- The UGTT as a counterbalance -- Conclusion: lessons learned from the UGTT's role in the revolution -- Postface -- Bibliography -- Appendices -- Sector-based and regional bodies -- Advisory commissions -- UGTT chronology (1946 to January 2014) -- Index.

This article draws attention to how management scholars "the outsiders within" who are structurally positioned within the academies of dominant powers might negotiate the complexities of producing a locally rooted and meaningful knowledge, emancipated from the U.S. hegemony while carrying organization studies in Arab countries. Drawing upon my different ethnographic journeys as a researcher, brought up in an Arab country with a Francophone intellectual mindset and studying Arab management practices, I will discuss both the potential for and the difficulties of critical engagement with a decolonizing management research agenda. Then, and building on critical border thinking tradition, I will propose the Egyptian term "Fahlawa" as a metaphor for better describing the challenges of a decolonizing research practice that privileges contestation and perpetual bricolage over formal and universal design. Finally, I will conclude by highlighting the potential of "Fahlawa" as a survival/resistance practice to theorize what is unthought and invisible in management literature and to build situated knowledge less organized by U.S. domination.

Adopting Barker's (2011) Marxist approach of a social movement "as a whole", this article addresses the question of whether and how mass-membership movement organizations can break out of oligarchic authority and support a radical political protest movement. Using an ethnographic approach, this article explores how the UGTT (the Tunisian General Labor Union) responded to organizational challenges during the Tunisian popular uprising in 2010 by examining its intra-organizational processes as well as its interactions with other parts of the protest movement and how their struggles mutually aided the fall of Ben Ali's regime. The findings highlight that two correlated aspects were critical to a radical transformation of UGTT's conservative goal. First, unionists with activism experience outside the labor organization played a key role as "mediators," deriving meaning from the organizational culture of the union to interpret the course of the event, supporting the popular uprising, and forcing the union leadership to join the revolutionary process. Second, the unpredictable and unprecedented regime repression radicalized the protest movement and its claims, and ruptured the union's traditional bureaucracy. The article concludes by elaborating on the potential of organizational studies to help us understand the role of trade unions in protest movement organizing and, more broadly, the role of formal mass-membership organizations in social movements.

The postcolonial and decolonial approaches open the way for a rich analysis of the material and cultural conditions in which international management operates, is spread, interpreted, and implemented. They also offer food for thought on the possibilities, tensions, and resistance associated with reinventing alternative organizations more respectful of the dignity of all, while still providing knowledge that is socially and politically useful for oppressed and marginalized groups. Nevertheless, and despite their undeniable contribution to the theoretical development of critical approaches in international management, these perspectives are faced with challenges and difficulties in both intellectual and empirical terms. In this article, I suggest a series of ways forward, which might allow for the renewal of the critical fruitfulness of this intellectual and political project, crucial to face the contemporary challenges of international management. ; Les approches postcoloniales et décoloniales ouvrent la voie à une analyse riche des conditions matérielles et culturelles dans lesquelles le mangement international est produit, diffusé, interprété et mis en œuvre. Elles offrent également des pistes de réflexion sur les possibilités et les résistances à réinventer des organisations alternatives plus respectueuses de la dignité de chacun tout autant qu'une production intellectuelle socialement et politiquement utile pour les groupes opprimés et infériorisés. Cependant et malgré leur contribution incontestable au développement théorique de lectures critiques en management international, ces perspectives sont traversées par des tensions et des difficultés aussi bien sur le plan intellectuel que pratique. Dans cet article, je propose d'esquisser une série de pistes de réflexion qui pourraient permettre de renouveler la fécondité critique de ce projet intellectuel et politique indispensable pour faire face aux enjeux contemporains du management international.

Drawing on postcolonial studies of management, this article highlights the importance of adopting a contextualized approach to hybridization processes that, first, takes into account the importance of the historical and cultural contexts from which hybridity emerges and, second, helps to identify the elements that change as well as those that persist when western management practices are imported into developing countries. Using a discursive analysis, this article shows the ambivalent nature of the accounts given by managers (trained in western traditions) of the Tunisian company Poulina as they explain how they modernized their company through the implementation of a US management model. The managers' ambivalence takes on two distinct forms. First, while they seem to have internalized the rhetoric of modernization in insisting on how they used the US management model to overcome the 'dysfunctional' family-based organizational system, they simultaneously express resistance by detaching themselves from the French colonial organizational model. Second, when they describe the implementation of the US management practices and how workers resisted them, it seems that they have implicitly negotiated and reinterpreted these practices via a local cultural framework of meaning. Based on these findings, I argue that hybridity is best understood as an interweaving of two elements – the transformation of practices and cultural continuity – in which identity construction, local power dynamics and cultural frameworks of meaning jointly shape the hybridization process of management practices.

L'objectif général de cet ouvrage est de faire le point sur les avancées récentes des recherches que Jean-François Chanlat avait entamées il y a 30 ans et de rendre compte des principaux débats qui portent sur les dimensions oubliées de la gestion, d'en identifier de nouvelles, et ce, afin d'envisager un prolongement à ses réflexions pionnières.

On July 25, 2013 the drafting of a new constitution by the Tunisian Constitutional Assembly reached a complete impasse, following the assassination of opposition politician Mohamed Brahmi that very day. Fears mounted that the fragile democratization process would come to a halt. In 2011, free and fair elections had brought the Islamist democratic party Ennahda to power, which had formed a government with two smaller opposition parties. Simultaneously, other "old" opposition forces underwent internal reforms and strengthened their position in the new political landscape. Instead of building strong coalitions, these "old" forces re-activated old struggles and disputes. Only in July 2013, during the critical moment, did the political forces realize that they needed to enter into negotiations and dialogue with each other to save the country. The so-called Quartet was formed, which managed to convince most parties represented in the National Constitutional Assembly to accept their road map and enter into negotiations focusing on three main issues: governmental, constitutional and electoral. The National Dialogue did not unfold as a well-planned process with a thought-through design, but rather was a response to an acute political crisis. Hence, the Tunisian National Dialogue served as an instrument for crisis management, implemented while the crisis was still unfolding. The Tunisian National Dialogue was an ad hoc process, with many actors engaged on different levels and several parts of the process taking place at the same time.