Évolution socioculturelle | EPFL Graph Search

L’évolution socioculturelle est une palette de concepts décrivant comment les cultures et les sociétés ont évolué au cours du temps. Ainsi, l'évolution socioculturelle peut être définie comme . De telles théories impliquent la création de modèles pour la compréhension des relations entre les technologies, les structures sociales, les valeurs de la société, et comment/pourquoi elles changent dans le temps, pourquoi elles varient en empruntant des mécanismes spécifiques. La modélisation socioculturelle se donne ainsi pour but de reproduire de façon informatisée comment les cultures et sociétés se sont développées dans le temps. Il a ainsi été développé des modèles des considérant l'humanité comme un ensemble, avec des sociétés à différentes étapes de développement social. Toutefois, les approches les plus récentes prennent en compte les changements spécifiques des individus et non plus un changement directif de la société dans son ensemble. Plus récemment encore, à la sui

Entrepreneurship across Sociocultural Contexts: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives

Shirah Eden Foy

Entrepreneurship is a highly contextualized process. Yet, the vast majority of entrepreneurship research has focused on Western contexts, yielding a skewed picture of global entrepreneurial behavior. Moreover, theories of mainstream psychology explaining the development of individual characteristics and worldviews - which have important implications for venture creation - have shown limited transferability to the eighty-five percent of the world's population that does not inhabit Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic societies. Much of this variation in social processes has yet to be explored in organization studies, meaning that our understanding of the vast firm creation activities taking place globally is sorely limited. Contributing to a more nuanced understanding of entrepreneurship, this thesis offers two contextualized empirical studies and a review of the main approaches to studying organizations, their founders and members, across sociocultural contexts. Study I, a qualitative study, develops and presents theory to explain how key venture decisions are shaped by the dynamics produced when entrepreneurs' identities interact with the surrounding social structure. Based on 50 in-depth interviews with Taiwanese entrepreneurs, we show that the (mis)alignment between an entrepreneur's identity structure and the perceived social structure of their environment produces tensions or reinforcement for the individual that frame their overarching attitude toward firm creation. These attitudes fundamentally shape the founder's strategic orientation, offer, production, and distribution. We extend theorizing on founder identity and discuss the limitations of theorizing based on a single sociocultural context or a single period in history. Study II reviews the psychological literature's various approaches to studying culture, presenting four packaged approaches that management scholars may adopt in their studies of organizational phenomena. While compelling evidence of wide variation in psychological orientations across cultures calls for deeper and broader studies of organizations both within and across cultural settings, the diversity of conceptualizations of culture and directives for its study create considerable barriers to entry for management scholars aiming to do rigorous work. In this study, I discuss key elements of the various approaches available, presenting the merits and limitations of each, and providing examples of how management scholars may employ each packaged approach to extend theories of organization. Study III, a qualitative study, examines venturing in the context of grand societal challenges--a context characterized by high complexity, requiring high impact, highly scalable solutions that generally engage multiple institutional actors. In an in-depth, longitudinal study of Swiss celebrity founder Bertrand Piccard and the Solar Impulse Foundation, we discover latent hybridity at play as the organization accelerates its sustainable mission with the brand of its celebrity founder--a brand which requires maintaining over time in order to provide continued support to the organization. We refine the concept of latent hybridity and develop a model of organizational awakening and response to latent hybridity, extending the literature on hybrid organizing as well as entrepreneurship in the context of grand challenges.

EPFL2020

Teaching Through Performing Arts in Higher Education: Examples in Engineering and Psychology

Simon Nessim Henein, Susanne Martin, Joëlle Valterio

This paper introduces two courses making use of performing arts at university level. The first course, taught by Prof. Simon Henein and his colleagues, called Improgineering, aims to teach collective creation through improvisation to master’s degree students in engineering at the EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland). The second course, taught by Prof. Laure Kloetzer and her colleagues, aims to introduce the Psychology of Migration via a sociocultural approach to bachelor’s degree students in psychology and education at the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland). After briefly introducing the topic of performing arts in higher education (section 1), the paper offers a description of the two courses (sections 2 and 3). These are complemented by teachers’ and students’ impressions of the course, as analyzed from individual interviews, focus groups and students’ learning diary entries (section 4). The conclusion presents some reflections on the convergences of the pedagogical designs of the courses, drafting a pedagogical model for using performing arts within higher education (section 5).

2021

Identity-Society (Mis)Alignment And The Instrumentalization Of Firm Creation: Creative Destruction And Creative Reconstruction

Shirah Eden Foy, Marc Gruber

Research on founder identity has significantly advanced our understanding of entrepreneurship and related literatures. By departing from the widely held-though often implicit-assumption that culture defines the parameters of identity formation, this paper investigates how the alignment, or misalignment, between a founder's identity and their perceived sociocultural context influences new firm creation. We engage in an in-depth qualitative study of 49 founders in Taiwan that reveals how founders' identity structures can be (mis)aligned with their perceived social structures, and how the reinforcement or tensions generated by (mis)alignment can fuel the creation of fundamentally different types of ventures-including those that challenge the perceived sociocultural status quo with a social mission intended to push society toward a new equilibrium. Our theory of founder identity-society (mis)alignment is therefore able to specify a key mechanism linking the founder's identity with perceived sociocultural context. Furthermore, we advance the influential Schumpeterian theory of creative destruction beyond the purely economic context to address the broader sociocultural environment and to incorporate the concept of creative reconstruction, in which entrepreneurs seek to restore elements of society past.

ACAD MANAGEMENT2022

Entrepreneurship across Sociocultural Contexts: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives

Shirah Eden Foy

EPFL2020