Michel Crozier obituary
Leading French sociologist whose breakthrough book was The Bureaucratic Phenomenon
Michel Crozier in 1995. He highlighted the self-defeating nature of large bureaucratic organisations. Photograph: Louis Monier/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
Michel Crozier, who has died at the age of 90, was one of the great French sociologists in a remarkable generation that came to prominence in the 1960s and early 70s. Names to be mentioned in the same breath are Pierre Bourdieu, Alain Touraine and Raymond Boudon. These dominant figures, methodologically at war, were propelled into public debate by the interlocked world of publishers based in Paris's intellectual triangle between the boulevards Saint Germain and Raspail and the rue du Bac, a press which took up their ideas and an expanding university system that up till then had not taken sociology seriously.
Crozier's breakthrough book, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (1963 in French, 1964 in English), is a still wonderful account of how an organisation as a system generates the overlapping vicious circles that then block the system. The voices of his interviewees in two public service organisations, one a clerical agency, the other a state industrial monopoly, explaining their attitudes and their behaviour, are as fresh as if they had been uttered yesterday. This book heralded a consistent theme in Crozier's work that organisational reform is not possible unless its proponents take into account the way that people will interpret it, react to it and subvert it. As Crozier put it in the title of a 1979 book: "You can't change a society by decree."
His findings and his analysis were not only theoretically important, refining the work of one of the founding fathers of sociology, Max Weber, to show what really happens behind the organisation chart. As applied to French public administration and French society as a whole, his work called for a much more sophisticated understanding of the rigidities about which a French elite constantly complains. Crozier pursued these ideas in The Stalled Society (1970 in French, 1973 in English) and in the theoretical classic Actors and Systems (1977), co-written with Erhard Friedberg.
Crozier got into sociology by chance. He was born in north-eastern France, at Sainte-Menehould in the Marne department, into what he described as a happy suburban family. His initial studies were in business and law at the Paris business school Hautes Etudes Commerciales. Then he was given a scholarship to spend 14 months in the US, where he chose to interview American shop stewards.
He was at that time, he wrote in his 2002 autobiography, Mémoires, "something of a poet, vaguely surrealist and even a bit of revolutionary with Trotskyite tendencies". The CIA dogged him. But he came back with a wealth of interviews which gave him a permanent taste for fieldwork, produced a prizewinning thesis in 1949, and gained him entry to the French national research organisation, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).
In 1961 he was able to create his own CNRS centre, the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations, to pursue the strategic analysis for which he was becoming famous, and away from what he considered the narrowness of the French university. From 1959 he had a continuing collaboration with American social scientists at the Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences at Palo Alto, California, and later at Harvard. It was a model of the fruits of international academic exchange, though somewhat dampened by his book The Trouble with America (1980 in French, 1984 in English).
In the mid-1970s I was sent to Paris with a Sisyphean task set by the magazine New Society of trying to interview the god figures of French sociology. It was a disaster: I came away feeling I had been eaten for dinner by both Bourdieu and Touraine and had not fully appreciated Boudon. Chastened, I didn't try to see Crozier face to face. It turned out he had long resented Bourdieu's "colonisation" of public opinion, about which he wrote scathingly in Mémoires.
When I did eventually meet him in the 1990s, he was still a stylish, dapper figure and a hopeful social reformer, berating top civil servants for not learning the lessons of his work.
Crozier's first wife predeceased him. Three daughters of that marriage and his second wife survive him.
• Michel Crozier, sociologist, born 6 November 1922; died 24 May 2013
Wikipedia
Michel Crozier (6 November 1922 in Sainte-Menehould, Marne- 24 May 2013 in Paris) was a French sociologist and member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques since 1999.[1] He was also an officer of the Légion d'honneur and a commander of the Ordre National du Mérite, as well as a laureate of the Prix Tocqueville.Biography
Michel Crozier did not become a sociologist by training. He became a sociologist because of a seminal experience in social analysis that was made possible by an American scholarship that he used to study the labor movement in the United States. After his initial training in business (HEC Paris, 1943) and law, he spent fourteen months traveling across the US in the immediate post World War II years, interviewing labor union members and officials, getting to know the American labor movement and American society in general. Back in France, he published a book on this research and joined the French National Center for Scientific Research as a sociologist.In 1953, he carried out his first research on the white-collar workers in the French Postal Bank. The publication of the results of this research (Petits Fonctionnaires au travail) established his reputation as a sociologist of white-collar work and set off a series of new field studies on insurance companies, a big nationalized bank and, last but not least, on the French tobacco monopoly. In 1959, he was invited to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto. There he started the elaboration and writing up of what eventually became The Bureaucratic Phenomenon, published first in English in 1964, and then in French. In this book, which established the sociology of organizations as a discipline in France, Michel Crozier sketched out the bases of what would later on become the “strategic analysis of organizations.”
The international success of The Bureaucratic Phenomenon provided him with the reputation and the resources to found the Center for the Sociology of Organizations, a small research group of young sociologists, with whom he embarked on a new research program on French Administration and Change, and pursued the theoretical and methodological elaboration of his approach to the study of organizations. In 1977, together with Erhard Friedberg, he published L’Acteur et le système (Actors and Systems, 1981, Chicago University Press), a scientific essay that was highly influential in France and continental Europe. In it, the authors put forth an approach to the study of organizations and other less formalized systems of action, detailing the theoretical and methodological assumptions that lie behind it. The way in which organizations and systems function is conceptualized by them as originating from game structures that channel and stabilize power and bargaining relations between a set of strategically interdependent actors.
Professor Crozier never considered sociology and sociological theorizing as an end in itself. He never separated his sociological work from his commitment to administrative and social reform, in the service of which he published seven books and engaged in numerous consultancies and interventions. He recently published his autobiography in two volumes, Ma Belle Epoque (2002), and A Contre-Courant (2004).
我2005年一篇blog:
其次，要盡可能參考比較可靠的翻譯本，譬如說Allen Bloom著的《走向封閉的美國精神》(缪青、宋麗娜等譯 北京：中國社會科學出版社，1994 。 好像還沒有人比較過Michel Crozier《被封鎖的社會》(1970巴黎Seuil出版 /1999年北京商務翻譯)......
"一九五一年，年輕的組織社會學學者米榭‧克羅齊埃(Michel Crozier)在由沙特領導的《現代》(Les Temps modernes)雜誌中寫道：「『傳播』的概念是人類工程學(Human engineering)的基本概念（略）。公共關係和人類工程學在美國文明中，並不構成一個孤立的現象。正相反，它們是一個影響所有面向的偉大運動的先趨點。公共關係宗教、藝術、文學、教育、社會和家庭關係、愛和性生活本身，都越來越處於這個假惺惺的微笑標記之下，越來越處於這種虛偽的好心情之下，越來越處於這個對保護社會利益功不可沒的假民主之下。」他繼續窮追猛打：「這種社會技術，幫『美式生活這個口號披上了一層不容辯駁的科學外表』。」〔Crozier, 1951. p. 65, 71〕。"---謬詠華草稿. 此本簡介法國電影的書台灣出版過.
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