Michel Crozier ( Fr. Michel Crozier ; November 6, 1922 , Saint-Meneu - May 24, 2013 , Paris ) - French sociologist , supporter of moderate functionalism . Professor at the University of Nanterre, Head of the Center for the Sociology of Organizations, President of the French Sociological Society (1970–72).
| Michel Crozier | |
|---|---|
| Michel crozier | |
| Date of Birth | November 6, 1922 |
| Place of Birth | Saint-Meneau , Marne , France |
| Date of death | May 24, 2013 (90 years old) |
| Place of death | Paris , France |
| Citizenship |  France |
| Occupation | Sociologist |
| Awards and prizes | [d] |
Biography
Michel Crozier became a sociologist, having gained rich experience in social analysis, which was made possible thanks to the American scholarship, which he used to study the labor movement in the United States. After an initial study of business and jurisprudence in Paris in 1943, he spent fourteen months traveling around the United States in the early post-war years, talking with union members and officials, studying the labor movement and American society as a whole. Returning to France, he published a book about this study and joined the French National Center for Scientific Research as a sociologist.
In 1953, he conducted his first white-collar research at the French Post Bank. The publication of the results of this study (“Little Officials”) created him a reputation as a “white-collar” sociologist and stimulated a number of new field studies in insurance companies, large national banks and, not least, in the French tobacco monopoly. In 1959, he was invited to the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto . There, he set about developing and writing what ultimately became the book The Phenomenon of Bureaucracy, first published in England and then in France in 1964. In this book, which created the sociology of organizations as a separate discipline in France, Michel Crozier outlined the basics of what would later become a “strategic analysis of organizations”.
The international success of The Phenomenon of Bureaucracy brought him a reputation and resources for founding the Center for the Sociology of Organizations, a small research group of young sociologists with whom he embarked on a new research program aimed at theoretical and methodological substantiation of his approach to the study of organizations. In 1977, in collaboration with Erhard Friedberg, he published Actors and Systems (1981, Chicago University Press), a scientific essay that was highly influential in France and continental Europe. In it, the authors described an approach to the study of organizations and other, less formalized operating systems, detailed the theoretical and methodological assumptions underlying them.
Professor Crozier never considered sociology and sociological theorizing as the main goal. He never separated his theoretical work from the desire to implement social reform, in the pursuit of which he published seven books, and participated in numerous consultations. In the 2000s, he wrote an autobiography in two volumes, “My Beautiful Era” (Ma Belle Epoque, 2002), and “Against the Current” (A Contre-Courant, 2004).
Ranks and Awards
Alexis de Tocqueville Prize for Humanism ( 1997 ). Member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences (1999). Officer of the Legion of Honor and commander of the French Order of Merit .