INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND POWER: POWER IN THE FIRM AND POWER OF THE FIRM.

This article presents a reprint of the paper "L'informatique etlepouvoir: Pouvoir dans l'entreprise et pouvoir de l'entreprise," that was published in the May 1972 issue of the periodical "Informatique et Gestion." A brief recall of the most recent concepts on the functioning of organizations will allow the potential implications of informatics for the distribution of power in a company to be better understood and will clarify the reactions of the cadres in this regard. Specialists on business administration and sociologists specializing in organizations have conducted studies in the United States and in Western Europe that have led to a company no longer being considered as a supra-individual entity, having an existence and a behavior independent of that of its members and capable to this extent of being explained and governed by referring to purely formal models. They have likewise demonstrated that a company can no longer be conceived of only as the network of interpersonal relationships--irrational and charged with affectivity--to which the theoreticians of human relations thought it could be reduced. Instead, an organization can more realistically be considered the resultant of strategic games carried out as a function of multiple, divergent, and indeed contradictory goals by the organizational actors and as a function of their adherence to a minimum of common norms.