Remi Jardat
email: r.jardat@istec.fr

HOW DEMOCRATIC INTERNAL LAW LEADS TO LOW COST EFFICIENT PROCESSES : PRACTICES AS A MEDIUM OF INTERACTION BETWEEN INSTITUTION AND ORGANIZATION

Keywords: practices, constitutional law, organizational routines, French institutionalism, retail banking sector

According to Sewell's principle of the multiplicity and the intersection of the structures, we consider here a retailing bank as an organization and as an institution. As an institution, the studied bank appears to be a constitutional democracy, whereas, as an organization, it proves to be a very efficient low cost company. Organizational and institutional features of this firm look correlated and this correlation is interpreted as an interaction between institution and organization, which takes place through the medium of interconnected practices inside the firm.

Institutional features are analyzed through Hauriou's institutionalism and Turpin's Constitutional laws theory, whereas organizational routines are described through a triadic model (Ostensive aspect, performance and artifacts) proposed by Pentland and Feldman.

Through the study of induction practice and interactions between this practice and other ones inside the firm, we map systematically induction's practising in the sense of Pesqueux and establish a dual influence of institution on organization. Firstly, there is a mainstream influence from constitutional law to organizational routines, through interconnection with an intermediate step called "institutional routines". Secondly, there is a "coherence" effect, by which some peculiarities of several organizational routines reinforce each other in the day-to-day life of the firm. Finally, we discuss the possibility of building a constitutional theory of the firm. We emphasize the structuring role of law and the specific influence of political constitutional law on the empowerment of employees, through the dialectic tension between law and other components of the institution.

INTRODUCTION

A -THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK Every firm may be described according to several overlapping dimensions: for example the organizational, institutional, political, professional or even biological ones. Every dimension itself may also have several definitions, in which the mutual extents offor example -the organizational and the political one may be quite separate or on the contrary almost the same. The study of diverse dimensions of the same firm leads to describe diverse structures that coexist and interact within practices.

Such a point of view can be related to the concept of the multiplicity and the intersection of the structures, defined by [START_REF] Sewell | A theory of structure: duality, agency and transformation[END_REF], and used by Martha Feldman (FELDMAN, 2003: 747). As the latter explains: "the multiplicity of structures refers to the observation that social systems "are based on practices that derive from many distinct structures" having "different logics and dynamics" (SEWELL, 1992: 16). Organizations, thus, have informal structures, hierarchical authority structures and temporal structures, just to name a few."

-Importance of the institutional dimension for the study of practices

It is commonly admitted that organizational and political dimension of the firm determine major levers by which managers can exert a certain influence on practices inside the firm. Our case study led us to emphasize the importance of the institutional dimension, and of its interdependence with the organizational one. Let us consider that an organization has to do with "coordination of persons and things in order to exert determined functions 1 ", whereas an institution consists in a "normative complex 2 ", whose principal elements 3 are "aims of a higher order", "foundation by rules which have force of law (are valid for everyone)" and are characterized by a high stability.

It is not unreasonable to consider practices as "stable patterns of action", which could in certain sense be meant by "routines", even if we don"t pretend that practices are only routines or only the performative aspect of routines. Then it looks natural that, on one side, when the organizational point of view is relevant to study some practice, this practice can be correctly described as an organizational routine. On the other side if it proves that the institutional point of view is relevant to study some practice, then it may me correctly described as an institutional routine. According to Sewell"s principle quoted above, "Structures or structural complexes intersect and overlap" [START_REF] Sewell | A theory of structure: duality, agency and transformation[END_REF]: 19 in FELDMAN, 2003 : 747). In so far as organizational and institutional dimensions of the firm Institution/Organization/Practices 4/26 may intersect and overlap, practices are likely to be described both as organizational and institutional routines, but, as we could establish in our case study, one dimension frequently prevails over the other.

-Theoretical framework for organizational routines

Martha Feldman and Brian Pentland proposed a theoretical framework for organizational routines involved in a perpetual process of reproduction and selftransformation [START_REF] Pentland Brian | Organizational routines as a unit of analysis[END_REF]. As explained by these authors, such a view about routines is coherent with a general paradigm explaining the dynamic equilibrium of social phenomena, as exposed for example by [START_REF] Giddens | The constitution of society[END_REF] or [START_REF] Bourdieu | Outline of a Theory of Practice[END_REF][START_REF] Bourdieu | The logic of Practice[END_REF]. But the peculiarity of their framework consists in decomposing every practice into three aspects inspired by Latour"s Action Network Theory [START_REF] Latour | Science in action. How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society[END_REF]: the ostensive, the performative and the artifacts. The ostensive aspect of the routine is its "abstract pattern"; it consists in the pattern by which people bring the practice to mind. The performative aspect of the routine consists in the specific actions people actually perform. The artifacts are material products related to the practice like flow charts, Standard Operation Procedures, etc. The generative properties of routines emerge from two dynamics: an endogenous dynamic produced by the tensions which come out between the ostensive aspect, the performative aspect, and the artifact of the practice. An exogenous dynamic produced by the interaction of the practice with other ones. As exposed by [START_REF] Feldman | A performative perspective on stability and change in organizational routines[END_REF], organizational routines can influence each other through one of the three aspects, for example the performative one. We used this framework to describe the organizational dimension of practices and interaction between practices, and to confront our observations with some conjectures and results of Pentland and Feldman.

-Theoretical framework for institutional routines

As exposed by Yvon Pesqueux [START_REF] Pesqueux Yvon | Gouvernance et privatization[END_REF], many theories of institution are at disposal, but most of them are not able to integrate the dimension of conflict, whose importance is crucial in our case study. Maurice Hauriou"s "theory of the institution and the foundation" [START_REF] Hauriou | La théorie de l"institution et de la fondation[END_REF][START_REF] Hauriou | Aux sources du droit : le pouvoir, l'ordre et la liberté[END_REF] doesn"t present this drawback. According to HAURIOU, conflicts are present in a very analogous way both in the spirit of every individual and inside the institution. This conflict has to be expressed and solved through "crisis of communion" by which all parts converge to consensus, some of them because they agree with the decision (the liber volui) , some other because they finally express loyalty to the institution and its aims (the coactus volui). The conflict solving design of Hauriou is procedural: the procedure is called "deliberation" and presents strong analogies with Habermas" "discussion" (HABERMAS, 1997).

There is a second reason for choosing Hauriou"s institutionalism when analyzing our case. According to Pesqueux, "Hauriou"s theory is particularly appropriate to explain "the institutionalization of such movements like mutualism and public health care in France, at the end of the XIXth Century" (PESQUEUX, Institution/Organization/Practices 5/26 2007 : p. 20). In fact the studied firmthe Crédit Mutuel -is a "mutualist" institution and the history of its institutional construction is fully in accordance with Hauriou"s theory, as will be explained below (part I). Moreover, Hauriou explains why and how an institution must be considered as a legitimate source of law, through "dialectic tension between the state and other social corps" (PESQUEUX 2007, p. 20). This is particularly relevant for our study, because of the existence of an "internal law" produced inside the Crédit Mutuel, exerting a major influence on the practices performed inside the firm.

Naturally Hauriou, as a French law professor who died in 1929, never used the term "institutional routine". We propose to define the term as following: an institutional routine is a routine whose characteristics are directly determined by the constituents of the institution inside which it is performed.

Hauriou stated the thesis that there is a natural trend inside every institution, that he calls "interiorization", which means that more and more people interiorize more and more a common idea of work in their spirit. When a certain degree of interiorization is reached, the institution has come to the stage of "personification". At this stage the institution has produced a set of "rules of law", "statutes" and "higher principles of law".

According to our definition, routines by which the day-to-day life of the institution is performed (like tactics of deliberating in an assembly) can be considered as institutional routines. As exposed above, many routines in the firm present both an organizational and an institutional aspect. Our definition allows us to consider some practices, whose features are a direct consequence of the institutional peculiarities of the firm, as institutional routines, interacting with "more organizational" routines and influencing them.

-Practices as a medium of interaction between institution and organization.

With such definitions, institutional and organizational routines have many characteristics in common. As involving "multiple actors and interdependent actions" (PENTLAND and FELDMAN, 2005: 795), they can be distinguished from individual routines. Indeed, particularly in the case of highly interiorized institutions, institutional routines must definitively produce "repetitive, recognizable patterns of interdependent actions, carried out by multiple actors" (PENTLAND and FELDMAN, 2003: 795).

Pentland and Feldman consider that "identifying a particular routine is a bit like trying to isolate the Gulf Stream from the Atlantic Ocean" (PENTLAND and FELDMAN, 2005: 798). What organizational and institutional routines have then in common is an ocean of actions, representations and artifacts by which they take place inside human collectivities. This complex set, crossed by many simultaneous streams, can be considered as the medium of interaction between organizational and institutional routines.

Why are practices so important for this mediation? As Pentland and Feldman explain "practice is inherently improvisatory" but "improvisation involves listening to what others are playing" (PENTLAND and FELDMAN, 2005: 796).

Institution/Organization/Practices 6/26

From our point of view, improvisation also involves inspiration from scores that the other ones have in mind if they belong to the same community. Pesqueux [START_REF] Pesqueux Yvon | Gouvernance et privatization[END_REF] calls "practising" this semi-deterministic (as well as semistochastic) phenomenon, located at the interface between performative (the action) and ostensive (the score in mind).

The moment of practising involves openness to other actions, other people, other practices, openness to reason but also to intuition and unconscious: it is the connecting node between many things, including several practices and, as such, institutional and organizational dimensions of the firm.

B -RESEARCH QUESTION, RESEARCH SETTINGS, METHODS AND MAP OF THE PAPER.

Is it possible to establish a relationship between institutional peculiarities of one firm and its efficiency? We studied the case of French retailing bank, the Crédit Mutuel Centre Est Europe (CMCEE), whose internal rights and statutes form a set of institutional peculiarities. Our challenge is thus to prove that these institutional features have an effect on this firm"s management and efficiency, through the medium of several interacting practices.

This study was conducted through a series of semi-directing interviews of employes and elected members of the CMCEE (Nine people, 30 hours), the direct observation of practices (10hours), the lecture of meetings minutes and the collection of internal documents describing the specific rights and statutes of the firm.

The steps of our demonstration are the following : Firstly (part I of this paper), we describe some general data about the studied retailing bank, and stress its organizational and institutional peculiarities.

Secondly (Part II of this paper), we briefly recall the idiosyncratic peculiarities of induction practice inside the CMCEE4 and explain that this peculiarities are perpetually created and recreated through the interaction with a set of interconnected practices, among which institutional routines transmit the influence of institution to organization.

Thirdly (Part III of this paper), we discuss the possibility of proposing a theory of the political constitution of the firm, and emphasize the necessity of a political constitutional law inside the firm.

Institution/Organization/Practices 7/26

II -INSTITUITIONAL FEATURES OF THE CREDIT MUTUEL A-GENERAL FIGURES AND FACTS

The Crédit Mutuel Centre Est Europe (CMCEE) is part of the Crédit Mutuel, which is a major actor of retail banking in France (the second one in size after Crédit Agricole), and regularly expresses pride for its own Capital stocks (12,5 G€ in 2004), its growth and its profitability.

On one side, the Crédit Mutuel is a classical retail bank involved in insurance and other peripheral financial service activities, with apparently classical management practices. But on the other side, the Credit Mutuel is also a paradoxical organization, which competes with corporations without really being one of them.

This bank is a highly decentralized organization, with a rather strong local empowerment. The CMCEE is a Federation of 600 Caisses, each of them being a bank on its own, in charge of performing its own profit and monitoring its own prudential ratios.

Some functional services and transversal activities are performed by federal entities. Inside the Crédit Mutuel, all these entities are called "The second degree". Some of these entities are subsidiaries and provide various services to the Caisses : asset management, technology, insurance products management, etc.

B -THE INSTITUTIONAL DIMENSION: A DEMOCRATIC FEDERAL GOVERNMENT 1°) A down-top legal architecture

The Caisse is the "basic cell" of the CMCEE. Every Caisse is a juridical autonomous entitiy, whose legal status is called "cooperative association with variable capital". The Caisse is an association owned by its members and ruled by the legal status of the French association law, including the sovereign power of the general assembly, as well as the existence of a board of directors and a supervisory board. Every customer of the Caisse can become a member by buying shares.

Each local Caisse owns shares of the "Federal Caisse", so that this central bank is a subsidiary of the Federate. At the same time, the "second degree" federation with its central services is an association whose members are elected by the federate Caisses.

The "Federative Bank" owns the various technical and financial service societies, but is itself owned by the federate Caisses.

As we can see, from a legal point of view, the decentralized entities are the parent of the centralized ones, whereas, most of time in business, the central Institution/Organization/Practices 8/26 rules and/or owns the local. That legal peculiarity is a first explanation for the peculiar organization of the bank.

2°) A democracy principle, a dual power at every step

The general assemblies at the Crédit Mutuel differ widely from the ones of a capitalistic society: the principal "one man, on vote" is fully respected, whatever the amount of shares every one is owner of.

Besides, at every degree of the Federation, there is a co-management by the professional director and the board of elected members. The same principle of co-management is present at a more centralized level. Locally, several Caisses form together a cluster called "district", inside which they can take some decisions in common. The elected boards of the Caisses elect the President of this "district". This intermediate level corresponds to an intermediate level of the organization called the "regional services", which are local parts of the Federation.

At the very top federal level, we can localize the "General Director" of the Federation and his staff. The members of the central offices and committees are managed and recruited by the general director, who is himself chosen by the President of the Federation. This President is himself elected by the democratically elected instances of government, so that, through a cascade of political representations, every member of the central management is under control of the basic elected members.

3°) A constitutional government for the firm

The CMCEE has developed an unique institutional architecture which largely exceeds the traditional statutes derived from the cooperative associations law. The following elements exist only inside the CMCEE and nowhere else :

There is a set of written rights and statutes, of purely internal value, that rule the decision making and the institutional relationships between the different parts of the federation. These rights and statutes are formulated in terms that are usually the ones of the constitutional law of a State. We can consider that they establish a sort of political constitutional law for the CMCEE.

This written constitutional law is explicitly based on the "separation of powers". These powers are in a number of three: an "executive power" exerted by the President, the federal board of directors and the general director chosen by the president, the "legislative" power of a "syndicate room" also called "parliament", and the "judiciary" power of "arbitral jury". Official documents describe a set of checks and balances between these three powers as well as rules for the election of people at each of these powers.

The main institutional knot of The CMCEE is the "parliament". Its members are elected, partly by the elected members of the Caisse Boards directly, partly by the Caisse Presidents and the District President, partly by the employees of the Caisses, regional Directions, federal departments and Institution/Organization/Practices 9/26 subsidiaries, and partly by the trade unions. It is also specified that a couple of seats is reserved for local politicians. This "Parliament" is in charge of voting the "resolutions" (i.e. the decisions) submitted by the executive power. The syndicate Chamber plays a vital role in this government system. Every decision affecting the conditions of doing business for the Caisses, for example the price of cash in the internal market is submitted to its vote. Every strategic decision, for example the purchase of another bank like the CIC, must be voted by the parliament.

The spirit of this constitution is expressed as the "subsidiarity" principle, designed to maintain the local power as strong as possible: "The nearest organ to the user should achieve all relevant tasks, leaving organs at an upper level (federations, co-ordinations, groups) perform the tasks is cannot itself sufficiently achieve. On the contrary, the federal organ should not achieve the tasks that an organ at lower level could achieve sufficiently Institution/Organization/Practices 10/26

C -DISCUSSION ABOUT THE INSTITUTIONAL FEATURES OF THE CMCEE

The CMCEE"s institutional architecture and decision making illustrate Hauriou"s institutionalism, due its anatomy6 as well as its physiology and its history.

Institution/Organization/Practices 11/26  The CMCEE"s anatomy: the idea of enterprise is "to be a social bank" and is present since the creation of the first Caisses (Raiffeisen"s movement).

The organized power and the organs of the institution are highly elaborated, through a complete set of rights and statutes. The manifestations of communion are multiple : federate and federal general assemblies, as welle as sessions of the syndicate chamber.  The CMCEE"s physiology: the foundation of Caisses, as well as the periodical re-foundation of federal institutions and new statutes, follow Hauriou"s principles, particularly the common will manifestations. Deliberations in assembly, decisions of the board and decisions of the director are part of the CMCEE"s dayt-to-tay life.  The history : the CMCEE"s degree of interiorization looks quite high : the central role of the organ of deliberating power and the separation of powers, show that the institution has reached the stage of personification which, according to Hauriou (HAURIOU, 1986 : 110) allows a political liberty to take place inside the institution. This evolution towards personification has lasted more than 100 years, and was punctuated by crises of communion. As forecast by Hauriou, the CMCEE, as a mature institution, has become an autonomous source of the law, producing its own rights, statutes, and even what we may call an internal constitutional law.

With such institutional features, being the ones of a representative democracy conducted by an idea of enterprise, one can expect that, from an organizational point of view, the CMCEE may be a participative organization with a quite high rate of empowerment, at least for decentralized middle managers (the Caisse directors). This empowerment may favor an organizational learning based on a "distributed intelligence", allowing quite good adaptation to the customers" needs and evolution.

But how do the institutional features of the CMCEE transmit their effects on the organizational life? A look at the practices that are performed inside this firm may give us some elements of answer.

II -INTERACTION OF ORGANIZATIONAL ROUTINES WITH THE INSTITUTION: THE CASE OF INDUCTION

It has been previously established [START_REF] Jardat Rémi | Practices, organizational learning and theory of constitutional law : the Crédit Mutuel Case, Euram Colloquium, may 2006[END_REF][START_REF] Jardat Rémi | Practices, organizational learning and theory of constitutional law : the Crédit Mutuel Case, Euram Colloquium, may 2006[END_REF]) that induction inside the CMCEE is a low cost efficient process, especially if compared with induction inside another typically centralized bank. A description of induction practice through Feldman and Pentland"s grid shows (i) concerning the ostensive aspect, a very homegenous and quite stable process, (ii) concerning the performative aspect, a great liberty for the federate Caisses, (iii) Institution/Organization/Practices 12/26 concerning the artifact, the absence of any Standard Operating Procedure (SOP). Acccording to Feldman and Pentland (FELDMAN and PENTLAND, 2005:799), this tends to prove that induction is a very interiorized practice, in a context of high empowerment of the working people.

HR Federal department considers itself as a "service provider" for the Caisses, and that Caisses" directors are "the real HR directors of the CMCEE". Moreover, it was explained that the current induction process was established 10 years ago, through a change process that stressed consensus building with the federate managers.

It is thus tempting to infer that such a situation is the product of the CMCEE"s institutional features. The consensus of the change may have produced an efficient induction process, due to the loyalty of the federate directors as well as the decentralized pattern of induction organization that came out of the negotiation between federate and federal. The search for consensus itself may be the compulsory consequence of a democratic constitutional law that would make every dictatorial practice implementation impossible for the federal. To summarize, the low cost decentralized induction process might reflect the "subsidiarity principle", that is the "spirit" of the CMCEE"s constitution.

We are going to try to prove this by revealing the influence of the CMCEE"s institution on its induction process, through the interaction among diverse practices inside this firm.

A -INTERACTION WITH OTHER ORGANIZATIONAL ROUTINES

There are some significant organizational routines that contribute to make induction practice interiorized and empowered. A first set of such routines is constituted by every functional service delivery from federal departments to Caisses ( §1). These routines produce and reproduce the peculiar service ethos of federal departments. A second set of influent organizational routines can be identified through the more or less formal meetings that gather federate and federal employees, in order to deal with project management or diverse organizational problems ( §2). These routines contribute to produce and reproduce an ethos of the search for consensus with federate managers.

-The delivery of services by federal departments

Although every Caisse is itself a bank, many functional activities are not performed by the Caisse but by federal departments. This has for consequence certain homogeneity of processes and products inside the CMCEE, as well as economies of scale.

However, the relationships between Caisses and federal departments are all but hierarchic. As a Caisse managing director explains: "we are independent. For example, if we consider here that the new savings products proposed by the marketing are not convenient, we can decide not to sell them. If we are skeptical about the success of the product, we can delay its implementation and wait until other Caisses have used it. If there are enough successes, then we adopt the product. No Caisse will ever be blamed by the federation for having this sort of attitude." The same habits and behaviors occur concerning other functions: "We can purchase equipments ourselves if we prefer, as soon as there is Institution/Organization/Practices 13/26 compatibility with the rest of the system"; "we can perform recruitment through the help of an external recruitment firm if we prefer".

Paradoxically, the recourse to external service providers instead of federal departments is very scarce. Caisse directors explain that they usually prefer services from the federal because they offer the best quality / price ratio, or because they observe the success that other federate Caisse obtain thanks to these product and services.

There is a whole set of service provision practices, related to several functions, by which a service-to-customer ethos is produced and reproduced. To maintain their legitimacy, federal departments have to design and perform efficient low cost services for Caisses, including service attitudes like openness to Caisses' needs and concerns, which contribute to sediment day after day the idea that relationships between the federate an the federal are not hierarchy but partnership. The production and re-production of induction practice influences and is continuously influenced by the production and reproduction of other functional practices involving Caisses and federation.

-Meetings with Caisses

There is another set of relationships with Caisses in which the Federal tends to produce and reproduce a given ethos: project meetings, periodical inspection of the accounting system, and presentation of new projects or strategies. What these meetings have in common is a problem solving purpose. The way a solution is sought after is always the search for consensus.

This search for consensus begins frequently with a quasi ritual that could be called "manifestation on contrition". As several interviewed people explained, as well at the federate level as at the federal, the federal general director uses a very famous slogan: "in these meetings you [the federal] are here to be blamed [by the Caisses]".

Certainly, such a practice contributes to make other practices involving Caisses and federal department more consensual. Probably, there is a reciprocal influence between such ordinary life rituals and more punctual change processes, in so far as both are characterized by consensus building. This particular meeting ritual illustrates how many day-to-day practices contribute to reproduce values and related ways of performing diverse management practices.

B -INTERACTION WITH INSTITUTIONAL ROUTINES

Organizational changes occur in various fields inside the CMCEE. If one takes only one of these fields into account, major changes may look quite scarce : for example induction practice remained stable for the last ten years. But, if one considers the set of all the major changes that took place within the last 10 years, it is possible to establish that: (i) a major change happens at least every 3-4 years and lasts about the same time, so that the existence some major change Institution/Organization/Practices 14/26 is permanent, (ii) all these changes have some characteristics in common so that they form a common pattern of change management and (iii) the CMCEE"s institutions play a major role in these changes. Thus, we consider such patterns of action as institutional routines.

The main pattern could be named "change from the top practice". It is a very special way of initiating and favoring a change wanted by the federal level, and the establishment of new induction practice is part of this institutional routine.

Every person who tries to explain the peculiarities of the CMCEE comes to tell a set of stories about some major changes which occurred within the last twenty years. The composition of this set may vary according to the interviewed person, but crosschecks show that none of these stories is an isolated memory. It is likely that these stories are widespread inside the CMCEE and are the ostensive aspect of a common culture of change. Each of these stories has its hero and gives a not ambiguous explanation of the reasons of success or failure. They can be considered as epopees in the sense of Alasdair MacIntyre [START_REF] Macintyre | After Virtue[END_REF], describing allegorically what are the main virtues that structure a cultural group.

In the following, we are going to relate some of these reconstructed epopees, and then to analyze them in terms of change culture and virtues.

Epopee 1 : The data processing epopee :

"At the end of the 1970ies, the CMCEE had become quite late with the data processing. Whereas other banks had begun to automate some processes, through heavy investments in centralized data processing centres, nothing had happened inside the Crédit Mutuel yet. Indeed, the federate "Caisses" had refused such a mutation, because they feared loosing their autonomy if a part of their core business activity would then be processed inside a federal Department. The situation became more and more concerning when more and more complex banking products began to rise, like "Housing Saving Plans" for example, which couldn't be properly processed by Caisses' teams.

But then came the hero. Michel Lucas (who is currently the general director of the federation), manager at the data processing department, proposed to bid on the further development of a new arising technology:

the network data processing. He managed to convince every main federate and federal decision maker, so that a consensus eventually came through. Thanks to him, the modernization of the CMCEE could take place, and in spite of its late start, could be quite quickly implemented thanks to the loyalty of the Caisses obtained."

Institution/Organization/Practices 15/26
Epopee 2 : The trade-unionist President epopee "During the "Trente Glorieuses" 7 , Crédit Mutuel was the only bank to pay attention to the low-and-middle class customers. Thanks to this proximity, the CMCEE could achieve a very important growth when the salaries progressively were paid through bank accounts instead of being delivered in cash. This was the "bankarization". But, despite this major growth, the federation could evolve with respect of the autonomy of the Caisses. The hero of this epopee is Theo Braun, the former President of the CMCEE until the eighties, who was a firm promoter of the "subsidiarity" principle, whereas other top managers were supposed to have been more "jacobinic". Moreover, Braun was a former member of a trade union. He had the intelligence to understand the CMCEE dynamics, and to decide that one shouldn't establish a too accurate organization chart for the Federation. This epopee is dramatically opposed to the history of the French competitors, which were nationalized in 1981 and had to experiment a very centralized and technocratic organization."

(Anti-) Epopee 3: The anti epopee of directors centralization

"There was once a federal manager wanted to centralize more the CMCEE's organization. In particular, he wanted to oblige systematically the Caisse directors to become employees of the federation, whereas the Caisses, through a local contract directly employed many of them. Before this attempt, the manager was promised to a brilliant future in the federation. But his project of centralization was firmly rejected by the syndicate chamber, so brutally that he could not keep his top management job and had to leave the federation."

Interpretation of these epopees:

These stories illustrate that, at the CMCEE, the main virtue of a federal manager is the obstinate search for a consensus with federates. The failure of the anti-hero of epopee 3 demonstrates, and perpetually recalls when related inside the CMCEE, that Caisses (that is, their shareholders) are sovereign. Due to the constituted powers of the Caisses and the locally elected members, change actions from the top have to respect certain compulsory steps unless they are dramatically rejected. It is interesting to point out that these stories admit that the CMCEE presents some weaknesses, for example its inability to conduct brutal changes from the top. But at the same time, it is specified that the Institution/Organization/Practices 16/26 hero transforms the weakness into a force: the efforts made to obtain a consensus guarantee a quite high efficiency of the implementation of the change, when finally approved.

From an institutionnalistic point of view, these stories may be interpreted as crises of communion in the sense of Hauriou, by which conflict solving occurs through deliberation.

The hero of each of these epopees has a very special counterpart: the CMCEE"s rights and statutes. None of these stories would have been the same if constitutional checks and balances had not exerted strong constraints on the process. The constitutional law of the CMCEE shaped directly what happened in these stories. On even can say that this constitution was elaborated for this purpose. Change-from-the-top practice is above all an institutional routine.

The consensual establishment of a new induction process ten years ago was not a contingent event, but an occurrence of the change-from-the-top institutional routine, directly derived from the CMCEE"s constitutional law. The punctuated dynamic of change, as illustrated by induction practice, proves to be a major vector of the institution"s influence on the organization.

C -A DUAL INTERACTION BETWEEN INSTITUTION AND ORGANIZATION

Induction practice is influenced by some organizational routines on the one hand and by institutional change routines on the other hand. Obviously this cannot be a complete and definitive description of interactions influencing induction. There is a bundle of multiple and diverse nets of influences among practices.

In particular, it is likely that organizational routines influencing induction are themselves in connectionmay it be direct or indirect -with institutional routines. How can one imagine that the "ritual of contrition" or the "service ethos" of federal departments have nothing to do with the federal constitution of the CMCEE? Establishing a not ambiguous relationship between institution and these organizational routines may require long supplementary inquiries in the field. Probably the circuits of influence, from routine to routine, are longer than the direct influence of change practices. But denying their existence does not seem reasonable.

Thus, we can assume without too acute doubts that, having studied induction practice in particular, we have raised a global path of influence from institutional peculiarities of the CMCEE to its organizational features. The dynamic of influence is at least dual: there is a mainstream influence due to the punctuated dynamic of change, affecting most of the organizational routines. And there is a mutual influence of organizational routines that reinforce the specific values of the CMCEE, through a "coherence effect". Some organizational routines inherit the genome of consensus and empowerment from change routines that give birth to them, and then they exchange and reinforce this genome trough the day-to-day interaction with other organizational routines (see fig. 2

below).

Institution/Organization/Practices 17/26

III -DISCUSSION: MAY WE BUILD A CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY OF THE FIRM?

Institutional features of the firm like the existence and characteristics of a constitutional law prove to have dual influence on practices, and then certain influence on its efficiency and prosperity. That is, through the medium of interconnected practices, there is a path from institution to corporate success. May we consider some institutional features as control parameters of the success of the firm?

Probably the most admitted theory of the firm is the economic one. This theory considers the corporation as a transformer of capital into profit. As profit is returning partially into capital, there is a virtuous cycle of richness sustaining the growth of the firm. In this theory, the most important control parameter is an appropriate allocation of capital in order to produce the maximum of profit (see fig. 3). Another major theory of the firm could be called the "behavioral theory". According to this theory, the firm is a transformer of individual objectives into decisions affecting the whole organization. There were some attempts to theorize the control of the firm"s performance with this theory. For example, Ansoff [START_REF] Harry | Stratégie du développement de l'entreprise, analyse d'une politique de croissance et d'expansion[END_REF]JARDAT, 2005-II: 202-223) procedures could be appropriate control parameters of the decisions taken inside the firm (see fig. 4). None of these theories are today considered as totally false. In particular, managers are still trying to choose appropriate resource allocation inside the firm and to design appropriate decision-making procedures. Moreover, they purchase management books and management consultants for this purpose. Naturally, all these managers know, at least as an intuition, that these parameters are nor sufficient.

As we admit the multiplicity and interconnection of structures, we don"t seek for any reductionism considering the firm as only an institution. But, maybe, it would be interesting to raise a hidden dimension of the firm. Our aim could be to produce a theory considering the firm as a looped transformer of universes of virtues (for example: the search for federalist consensus) into practices. According to this theory, the parameters of control would consist in the political constitution inside the firm (see fig. 5). A preliminary step of the construction of the constitutional theory of the firm, is to establish the necessity of the law and of the constitutional law as generators of institutional routines, which is the most heretic part of the theory.

Firstly, we must establish the structuring role of the law inside the firm-asan-institution (Paragraph A). Secondly, we have to explain why not only law as a social constitutional law, but law as a political constitutional law is vital if we want to really shape decision making inside the firm (Paragraph B). Thirdly, we recall that such a political constitutional law, as a part of the institutional anatomy of the firm, cannot be instituted with success independently from other aspects of the institutional "foundation" in the sense of Hauriou (Paragraph C). The firm is an Ocean of instability with continents (perhaps only archipelagos) of stability. Not only performances have a dynamic dimension. Many apparent structures of the firm are in fact subject to quick change and instability, for example its rate of recruitment and turnover, its organizational cut into divisions, the main allocations of resources, etc. These changes are part of the firm"s life, and it may be particularly noxious to inhibit inappropriately its possibilities of move.

However, law reigns over some fields of the firm"s life, establishing limits that cannot be transgressed, independently from any management considerations that would motivate transgression. For example special laws may prevent the firm from lowering the salaries beyond certain limits, although this would have been a particularly appropriate solution for competition problems of the firm. And, in fact, firms respect the law much more frequently than diverse promises and commitments. It is obviously admitted that respecting the law is one of the most predictable aspects of people and firms behaviors. As Habermas explains (HABERMAS, 1997: 162), the general function of law consists in "stabilizing behavior expectations".

Thus, law may be a privileged control parameter in order to obtain behaviors that would not spontaneously take place inside the firm. In particular, law is frequently used to fight about phenomena of injustice that reflect the asymmetries of resources and power inside organizations: laws against sexual or moral harassment, social protection laws, etc. In general, we may assume that law would be a relevant instrument for the fight against organizational harmful problems that are caused by oligarchic phenomena.

Firms publish more and more "charters" of transparency, of empowerment of employees, of social responsibility, etc. But these commitments have not force of law. They are subject to change due to strategic factors or even due to changes in the top management of the firm. The possibilities of recourse for broken commitments are weak, especially for players who don"t master enough resources of information and power inside the firm. For example, may we really imagine that, without its set of precise laws and statutes, the CMCEE"s organization wouldn"t have been subject to the general trend of centralization that occurred inside French retail banks during the 1980ies?

Hauriou thought that laws and statutes were the natural product of every "personified" institution (HAURIOU, 1986: 114-117), ensuring the continuity (durée) of the idea of work inside the institution. This must be particularly true in the case of any firm, like the CMCEE, whose aim (to be a "social bank" through the "self help") stands agaients the current of social inequalities. Law is an instrument. But not every sort of law is relevant to counterbalance harmful uses and abuses of power, particularly concerning organizational life. A typical example for this is the case of French banks during the 1980ies. Most of them were nationalized, and as a consequence they adopted very protective statute laws for employees, who were considered as state servants and, for example, could not be fired for economical purpose. Despite this legal situation, nationalized firms were very "jacobinic" centralized organization with no empowerment of the employees. This phenomenon is not really surprising, if we draw an analogy between law phenomena inside the firm and law phenomena inside the society. In his study about law and democracy, Habermas explains that (HABERMAS, 1997: 93): "only laws of politic participation found the legal, reflexive and self-referential position of citizens. On the other hand, laws that warrant negative liberty and social rights may be granted in a paternalistic way. The state of law and the welfare state are in principle possible without democracy." Transposed to the inside of the firm, such an analysis means that one must discriminate between "welfare firm" law on one side and "political" law on the other side. Thus, elements of welfare law, like social rights inside nationalized banks are not sufficient to influence the organization in the sense of the empowerment of employees. Only elements of political law inside the firm may do it.

B -THE ROLE OF A POLITICAL CONSTITUTIONAL LAW

Within the sets of common or internal laws of the firm concerning powers, rights and participation we have then to distinguish between a social constitutional law on the one hand and a political constitutional law on the other hand. The social constitutional law exerts structuring influence on the way corporate decisions affect the stakeholders" welfare, whereas the political constitutional law shapes the ways and manners of taking into account the wills of power and participation of these stakeholders. Thus, only the latter may have a major effect on the legitimacy of organizational change process and subsequent practices. In our case study, the checks and balances that shape the features of the CMCCE"s organizational routines belong to a political constitutional law and are part of its institutional identity, whereas the CMCEE"s social constitutional law does not differ widely from the one of its competitors" 8 . This confirms that only the former set of laws may explain the peculiarities of this firm"s organizational routines.

Legal control parameters of the generation of practices inside the firm are essentially to be found within a political constitutional law, even though there may exist interdependence between political and social rights.

C -INTERCONNECTIONS BETWEEN POLITICAL CONSTITUTIONAL LAW AND OTHER INSTITUTIONAL ELEMENTS OF THE FIRM.

Institution/Organization/Practices 22/26 Law "has no substance" and is pure "mediation" (OPPETIT, 1999: 24) or "dialectics between politics and ethics" (FREUND, 1965: 285). Political constitutional law of the firm must be understood as a vector of expression and a medium of reproduction of the institutional identity of this firm.

As Maurice Hauriou explained "rules of law are not enough full of life to organize a community that would be proper to them and in which they would be expressed […] the true objective element of the law system is the institution". Whereas law means only "ideas of limit", individuals and institutions are "alive and creators", produce "ideas of enterprise" and have "power of realization" (HAURIOU, 1986: 127-128).

Political constitutional law must be understood itself as a vector of expression and continuity (through "stabilization effect") of institutional features of the firm. But it is a mandatory vector so that there is a generative loop between the existence and shape of law on the one hand and the properties of institution on the other hand (see fig. 6). This means that the former and the latter do not coincide permanently: there may be internal tensions between these constituents of institution. For example, the instauration of current federal constitutional law of the CMCEE was possible because of the moral authority of the President who proposed it to the syndicate chamber. This law was a vector of intensification and systematization of relationships and consolidation of common resources between federate members, and allowed to accelerate this trend. But it was possible to implement it because this trend towards intensification and systematization had already begun and because a majority of the CMCEE"s members had interiorized the idea of this trend. if the firm has not reached a high degree of institutional "personification" in the sense of Hauriou. Considering political constitutional law as a control parameter of the firm looks easier if used as a grid of observation and deciphering of the firm"s performance rather than as a management tool. However, such knowledge may be useful at some privileged moments, when firms have to change their statutes because of major organizational or business transformation. Then the art of "political constitutional law design" would rely on the ability to choose the appropriate degree of tension between institution and law, in order to implement viable change.

CONCLUSION

There is nowadays a growing research community in France and continental Europe about the life of firms with untypical institutional architecture, the so-called "Coopératives" and "Mutuelles". Although many of these firms exist since the end of the XIXth Century, their institutional and organizational peculiarities are not well known. Establishing some relationship between these peculiarities and the efficiency of these firms is a great challenge, not only for researcher but also for authorities, because many lobbies exert pressure to obtain their suppression or at least their transformation into classical firms.

The general theory of interconnected practices may offer major access roads to the comparative assessment of several institutional types of firms, in relationship with their organization features and their efficiency.

Figure 2 :

 2 Figure 2: the dual influence of institution on organization

FigFig. 4 :

 4 Fig.3: The economic theory of the firm

Fig. 6

 6 Fig. 6 Dialectic tension between law and other components of the institution

described in detail in another paper :[START_REF] Jardat Rémi | Practices, organizational learning and theory of constitutional law : the Crédit Mutuel Case, Euram Colloquium, may 2006[END_REF]

." We can then understand that the decentralized management, on the organizational dimension, reflects fully the institutional principle of subsidiarity.5 Internal document [DG,2], p. 3

Her we type in italic the terms that Hauriou used to describe the constituents of every institution

In France, the so called "Trente Glorieuses" mean the 1945-1975 period.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research is being achieved under support of the British Advanced Institute of Management, through the Gnosis project lead by professor Elena Antonacopoulou.

We would like to give special thanks to Elena and to the other member of the French sub-project, researchers Maria Bonnafous-Boucher and Jérôme Méric , and assistant Terry Rocves.

The last, but not least thank is for Yvon Pesqueux, leader of the gnosis studies processed in France.


Jean-Jacques Girardot

Cyril Masselot
email: cyril.masselot@mshe.univ-fcomte.fr

SPECIFICATIONS FOR THE TERRITORIAL INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY SYSTEMS (TICS)

Keywords: territorial intelligence, territorial information system, partnership, sustainable development, data analysis, participation intelligence territoriale, système d'information territoriale, partenariat, développement durable, analyse des données, participation

This paper presents the progress of the drafting of specifications regarding the design of the Territorial Intelligence Community System, a concept that emerged within the caENTI coordination research activities framework from the Catalyse method. After a presentation of the TICS global design we will present the research about specifications according to the TICS four axis:

-Integration of the data processing software -Online editorial process from data gathering to results publishing -Data processing protocols for statistic and spatial analysis -Integration of actors' uses Résumé: Cette communication présente les résultats obtenus dans l'élaboration des spécifications des Systèmes Communautaires d'Intelligence Territoriale, un concept qui s'est développé dans le cadre des activités de coordination et de recherche de la caENTI à partir de la méthode Catalyse. Après une présentation de la conception générale des SCIT, nous présenterons l'état des recherches sur les spécifications selon les quatre axes d'intégration des SCIT : -Intégration des logiciels de traitement des données -Processus editorial, de la collecte des données à la publication en ligne des données -Protocoles d'analyse des données pour l'analyse statistique et spatiale -Intégration des usages des acteurs.

At the beginning of caENTI, Catalyse was the starting point of the work on TICS. We essentially take consider Catalyse as a set of tools. Consequently, caENTI aims at "integrating the present research projects on territorial intelligence tools, so as to give them a European dimension" and the main objective of the work package 6 was to "design tools for territorial actors".

From Catalyse to TICS

Harmonisation of Catalyse Tools

Catalyse essentially articulates three kinds of tools: -The tools for diagnostic and evaluation, an individual multi-sector guide, Pragma for quantitative analysis and Anaconda for qualitative analysis (profiles of needs) -The repertory that publishes on line the available services -Territorial indicators mapping

We consider then two additional specifications sets: -The Catalyse « toolkit » harmonizes and updates the tools, improves their accessibility and completes their documentation.

-The integration of the Catalyse tools within a territorial information system linking quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis and spatial analysis in order to determine and compare people's needs profiles and services profiles within a context defined by territorial indicators.

In the initial project, the specifications of such a territorial information system mostly depend on a methodological and technical logic. Statistic analysis, data analysis and spatial analysis have their own generic process.

They are integrated within an information system that also has a broader generic process, from data gathering to information publication, via cooperative space for analysis. These generic processes can also be defined step by step, independently from their application field and uses.

During the first period of caENTI, common specifications were drafted for information contents: guide, repertory and territorial indicators; as for the data processing tools: Pragma, Anaconda, Nuage and Sitra for mapping (see deliverables 51 to 56). The definition of harmonized information contents and tools specifications, on the basis of observatories experiences and respecting European standards, strongly mobilized actors and researchers at the European scale.

Diagram 1: Harmonisation of Catalyse tools (J-J. Girardot, ThéMA) New experimentations quickly started with the updated contents and tools.

Transition towards TICS concept

The modelling of the Catalyse method made decisive progress: -The information contents became at least as important as the data processing tools.

-The specifications for uses became more important than the technical guidance note.

Data analysis protocols were drafted to define the data processing and the analysis process for each question of the guide. These protocols were deduced from the generic analysis process on one hand, and from actors needs and uses on the other hand. A diagram describes the Catalyse governance integrated within territorial cooperative observation tools used by participative territorial partnerships.

Diagram 2: Scheme of Catalyse governance (J-J. Girardot, ThéMA) During the second period, two coordination groups drafted specifications for: -The integration of the guide within the European online Inclusion Itinerary Accompaniment File, which computerises a traditional professional tool of the medical and social sector (see deliverable 57).

-The generic processing and editorial chain from territorial data to results publication. An unplanned coordination group was created during Huelva conference on October 2007 in order to study the uses of associated observatories, follow the caENTI experimentations and make a repertory of territorial actors (see deliverable 58).

Definition of TICS concept

During the first two periods of caENTI, we progressively define the territorial intelligence community system (TICS) as a territorial information system (TIS) designed on the basis of actors use and specifically uses within territorial development partnerships. Its governance in the observation field was illustrated within the Catalyse method framework.

Our first objective was to integrate the fundamental analysis tools Pragma, Anaconda, Nuage and Sitra as modules of a Territorial Information system. This software only allowed beeing used on a working station. As their main users were distant partners from different bodies and worked in network, the need to integrate this software and to make the output and input files compatible and available at distance quickly appeared.

Diagram 3: Integration of basic modules (J-J. Girardot, ThéMA)

In the TIS, we designed the information concerned a territory, that is to say a geographic space and its community. They are referenced in space and time. The aim of the statistical and spatial analysis functions was to help territory actors, by producing knowledge about the territory. We considered the functions from the technical point of view of an editorial chain:

-Gathering information -Analyzing them according to scientific protocols, especially in a spatial prospect -Interpreting these analyses results -Representing the information and the results -Drafting decision-making scenarios -Managing and evaluating policies, programs, devices, projects and actions that result from these decisions.

When we paid interest in uses, we referred to the following definition that focuses more on the uses than on the functions: A TICS is a TIS addressed to a territorial community, or to a partnership of territorial actors who want to develop democratic governance according to sustainable development principles.

-It favours information sharing within a territorial development partnership; -It instruments the data cooperative analysis and the participative interpretation of the results; -It introduces citizens' participation in the decision-making process; -It provides to the actors useful information in order to draft projects, and then to manage and to evaluate them; -It gives to the community all the useful information.

It exploits the potential offered by computer science for gathering information, sharing it, favouring the actors' partnership in the information cooperative analysis, and increasing citizens participation, by improving their information and their access to information. It respects the constraints that sustainable development, particularly participation and partnership, imposes to information processing and publication protocols. The next diagram shows four research axes:

TOOLS INTEGRATION

The tools integration is the starting point and the most advanced axis of the TICS. Its work was preceded by the creation of specifications regarding the software Pragma (deliverable 54), its integration with Anaconda (deliverable 55), the territorial indicators System (deliverable 56), then the analytic and editorial chain of territorial information from gathering to online publication (deliverable 58).

This part aims at showing the progress in the development of the software and in the design of their integration.

Before the CAENTI project, we began to develop new stand-alone cross platform version of software and to integrate data and spatial analysis software.

These first steps were quickly joined and enlarged with the design of the TICS during caENTI, in two directions:

-Firstly we wanted to gather the tools in a Catalyse Toolkit for personal computers.

-Then we pursued a better integration of the tools in a unique database within the TICS.

-We followed the first schema of integration of the catalyse software (diagram 3) and upgraded pragma classic, developed a version in Java jPragma and an ePragma online version and integrated Nuage in Anaconda.

During the last period of caENTI, the software and their integration made important progress with:

-The java version of Pragma, ready for a daily use. It has the same function of Pragma classic and new functionalities, as the multilingual management. -A first webmapping was done to represent data at the communal level and we initiated regional experiences at infracommunal level.

Diagram 8: European web mapping of territorial indicators (unemployment) at communal level (P. Pehani, ZRC ZAZU).

These tools will be presented in the workshop "Catalyse tools integration" and "European portal of territorial indicators". In this workshop we will debate of:

-The CATALYSE Content Management System, which prefigures a more ambitious TICS. It suggests to Catalyse old and new observatories a website « ready to go », based on the Catalyse method, multi-language, low cost, robust and reliable -The Catalyse community, which allows downloading free updated and gives a multilingual documentation at conceptual, methodological, technical and operational levels.

Editorial and documentary process

This research axis considers the TICS as an editorial process, from data collection to results publication.

We essentially designed the documentary process of the TICS.

Firstly, we updated specifications about the input documents: the guide for diagnosis and evaluation, the repertory of services, the territorial indicators, the file, the questionnaire as a model for the previous documents and the links between these documents

Diagram 10 : Hamonization between input documents of the TICS (J-J. Girardot, ThéMA)

Then, we completed the specification of the intermediary documents: Global qualitative balance, Cross plan, Boolean data sheet, codes list and the results file of Anaconda with a proposal for a new classes profiles file

We will debate of the data modelling and of the topic of Métadata that were both coordinated by Sylvie DAMY and Bénédicte HERMANN. The report on data modelling was published on Coospace and a paper on metadata will be presented.

Analytical protocols

By working on analytical chain, we became aware of the matter of its editorial function, directed towards online edition of data analysis results. Last year, we drafted a first scheme of the main phases and stages, according to the technical protocols of data analysis, and we initiated to define with the actors the specific protocol for each question of the guide in the framework of experimentations.

Celia SANCHEZ LOPEZ and Antonio MORENO MORENO, Universidad de Huelva, Spain will be present a paper on protocols.

Integration of uses

When we were working on data analysis protocols and the use of Catalyse tools, we decided to enlarge the topic of the collective use of Pragma to the use of territorial intelligence by a development partnership, and above all, beyond it, by a community (deliverable 56). In the context of the current evolution of Internet towards social use, we bridged Internet community and community development, as a group of people gathered by a common project. It allowed clearly introducing the uses of a community, in the design of the system, in accordance with the modelling of the Catalyse governance (deliverable 56).

In territorial intelligence and TICS, the word « community » does not refer to the biological, historical or religious dimension. It refers to a group of people united by a common project. It is also the meaning that is used in computer science to refer to a users community. This meaning covering will allow studying the conditions in which territorial community can constitute the TICS users community. We should also take into account the fact that if the information analysis can constitute a project for the TICS, it is an intermediary step at the service of an objective of sustainable development for the territorial community, or more simply for the local actors who want to plan, lead and evaluate actions of local development.

This orientation implies the categorization of the TICS usersa priori; experts, actors, partners and community, and the study of their uses:

-Which functions do need an expertise? -Which functions are transferable to the users? -According to which pedagogy and with which accompaniment? -How to organize the sharing of territorial information, and then the cooperation at the level of their analysis and their edition? -Which are the actors, partnership, and territorial community functions? -How to associate the community by the means of the participative interactive systems? This modelling implies an adaptation of data analysis steps and of the results interpretation, as well as of the editorial flow, to the communication, the animation objectives of the partnership, the participation and of governance of the territorial community.

We lead comparative analysis on the uses with the caENTI observatories and the four experimentations: Accem (Spain), Integra Plus (Belgium), Adapei (France) and Chapelle-lez_Herlaimont.

We joined the WP6 (on methodological and technical aspects) and the WP5 (on "sustainability principles") efforts. They organized together during the third period three coordination meetings in order to:

-Evaluate the Catalyse method from the point of view of the uses and of the users, with a first short evaluation form (Liege, February 2008). ). Jean-Marie DELVOYE, Christiane RULOT MARÉCHAL and Guenaël DEVILLET coordinated this evaluation. They will present a paper on preconisation for Catalyse use. -Draft a form that allows describing, then analysing, the uses of territorial intelligence tools within development partnerships in order to make territorial diagnoses, to evaluate action, to observe, to elaborate projects, etc. (Huelva, May 2008). Maria Jose ASENSIO COTE coordinated the form drafting.

-Feed the form in order to draft papers that present the uses of territorial intelligence tools according to their action objectives and their principal approach in the domain of observation, and present a first version of their paper for internal discussion (Besançon, June 2008). Celia SANCHEZ LOPEZ and Jean-Jacques GIRARDOT animated the feeding and the papers drafting. -These papers will be presented in the two workshops on "The uses of territorial intelligence tools". Celia SANCHEZ will animate the workshops and Blanca MIEDES UGARTE will make a synthesis.

The led experimentation fed the research activities that were made. The workshop members should now identify all the meetings devoted to observation activities within the partnerships.

CONCLUSION AND PROSPECTS

The draft of specifications for the TICS is a very important work we initiated in caENTI. It needs to be completed in all axes and will not be finished with caENTI. However, we recently drafted sufficient specification to begin experimentation of TICS.

Numerous topics are linked between documents, protocols and uses. It is often difficult to progress in an axis until we end another. Documents cannot evolve before protocols are sufficiently advanced and the latter depends on use analysis.

Research and action are also closely associated in this domain. Each tool, document or protocol need to be experimented before making a new step. We can consider the work is now well advanced and will go on.

The tools have been presented in a demonstration workshop, with the first prototype of online documentation managed by a wiki tool.

They can be downloaded on the Catalyse community website (http://www.territorialintelligence.eu/catalyse/). Each version of these tools is available in a good and stable version. Meanwhile, they can be improved, and some points have to be finalized for a public use.

The Catalyse Community gives a first online version of the Catalyse toolkit.

The integration of the software progressed much. The website ready to use Catalyse's Contents Management System is a first simple TICS.

We have strongly initiated the specifications of the documentary and editorial chain with several approaches: documents, data modelling, and metadata.

Analysis of uses has mobilized all the caENTI territorial actors to elaborate a first set of recommendations on uses in the framework of participative partnership. The actors also initiated the constitution of a portal of territorial intelligence actors.

  Diagram 4: Territorial Intelligence Community System (J-J. Girardot, ThéMA) Before considering the results in each axis, we will quote the research actions on transversal specifications about the overall design of TICS initiated last year (see deliverable 57 and 58) -Computer science specifications, coordinated with Sylvie DAMY and Bénédicte HERMANN of the "Laboratoire d'Informatique de l'Université de Franche-Comté" (LIFC) -Energy consumption and ecological use (it is new) -Ethics and law, mainly about the respect of private life -Information and communication sciences coordinated by Cyril MASSELOT

Diagram 5 :

 5 Cross-platform version of Pragma (J. Bénilan, ThéMA) -A new version (2) of ePragma: Diagram 6: New epragma version 2 (R. Thomas, ThéMA) -Anaconda has been entirely rebuilt with a new graphical user interface, more ergonomic and easier to use. Diagram 7 : New beta version of Anaconda 3 software (croos-platform and online, M-E. Ramage, ThéMA)

Diagram 9 :

 9 Catalyse community (C.Masselot, Laseldi)

  They are now engaged in the specifications of the observation meetings in development partnerships. Bibliography FERNANDEZ QUINTANILLA J., MAHIA CORDERO J., GIRARDOT J.-J., MASSELOT C., 2007. ACCEM observation strategy. In International Conference of Territorial Intelligence, Alba Iulia 2006. Vol.1, Papers on region, identity and sustainable development, Aeternitas, Alba Iulia, 2007, p. 151-158. <URL: http://www.territorialintelligence.eu/index.php/alba06/Fernandez> FERNÁNDEZ QUINTANILLA J., MAHIA J., MIEDES B., 2008. Strategic Observation and Partnership. The case of ACCEM Observatories. In International Conference of Territorial Intelligence, Huelva 2007. Papers on territorial intelligence and governance, participative action-research and territorial development, Observatorio Local de Empleo, Huelva, 2008, p. 665-671. <URL: http://www.territorial-intelligence.eu/index.php/huelva07/Fernandez>


Gaëlle Ferré
email: gaelle.ferre@univ-nantes.fr

Timing Relationships between Speech and Co-Verbal Gestures in Spontaneous French

Introduction

These last years, a major effort has been made by the international community to extend the number, variety and size of annotated multimodal corpora in several languages, especially since it has been shown by [START_REF] Mcneill | Hand and Mind : What Gestures Reveal about Thought[END_REF] among others that gestures play a role in communication. Nowadays, some tools even allow automatic recognition of body movements [START_REF] Campbell | Tools and Resources for Visualising Conversational-Speech Interaction[END_REF] which will save time in the annotation of the less interpretative gesture configurations (eyebrow rise, hand trajectory, for instance). Yet, manual annotation is still needed for features that involve interpretation (type of hand gesture, etc). Manual annotation is also needed for corpora recorded before the development of special tools. This is why the OTIM project [START_REF] Bertrand | Le CID -Corpus of Interactional Data -Annotation et Exploitation Multimodale de Parole Conversationnelle[END_REF][START_REF] Blache | Creating and Exploiting Multimodal Annotated Corpora: The ToMA Project[END_REF] is based on the annotation of several hours of conversational speech in French. Part of the annotation process is automatic (transcription and alignment of words and phonemes, annotation of syntactic clauses and morphological categories), but the rest is manual (gesture and body movements and postures, prosodic phenomena, discourse units). These annotations (whether automatic or manual) are made with the annotation tool Praat [START_REF] Boersma | Praat: doing phonetics by computer (Version 5.1.05)[END_REF] for speech and Anvil [START_REF] Kipp | Anvil -A Generic Annotation Tool for Multimodal Dialogue[END_REF] for gestures, which is not the case of every study concerning gesturespeech relationships (for instance, the studies of [START_REF] Chui | Temporal Patterning of Speech and Iconic Gestures in Conversational Discourse[END_REF][START_REF] Kida | Prédication gestuelle[END_REF][START_REF] Kida | Prédication gestuelle[END_REF] were not based on alignment of speech transcription and gesture annotation). This does not mean that linguistic studies which are not based on time-aligned annotations are of no value, but simply that temporal alignment of annotations adds precision to otherwise more intuitive observations. Among the studies concerned with co-verbal gestures, a few of them described the timing relationships between gesture and speech. [START_REF] Beattie | Gestures, pauses and speech -an experimental investigation of the effects of changing social-context on their precise temporal relationships[END_REF] and [START_REF] Nobe | Where do most spontaneous representational gestures actually occur with respect to speech?[END_REF], for instance, analyzed gesture production cooccurring with speech or with silent pauses. Others like [START_REF] Schegloff | On Some Gestures' Relation to Talk[END_REF]), McNeill (2001, 2005), [START_REF] Kipp | Gesture Generation by Imitation. From Human Behavior to Computer Character Animation[END_REF], [START_REF] Loehr | Gesture and Intonation[END_REF], [START_REF] Kranstedt | Deictic object reference in taskoriented dialogue[END_REF] and [START_REF] Leonard | Temporal Alignment of Gesture and Speech[END_REF] for English, [START_REF] Chui | Temporal Patterning of Speech and Iconic Gestures in Conversational Discourse[END_REF] for Chinese, [START_REF] Kida | Prédication gestuelle[END_REF] for French, and Rochet-Capellan (2008) for French and Portuguese, concentrated on the timing of gesture with regards accompanying speech or parts of speech. These studies all show the interest of developing annotated corpora and timing relationships will also be the object of the present paper, in which we will compare the timing of the gesture stroke with regard to the lexical affiliate, and the gesture phrase with regard to the Intonation Phrase, after having briefly presented the corpus and the annotations made.

Corpus and data

This study is based on analysis of the data in a subset of the CID video corpus, fully described in [START_REF] Bertrand | Le CID -Corpus of Interactional Data -Annotation et Exploitation Multimodale de Parole Conversationnelle[END_REF] and [START_REF] Blache | Creating and Exploiting Multimodal Annotated Corpora: The ToMA Project[END_REF]. This corpus is still under the annotation process (OTIM project), but we were able to work on the hand gestures annotated in 75 minutes of speech, involving 6 speakers in dialogues of spontaneous French.

Speech transcription and annotations used to establish timing relationships

The paper is based on a semi-automatic transcription and its alignment with the sound file in Praat, which were then corrected manually. Intonation Phrases (IPs) as defined by Selkirk (1978 and later works) have also been annotated in Praat: whereas syntactic units such as clauses or sentences would be relevant for written texts, we considered that Intonation Phrases are quite appropriate for the chunking of speech recordings since prosody (including pauses, different degrees of stress and boundaries) gives some clue on information structure. If we consider the following example from the corpus: / y avait un espèce d'écran géant donc un matériel d'enfer / The utterance could have two possible interpretations due to the structure of spoken French and the possible placement of the conjunction donc ("so") which can be placed before, in the middle or after the clause in its syntactic domain: (a) so there was some sort of huge screen, high tech resources, or (b) there was some sort of huge screen so they had high tech resources. Now if we consider prosody, the ambiguity is not present anymore and the two Intonation Phrases are in fact: / y avait un espèce d'écran géant / donc un matériel d'enfer / This is not determined by the presence of a pause as there is none in the example but rather by the fact that there is a pitch rise on "géant" and a reset on "donc". If "donc had been part of the first Intonation Phrase, it would still have been low in pitch but the pitch reset would have occurred on "un", so that there would have been a prosodic break between "donc" and "un". Other studies have previously established a relationship between prosodic units and gestures. For instance, [START_REF] Loehr | Gesture and Intonation[END_REF] has shown that there is a timing relationship between Intermediate Phrases and gesture phrases (described in the next section). His study is in the framework of J. Pierrehumbert's autosegmental theory of intonation and what he terms Intermediate Phrases corresponds to Intonation Phrases in Selkirk's metrical theory so the prosodic units we are considering are the same. Below is represented the metrical analysis of the Intonation Phrase "tu signes le papier" ("you sign the paper", the example is also given in section 2.3).

( x) Intonation Phrase ( x ) ( x) Accentual Phrases ( x ) ( x) ω (x ) ( x) Σ x x x x x x σ tu signes le papier
In this study, the distinction between Major and Minor accentual phrases [START_REF] Kratzer | Phase theory and prosodic spellout: The case of verbs[END_REF] was not relevant since only Intonation Phrases were annotated, but it is important to understand exactly what elements they comprise. The stresses in Accentual Phrases correspond to pitch accents in the autosegmental theory, whereas stresses at Intonation Phrase level correspond to phrase tones in the autosegmental theory. Selkirk analyses a further level, the sentence level, which is not relevant here. Stresses at this level would correspond to edge tones. For all these reasons, IPs seemed to be quite an appropriate unit in a comparison between speech and gesture, and their timing has been directly compared to the timing of gesture phrases as described in the next paragraph, whereas gesture strokes have been linked to lexical affiliates. All speech transcriptions and annotations made in Praat were then imported in Anvil which was used for the annotation of gestural phenomena.

Gesture annotations

Although the general OTIM project has started the annotation of various gestures, movements and postures that include all body parts, the author of the present paper has been more particularly concerned with the annotation of hand gestures. So far, 1477 gestures have been annotated on 75 minutes of speech (the ultimate aim being to annotate all the gestures during 3 hours of corpus). Each hand gesture was described in terms of symmetry (single-handed vs. two-handed gesture, symmetric vs. asymmetric hand configuration). We then annotated each gesture's phases [START_REF] Kendon | Gesture and speech: two aspects of the process of utterance[END_REF]: preparation -stroke -hold -retraction -recoil, as well as the gesture's phrase (Kendon, op. cit.), that is the gesture in its whole, to which we assigned a dimension [START_REF] Mcneill | Gesture and Thought[END_REF] or a function regarding co-occurring speech (we retained the semiotic types proposed by [START_REF] Kipp | Gesture Generation by Imitation. From Human Behavior to Computer Character Animation[END_REF]. Each gesture was also described in terms of hand shape, gesture trajectory, space, velocity and amplitude, although these descriptions which were useful in determining lexical affiliates, were not used per se in the present study. The gesture onset corresponds to the first frame in which the hand(s) moves from its rest position whereas the offset corresponds to the first frame in which the hand returns to its rest position when the gesture is produced in isolation. When the gesture is produced in between two other gestures without any return to rest position, its onset corresponds to the first frame in which the hand changes trajectory from the previous gesture (initiates the preparation or stroke of the gesture). Its offset corresponds to the last frame before the hand changes trajectory for the preparation or stroke of the next gesture. One has to keep in mind that due to the granularity of the videos (24 frames per second), the onset and offset of hand gestures are defined less precisely than the onset and offset of speech shown in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1: Speech onset and offset.

onset offset

Among the annotations, we retained only the iconic hand gestures for the study, which was based on a number of 244 gestures out of a total of 286 iconics (42 were discarded, either because it was not possible to determine a lexical affiliate in speech due to the absence of a verbal affiliate or due to the fact that it was not possible to determine precisely a word in speech which would have a close meaning to the one conveyed by the gesture; some of the gestures were also interrupted and not taken into consideration.

Lexical affiliate

In order to establish a relationship between gesture and speech in terms of timing, it is necessary that the link between them be of an explicit nature. [START_REF] Schegloff | On Some Gestures' Relation to Talk[END_REF] described lexical affiliates as "the word or words deemed to correspond most closely to a gesture in meaning." In the case of iconics, it appears that in 85. This close correspondence between gesture feature and meaning in speech is not so explicit with other gesture dimensions such as metaphorics, for instance, which may be used to add a modality to the entire IP as presented in Figure 4:

on n'en avait pas reparlé we hadn't spoken about it again Figure 4: Metaphoric gesture adding a modality to the IP with no precise lexical affiliate.

The explicit affiliation is the reason why we chose to study the timing relationships between iconics and cooccurring speech which was also the choice made by [START_REF] Chui | Temporal Patterning of Speech and Iconic Gestures in Conversational Discourse[END_REF], whereas [START_REF] Schegloff | On Some Gestures' Relation to Talk[END_REF] for similar reasons, chose deictics (the number of deictics in our corpus was too small with only 137 occurrences to motivate such a choice, this depending much on the type of corpus), and [START_REF] Leonard | Temporal Alignment of Gesture and Speech[END_REF] chose beats.

Other studies had a larger understanding of lexical affiliation and did not restrict their observations to a particular dimension [START_REF] Loehr | Gesture and Intonation[END_REF].

Results

The first observation that needs to be made concerning the timing of gestures and co-occurring speech is that gesture units (Gstroke at lexical level and Gphrase at phrase level) are generally longer than corresponding verbal units (word and IP), as shown in Figure 5 below, and that the difference between the mean duration of phrasal units is smaller than the difference of the mean duration at word level.

Figure 5: Mean duration (in seconds) of lexical units (affiliate/Gstroke) and phrasal ones (IP/Gphrase).

In terms of timing relationships (cf. percentages given in Table 1 below), at word level, when comparing the onset and offset of gesture stroke and lexical affiliate, we observe that a large majority of strokes (72 %) start before the onset of the lexical affiliates and an even greater proportion of strokes (87 %) end after the offset of lexical affiliates. A paired T-Test showed that the anticipation of strokes on lexical affiliates is highly significant: the mean difference (M=-0.454, SD=0.692, N=244) is significantly greater than zero (t(243)=-10. (-0.32, -0.11). In all the occurrences, as opposed to the production of lexical affiliates and gesture strokes, an overlap between the production of Gphrases and IPs was observed. There was no occurrence of a Gphrase completed before its corresponding IP. Lastly, comparing the production of gesture phrases and lexical affiliates, we only found 21 cases (8.6 %) where the gesture phrase was completed before the production of the lexical affiliate (although it was overlapping the IP containing the affiliate). Most of the cases contained some verbal hesitation as in the following example: le village / il fait une espèce de / il est sur une espèce de colline [The village makes some sort of / is on some sort of hill.] Where the speaker produces two identical iconic semispherical gestures representing a 'hill'. What is apparent here is that the idea of a hill had already formed in the speaker's mind but due to the false start, the first gesture is not synchronized with the lexical affiliate 'hill'.

Concerning the comparison of gesture and speech production of Gphrases vs. affiliates, we note that in 95 % of the cases, the Gphrase onset starts before the onset of the affiliate. The results concerning gesture-speech timing relationships may be summarized in the following figure:

Discussion and conclusion

In this paper, we presented the results of one of the few studies on gesture-speech synchrony in the case of iconics. The choice of the iconic dimension was justified by the explicit relationship which exists between redundant iconics and lexical affiliates (namely words).

The results in this study -obtained from 244 iconics produced by 6 speakers during 75 minutes of spontaneous French -show that the timing relationships between gesture and speech are much alike in French and in English, as opposed to Chinese. Indeed, in Chinese, Chui (2005:878) found a higher proportion of gestures synchronized with speech than gestures anticipating speech (60.1 % vs. 35.6 %). In English, on the contrary, [START_REF] Schegloff | On Some Gestures' Relation to Talk[END_REF], who worked on deictics, observed that gesture strokes are generally produced in anticipation to the lexical affiliate. In a recent study, [START_REF] Leonard | Temporal Alignment of Gesture and Speech[END_REF] also find an anticipation of gesture in English. Their work was more precisely based on the temporal alignment of beats' phases with lexical affiliates. They showed -on a very restricted corpus though -that the onset of the gesture stroke anticipated on the vowel onset in the corresponding affiliate. They also found, like in the present study, that the gesture offset occurred after speech. Although we did not have any movement detection device during the recording of the corpus 1 (and would therefore not reach the same degree of precision as Leonard & Cummins), the corpus has also been transcribed into phonemes so we should be able to go into finer detail in the future. More refinement will also be needed concerning the relationship between gesture stroke and other speech and gesture dimensions.

For instance, [START_REF] Rochet-Capellan | Does the Number of Syllables Affect the Finger Pointing Movement in a Pointing-naming Task? 8th International Seminar on Speech Production[END_REF] showed that in French and Portuguese, deictics' alignment with speech was very much dependent on the number of syllables in the co-occurring speech: although they found general gesture-speech synchrony, they also observed a 'tendency to delay pointing events with the increase of nsyl' which could result 'from the interaction between the two systems' (p. 160). Working on deictics as well, [START_REF] Kranstedt | Deictic object reference in taskoriented dialogue[END_REF] found that the initiation of the gesture generally starts slightly after the co-occurring speech and that the stroke generally ends before the affiliate (p. 145). The difference between these last two studies and our results may very well lie in the fact that they are based on experimental corpora, whereas the present study is based on uncontrolled speech, but it would be interesting in a future study to investigate whether the variability in gesture-speech timing can be explained by different gesture amplitude. In their experimental setting [START_REF] Kranstedt | Deictic object reference in taskoriented dialogue[END_REF] the participants were pointing to objects on a table, some of which were quite near the participants, others being quite distant. Our complex annotation on the CID which codes gesture amplitude would make such an enquiry possible.

What we added to the studies on timing relationships was the fact that not only gesture strokes (i.e. the relevant part of the gesture) and lexical affiliates could be compared, but that we can also compare the timing relationships between gesture and intonation phrases, since the lexical affiliate is in the same type of relationship with the entire IP as the stroke is with the gesture phrase, which means that a correspondence can be established between stroke and lexical affiliate as between gesture phrase and IP. At phrase level, the timing relationships are of the same order as those at word level. This corroborates what [START_REF] Loehr | Gesture and Intonation[END_REF] found for English, although his results showed higher gesture / speech synchrony (but he mentions variability). This difference can be explained by the fact that Loehr considered all gesture types.

At last, this study shows one of the many interesting aspects of the annotation of multimodal corpora, since only this type of annotation allows a comparison between units from different modalities, such as coverbal gestures and speech: some of the studies quoted in this paper have been produced without any systematic annotation of either gestures or speech units. They certainly helped in formulating hypotheses on timing relationships, but it is extremely difficult to obtain precise results in terms of temporal alignment, even when one watches a video frame by frame, whereas greater precision can be attained when using annotation software like Praat for speech and Anvil for gesture phenomena. The results in such studies can be used to improve the generation of animated agents.

  Figure 2: Iconic gesture corresponding to the lexical affiliate "sign" in terms of hand configuration and movement. enfin c'est long well it's long

Figure 6 :

 6 Figure 6: Timing relationships between gesture and Intonation Phrase, and between gesture stroke and lexical affiliate.

Table 1 :

 1 Percentage of gestures starting/ending before or after speech.

	The paired T-Test showed a mean
	difference (M=-0.82, SD=0.76, N=244) significantly
	greater than zero (t(243)=-16.90, two-tail p=6.50e-43). A
	95 % C.I. about GPhrase/affiliate onset is (-0.92, -0.72).
	A high proportion (75 %) of Gphrase offsets occur after
	the offset of affiliates. Once again, the paired t-test
	provided evidence that the mean difference (M=0.595,
	SD=0.92, N=244) is significantly greater than zero
	(t(243)=10.05, two-tail p=4.21e-20). A 95 % C.I. about

This type of recording would not be quite possible with spontaneous interactions.

Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the French National Research Agency (Project number: ANR BLAN08-2_349062) and is based on annotations made by various team members besides the author of the current paper. The OTIM project is referenced on the following webpage: http://aune.lpl.univ-aix.fr/~otim/. The author thanks the reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions on a previous version of this paper.