A Case of Organizational Conflict Analyzed by Communication Dynamics
This article presents the case study of a conflict situation in a French social organization, based on a novel conceptualization of interpersonal conflict in an organization that articulates four dimensions: the analysis of conflict in terms of escalation processes in interpersonal communication; psychosociological phenomena such as social facilitation and identity processes and group dynamics; individual trajectories in terms of habitus; and contextual factors, including cultural dimensions (based on the notion of field). This conceptual framework is applied to the case of a social center in France and shows that the conflict is centered on relational disjunctions that are not specific to French culture and that are not controlled by the management. Management recommendations are deduced from this.