Jean François Delplancke

Biography

Jean-François Delplancke is an Emeritus Professor at ESCP Europe Paris campus. He teaches the human dimension of Management and Organizations and has a background in Management, Consulting and Clinical Psychology. His career has been marked by several important factors that have forged his scolarly practice and influenced his professional path. Among other positions, he was a psychotherapist (with a psychoanalytical orientation) for 12 years. He has also served as Mayor of Farges-Allichamps France (1983-1989), and was an associate consultant at Harbridge House Consulting Group London (1991-1997). In 1998-1999, he was a research fellow at City University Business School and in 2007 a visiting scholar at ILR, Cornell University, NY. In 2010, he was awarded his PhD in Management Studies at the University of Essex (UK).

Jean-François Delplancke's research focusses on what he calls now the dynamic identity of organisations. This term, borrowed from Paul Ricoeur (2002), addresses simultnaneously the two dimensions of organizational identity that he considers inseperable:

• Identity itself, which he considers a long process of selective sedimentation and accumulation that links an organization to its past and leads it to reproduce itself on the basis of a certain loyalty to itself and to its history. This is the determinist dimension of dynamic identity
• The dynamics of identity on the other hand that he sees as that which links the organization to Otherness and mobilizes its capacity for transformation. It is here in engaging with the Other (a partner, an innovation, an acquisition...) that the organization, through the interplay of differences and the force of its engagement, will be led to change and reinvent itself. This is the evolutionary dimension of dynamic identity.

As a result, this definition leads to a close association between the problematics of identity and diversity. In this context, Jean-François Delplancke has developped a hybrid methodology that brings together historical, ethnographical and, to a great extent, auto-ethnographical approaches to the study of organizations. At the outset, his reseach terrain was an important French bank, the Crédit Agricole. While engaging in this research, he became a bord member of one of the Group's regional caisses.

Jean-François Delplancke is a founding member of EURAM (European Academy of Management).

Research Interest