OCE - Impact
In 2025, the OCE Research Center celebrated its 20th anniversary through two major events: a day of exchange and a scientific poster exhibition.
Special day of exchange
On June 12, 2025, the OCE Research Center celebrated two decades of existence by bringing together, for a single day, all those who have shaped its history and continue to shape its future. From the founders to the recently appointed early-career researchers, as well as former members who returned especially for the occasion, this anniversary event fostered a rare and valuable intergenerational dialogue.
The images captured bear witness to these warm reunions, to the lively exchanges between generations of researchers, and to the living transmission that gives a research center its soul. This audio-visual record is far more than a simple memory: it encapsulates the spirit of OCE, the distinctive blend of scientific rigor and conviviality, of tradition and innovation, which has enabled the center to establish itself as a major player in research.
Scientific poster exhibition
The OCE Research Center at emlyon business school celebrated its twentieth anniversary, and on this occasion a scientific poster exhibition was created. It offers a window onto projects that have marked two decades of committed research and ethnographic fieldwork conducted by OCE researchers. Special attention is given to the past ten years and to doctoral research. The disciplines that make up the richness of the center are represented: anthropology, sociology, political science, and management and organizational studies. This exhibition embodies the very essence of OCE. Each poster reflects an approach to research that privileges the researcher’s immersion in organizational realities in order to better reveal tensions, dysfunctions, as well as often invisible or rendered invisible dynamics that run through these organizations.
After being presented in Lyon, in the Jean Jaurès space of the campus library, the exhibition is hosted from October 2025 to January 2026 at the emlyon Paris campus library.
The exhibition is organized into seven thematic clusters that reflect the richness and diversity of the field sites explored by OCE researchers over the years. From cooperatives to activist mobilizations, from alternative forms of organizing to migration struggles, and including the ambivalences of contemporary work and crisis management, each poster bears witness to a long and patient immersion in social and organizational realities.
Through this exhibition, OCE reaffirms its conviction that research grounded in the field and attentive to the human consequences of organizational transformations is essential. These posters constitute fragments of individual and collective works that, over the past twenty years, have sought to deconstruct relations of domination, reveal inequalities, and give voice to lived experiences within organizations.
This celebration of OCE’s twentieth anniversary serves as a reminder that conducting critical research in a business school is not merely an academic posture, but a specific epistemological stance: one that refuses to naturalize managerial and organizational logics and instead seeks to analyze how power is exercised, contested, and reconfigured within organizations and beyond.
