GDPR, chair Values and policies of personal information

Personal data: How the GDPR is changing the game in Europe

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The new European regulation on personal data will become officially applicable in May 2018. The regulation, which complements and strengthens a European directive from 1995, guarantees unprecedented rights for citizens, including the right to be forgotten, the right to data portability, and the right to be informed of security failures in the event of a breach involving personal data… But for these measures to be effective, companies in the data sector will have to be in agreement. However, they have little time to comply with this new legislation that, for most companies, will require major organizational changes. Failure to make these changes will expose them to the risk of heavy sanctions.

 

With very little media coverage, the European Union adopted the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on April 27, 2016. Yet this massive piece of legislation, featuring 99 articles, includes plenty of issues that should arouse the interest of European citizens. Because, starting on May 25, 2018, when the regulation becomes officially applicable in the Member States, users of digital services will acquire new rights: the right to be forgotten, in the form of a right to be dereferenced, an increased consideration of their consent to use or not use their personal data, increased transparency on the use of this data… And the two-year period, from the moment the regulation was adopted to the time of its application, is intended to enable companies to adapt to these new constraints.

However, despite this deferment period, Claire Levallois-Barth, coordinator of the IMT chair Values and policies of personal information (VPIP) assures us that “two years is a very short period”. The legal researcher bases this observation on the work she has carried out among the companies she interviewed. Like many stakeholders in the world of digital technology, they find themselves facing new concepts introduced by the GDPR. Starting in 2018, for example, they must ensure their customers’ right to data portability. Practically speaking, each user of a digital service will have the option of taking his or her personal data to a competitor, and vice versa.

Claire Levallois-Barth, coordinatrice de la chaire VPIP.

Claire Levallois-Barth, coordinator of the chair Values and policies of Personal information

Two years does not seem very long for establishing structures that will enable customers to exercise this right to data portability. Because, although the regulation intends to ensure this possibility, it does not set concrete procedures for accomplishing this: “therefore, it is first necessary to understand what is meant, in practical terms, by a company ensuring its customers’ right to data portability, and then define the changes that must be made, not only in technical terms, but also in organizational terms, including the revision of current procedures and even the creation of new procedures,” explains Claire Levallois-Barth.

The “privacy by design” concept, which is at the very heart of the GDPR, and symbolizes this new way of thinking about personal data protection in Europe, is just as restricting for organizations. It requires the integration of all of the principles that govern the use of personal data (principles of purpose, proportionality, duration of data storage, transparency…) in advance, beginning at the design phase for a product or service. Furthermore, the regulation is now based on the principle of responsibility, which implies that the company itself must be able to prove that it respects this legislation by keeping updated proof of its compliance. The design phases for products and services, as well as the procedures for production and use must therefore be revised in order to establish internal governance procedures for personal data. According to Claire Levallois-Barth, “for the most conscientious companies, the first components of this new governance were presented to the executive committee before the summer of 2016.”

 

Being informed before being ready

While some companies are in a race against time, others are facing problems that are harder to overcome. During the VPIP Chair Day held last November 25th, dedicated to the Internet of things, Yann Padova, the Commissioner specializing in personal data protection at the French Energy Regulatory Commission (CRE), warned that “certain companies do not yet know how to implement the new GDPR regulations.” Not all companies have access to the skills required for targeting the organizational levers that must be established.

For example, the GDPR mentions the requirement, in certain cases, for a company that collects or processes users’ data, to name a Data Protection Officer (DPO). This expert will have the role of advising the data controller—in other words, the company—to ensure that it respects the new European regulation. But depending on the organization of major groups, some SMEs will only play a subcontracting role in data processing: must they also be prepared to name a DPO? The companies are therefore faced with the necessity of quickly responding to many questions, and clear-cut answers do not always exist. And another reality is even more problematic: some companies are not at all informed of the contents of the GDPR.

Yann Padova, commissaire à la CRE.

Yann Padova, CRE Commissioner

Yann Padova points out that before they can be ready, companies must be aware of the challenges. Yet he recognizes that he “does not see many government actions in France that explain the coming regulations.” Joining him to discuss this subject on November 25, lawyer Denise Lebeau-Marianna—in charge of personal data protection matters at the law firm of Baker & McKenzie—confirmed this lack of information, and not only in France. She cited a study on companies’ readiness for the GDPR that was carried out by Dimensional Research and published in September 2016. Out of 821 IT engineers and company directors in the data sector, 31% had heard about the GDPR, but were not familiar with its contents, and 18% had never heard of it.

 

Without sufficient preparation, companies will face risks… and sanctions

For Claire Levallois-Barth, it seems obvious that with all of these limits, not all companies will comply with all aspects of the GDPR by 2018. So, what will happen then? “The GDPR encourages companies to implement protection measures that correspond to the risk level their personal data processing activities present. It is therefore up to companies to quantify and assess this risk. They then must eliminate, or at least reduce the risks in some areas, bearing in mind that the number of data processing operations is in the tens or even hundreds for some companies,” she explains. What will these areas be? That depends on each company, what it offers its users and its ability to adapt within two years.

And if these companies are not able to comply with the regulations in time, they will be subject to potential sanctions. One of the key points of the GDPR is an increase in fines for digital technology stakeholders that do not comply with their obligations, especially regarding user rights. In France, the CNIL could previously impose a maximum penalty of €150,000 before the Law for a Digital Republic increased this amount to €3 million. But the GDPR, a European regulation with direct application, will repeal this part of French regulation in May 2018, imposing penalties of up to €20 million euros or 4% of a company’s total annual worldwide turnover.

The new European Committee for data protection—currently called G29—will be in charge of organizing this regulation. This organization, which combines all of the European Union CNILs, has just published its first three notices on the regulation issues that require clarification, including portability and the DPO. This should remove some areas of uncertainty surrounding the GDPR, the biggest of which remains the question of the GDPR’s real, long-term effectiveness.

Because, although in theory the regulation proposed by the EU is aimed at better protecting users’ personal data in our digital environment, and at simplifying administrative procedures, many points still seem unclear. “Until the regulation has come into effect and the European Commission has published the implementing acts presenting the regulation, it will be very difficult to tell whether the protection for citizens will truly be reinforced,” Claire Levallois-Barth concludes.

 

 

Smart cities, Ville intelligente : « Ce n’est que par une recherche pluridisciplinaire que les défis seront relevés »

Smart cities: “it is only through multidisciplinary research that we can rise to these challenges”

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The smart city is becoming an increasingly tangible reality for citizens in urban areas, with the efforts made to increase mobility and energy management being obvious examples. But is more efficient transport and optimized energy consumption sufficient to define a smart city? Being a member of the jury of the international Prizes Le Monde-Smart Cities that will be awarded in Singapor on June 2, Deputy President of IMT Francis Jutand explained to us why smart cities must be considered in a general and systemic way.

 

Is it possible to reduce smart cities to cities with lower energy consumption?

Francis Jutand: Definitely not. The impact of digital technology on cities goes far beyond energy-saving issues, even if this is an important aspect of it. Of course, it allows smart technology to be used in energy monitoring for buildings and vehicles, but digital technology also plays in important role in managing mobility and interactions. For example, it eliminates the need for physical transport by allowing for telecommuting, coworking and exchanges of information in general. It could even allow for a more adaptive organization of mobility — although there is a long way still to go in this matter.

 

What do you mean by more adaptive organization?

FJ: One of the problems affecting cities is congestion linked to peaks in traffic. Managing congestion is a tricky systemic challenge which has to combine a number of solutions, such as organization of work, staggered management of office opening hours, proaction and dynamic reaction. There is a whole organizational infrastructure to be established, to which digital technology can contribute.

 

Besides the digitization of services, will smart cities also be a source of apprehension for citizens?

FJ: Digital technology allows us to provide new functionalities. Everyone experiences digital technology and its services and perceives a certain number of obvious advantages. Digital technology also concerns future problems to be resolved. In the case of digital cities, one of the most interesting ones is anticipating its growing complexity. Infrastructures are being digitized and can be interfaced. At the same time, humans are benefitting from increased capacities for interaction, while at the same time autonomous entities are being developed — such as autonomous cars — which incorporate intelligent elements that also have a high capacity for interaction with infrastructures. Therefore, there needs to be an efficient management of exchanges between agents, humans and infrastructures.

 

Is digital technology the only field that must addressed when considering the city of the future? 

FJ: Smart and sustainable cities — I always add the word “sustainable”, because it is vital — must be considered from several perspectives. In terms of research, the subjects concerned are digital technology and big data, of course, but also supply chains, air quality, social and economic impacts etc. It is only through multidisciplinary research that we can truly rise to these challenges. This is what we try to do at Institut Mines-Télécom, with schools that are very active in their area and involved in local projects linked to smart cities. In addition to their strength in research, they are an important lever for innovation for designing products and services linked to smart and sustainable cities, and more particularly by fostering entrepreneurship through their students.

 

If digital technology is not the only subject of reflection for cities of the future, why does it seem to be an ever-present topic of discussion?

FJ: In the currents temporality, the technologies that increase our capacity are digital technologies. They lead to the most innovation. They are used not only for automation, but also for developing interactions and providing algorithmic intelligence and autonomy in different products and services. Interaction implies connection. I would add that it is also necessary to manage the securing of transactions both in terms of reliability of operations and prevention of malicious actions. Today, digital technology is a driving force as well a guide, but the unique thing about it is that it comes out in waves. It is therefore necessary to combine short and long-term views of its impact and work on creativity and innovation. This is why openness and accessibility of data are important points.

 

Is a smart city necessarily one in which all data is open?

FJ: The debate on this matter is too often caricatural and simplified through the question of “should data be open or not?”. In reality, the debate plays out on a different level. Data is not static, and the needs vary. There is a cost to supplying raw data. An extreme position in favor of complete openness would very quickly become financially impossible, and it would be difficult to produce the new data we need. Besides this, there is the issue of data enrichment: we must be able to encourage approaches for a common commodity in which any citizen can work on the data, as well as commercial approaches for developing new services. The balance is hard to find, and will probably depend on the characteristics of each city.

 

You mentioned the cost of digital technology and development, and its energy impact. If local governments can’t bear the entire cost, how can we guarantee homogeneous development within a city or between cities?

 FJ: First of all, it’s true that there are sometimes concerns about the idea that digital technology itself consumes a lot of energy. We must remember that, for the moment, the proportion of a city’s overall energy consumption accounted for by digital technology is very small compared with buildings and transport. Secondly, given that local governments can’t bear the full cost, it is not inconceivable that private-sector-based initiatives will foster and generate differences in the city or between cities. It is extremely difficult to plan the homogenization of cities, nor is it desirable because they are living, and therefore evolving, entities.

The most likely outcome is that sustainable smart cities will develop per district with purely private offerings that will be naturally selective because they will target solvent markets, but which will also leave room for equally welcome civic initiatives. The whole process will be regulated by local government. But this is something we are used to: it’s typically the case with fiber optic broadband and its roll-out. In any case, it is essential to make public policies clear. If we don’t make them clear, people may react by adopting a defensive precautionary position and refusing the development of smart cities. For now, this is not the case, and lots of cities such as Lyon, Rennes, Bordeaux, Nice, Montpellier, Grenoble, Paris, Nantes are determinedly tackling the problem.

 

Could the rise of connected cities lead to the development of new networks between megacities?

FJ: Megacities are increasingly powerful economic entities all over the world. A general expansion of the economic power of cities is also taking place. There are elements of an economic impetus which could lead to shared forms of mutualization or innovation that go much further than previous twinning projects, or even competition. It is therefore likely that economic competition between nations will move toward competition between megacities and the areas that support them.

 

Entrepreneur, Thomas Houy, Télécom ParisTech

What is the truth behind the myth of the entrepreneur?

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A much more complex and less glamorous truth lies behind the storytelling of the visionary entrepreneur, the insider who has the revolutionary idea of the century. Thomas Houy, Researcher at Télécom ParisTech, breaks down the stereotypes surrounding the false image of the exceptional strategist. Following his presentation during the IMT symposium on businesses, the economy and society in November 2016, he returns to the subject of the truth of an entrepreneur who is above all closely attentive to demand and market data.

 

Even after his death, Steve Jobs embodies the figure of the entrepreneur. Often presented — or represented — as an innovative genius, he symbolizes the power of visionary man, the fortuitous person able to provide the solutions to the problems of a world that only he can understand. Far from being unique to the former CEO of Apple, this rose-tinted perspective seems to concern all successful entrepreneurs, who supposedly build long-term strategies on ideas that are just as sudden as they are disruptive. The only problem with this belief is that it is wrong.

Thomas Houy, Researcher and Head of the Student Entrepreneurship in a Digital World Chair at Télécom ParisTech, studies the characteristics of contemporary entrepreneurship, which is a driver of digital transition. He believes that multiple clichés need to be broken down, and first and foremost, the one which consists in believing that it is question of being visionary, that a person almost needs to have the gift of ubiquity to be a successful entrepreneur. While he does not consider that success comes down to chance, he simply points out that “entrepreneurship is almost completely obscure. Nobody can really predict its success. In the face of so many uncertainties, the most practical solution is to iterate as much as possible with the market.”

This ability to iterate has improved thanks to digital technology. 3D printing, for example, allows a product to be prototyped very quickly and tested among users, before returning just as quickly to the prototype phase if the solution is not suitable. Even better, data collected from users of online services provides a gage of the success or failure of a platform. In short, “it is now much easier to test a market and understand users” Thomas Houy observes.

It is more this capacity for rapid transfer between consumers and enterprises that explains success — which is built on the basis of repeated failures — rather than a long-term strategy or plan. This is one of the advantages of start-ups over big groups in digital technology. “Big businesses function with business plans and projections over several years; they are less able to let themselves be guided by a sort of serendipity, in which the organization accepts the fact it does not know where it will end up” the Researcher explains. Start-ups, on the other hand, are able do this thanks to their short history and close relationship with their first clients.

 

Entrepreneur, Thomas Houy, Télécom ParisTech

In May 2015, Bloomberg illustrated an article about Elon Musk and his SpaceX business using this visual from The Red Dress. A symbol of the mythologization of an entrepreneur raised to a position of pioneer in the conquest of Mars. Credits: Bloomberg / The Red Dress.

 

“Start-ups focus their efforts on finding what is known as the “product market fit”, which is the stage where the developed solution meets the demand of the market. Start-ups can even use tricks such as building false products to test the market’s liking for their solution,” Thomas Houy explains. He uses the example of Dropbox to illustrate this point. This start-up, which offers a system of storing and sharing files via the cloud, found its users before it even had a marketable product. “The founder of Dropbox created a false video over the space of a weekend to present his product, without mentioning that it didn’t exist yet,” the Researcher told us, “he was immediately inundated with emails. He had found his market without even having a product.”

This fast roll-out of solutions in the new digital economy makes business plans obsolete. The acceleration of the rate of digital transformation also prevents any form of prediction over the medium or long term. When Tinder entered the dating applications market, all the existing actors were wiped off the board within the space of a few months, nullifying any 5-year projections. “Business models have replaced business plans in the digital economy today,” Thomas Houy adds, “because nobody can predict what will happen in 6 months’ time.”

 

Being the first is not enough to be successful

Innovations can break through quickly, but this is no reason to believe that an innovation is an idea that strikes like lightening in the mind of an exceptional being. In fact “all ideas already exist” the Researcher believes, “if an idea doesn’t already exist, it’s probably because it’s a bad one. This is also what investors say” he continues. Twitter was in no way the first micro-blogging website. It even arrived ten years after the concept was first invented. Having the idea first is not a sign of success. What counts is the quality of execution. Twitter’s strength lies in the fact it pays constant attention to the user’s perception and adapts to its uses.

Does that mean a good entrepreneur is a good copier, able to take inspiration from others’ successes to develop a better solution? “People who copy successes often copy the wrong things” Thomas Houy warns. The creator of a social media may be tempted to copy Facebook, and will try to isolate what characterizes Facebook, such as its agile methodology based on frequent updates. “The problem is that among all the people who have used agile methodologies, thousands have got it wrong, so it’s not that which is behind the success of Facebook.” the Researcher explained. “Good entrepreneurs take inspiration from others’ mistakes just as much as their successes,” he added

It is partly this need to take a step back that means that good businesses in a given field are not necessarily set up by those already in the inner circles. “Statistically speaking, entrepreneurs with a knowledge of the field are more successful, but this is not the case among disruptive enterprises” the Researcher observed. This paradox is due to the fact that once the mentality of a sector or market has been adopted, it is difficult to break away and change perspective. He illustrated this fact with an example he is very familiar with: teaching. “When teaching staff create MOOCs, they generally do so from an academic point of view,” he explained, “but we are much less efficient at keeping the attention of the audience behind their screen than someone from the audio-visual or media sectors and who is familiar with attention economics.”

The reality of entrepreneurship is in fact often a long way off the widespread vision of it. The storytelling used with regards to this concept does not help paint an accurate portrait of an entrepreneur. Unfortunately, “it is a lot simpler and more attractive to describe how an entrepreneur has the gift of ubiquity, rather than to say that they are a humble person who does not forecast on the strength of their ideas but who constantly observes data for guidance,” comments Thomas Houy.

 

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Transmitting good entrepreneurial practices to students

One of the common beliefs about the qualities of an effective entrepreneur is that you have to scale-up an innovation quickly. Thomas Houy is regularly confronted with this erroneous idea in the projects he leads with his students through the Student Entrepreneurship in a Digital World Chair, financed by LVMH. “My students often want to solve the problem of boredom in public transport,” he explained, “several times, they have come up with the idea of an ephemeral social network allowing travelers to contact each other on the bus or metro. They all have the same thought: ‘it’s a really good idea because 10 million people use the metro every year in France.’ Except that there’s no such thing as ‘the people on the metro’, and there are just as many different needs as there are individuals. In the morning, there may be a student on the metro going home from a night out, next to an executive practicing his project presentation in his head. Trying to scale-up quickly means trying to satisfy everybody, and trying to satisfy everybody means satisfying nobody. Good entrepreneurs target niches, they learn to perfectly satisfy their niche and only scale-up by addressing new categories one at a time.”[/box]

Product configuration, Elise Vareilles, Mines Albi, Expérience industrielle

Scientific description of industrial experience

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At Mines Albi, Elise Vareilles works on “product configuration”, which entails understanding industrial constraints and considering them scientifically using IT. This multidisciplinary work is based on experts’ experience which must be recorded before the people in question retire.

 

When you order a car and specify the color, engine type, extras and delivery deadline, you are generally unaware of the complexity of the IT tool which allows these preferences. Each choice leads to constraints that have to be taken into account at each stage: ordering a more powerful engine, for example, entails having larger wheels. The software also communicates with the consumer in order to guide their choices. So, when the client wants a short deadline, only certain options are available and must be proposed in the computer interface. This discipline is called product or service configuration, and it is what Elise Vareilles and her colleagues at Mines Albi are working on.

 

Understanding expertise

“We start with businesses’ knowledge of their products and then formalize it. In other words, we determine what constraints there are,” the researcher explained, “next, we develop an IT tool to consider this knowledge and deduce rules from it in order to offer consumers something that corresponds to their needs in terms of price, options and timing.”

This multidisciplinary work is on the border between industrial engineering and artificial intelligence. “This multidisciplinarity is our specificity”, confirms Elise Vareilles, who has acquired specialist knowledge in very different industrial fields. But paradoxically, this research which may seem purely technical includes a considerable amount of human sciences. Besides the technological aspects, the researchers are also interested in professionals’ expertise. “An employee with 30 years of experience knows what he has to do to optimize a process,” explains Elise Vareilles, “but this means that it is a disaster when he retires. We formalize knowledge that can only be acquired with experience.”

 

The importance of knowledge

However, this knowledge is extremely difficult to formalize because experts find it difficult to explain their processes, which feel so natural to them. It is like a meal cooked by a great chef: even if we have the exact recipe and quality ingredients, we won’t get the same result because a chef’s skill is only learnt with years of practice. In the same way, when we learn to ride a bike no-one can really explain how to keep balance; it is only through practice that we become skilled enough to ride without help from our parents.

 

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Elise Vareilles, Expérience industrielle, Mines Albi

Product configuration at the service of energy efficiency

If we want to meet the French target of thermally renovating 500,000 residences per year, the process needs to be industrialized. This is why the Agency for the Environment and Energy Efficiency (ADEME) launched the “Minimum carbon footprint and positive-energy buildings and blocks” call for expressions of interest in 2012 for the external insulation of a building containing 110 social housing units in Saint-Paul-lès-Dax (Landes). This project, called Criba, aims to “develop an industrialized technical solution for renovating multi-unit housing”. Elise Vareilles and her team developed a software program to help architects design and draw the building after renovation. “We developed an algorithm proposing different renovation solutions,” Elise Vareilles explained. “to do so, we based our work on photos of the different sides of the building taken by drones, which allowed us to build a 3D digital model that we enhanced with various architectural data. Lastly, we took different constraints into account, such as the local urbanism plan, the operator’s restrictions (in particular their budget) or architectural requirements.” The project was launched in 2013, will be completed in January 2017 and will cost €8 million.[/box]

 

Product or service configuration can be applied to a number of processes, such as choosing a complex product like a car, or the optimization of industrial processes with a large number of constraints, as Elise Vareilles did with a process of heat treatment for car gears. Such configuration also includes helicopter maintenance, airplane design or external renovation of buildings (see inset) etc. Even medicine can benefit from it. “We have configured the treatment program for pregnant women at the University Hospital Centre in Toulouse,” the researcher explained, “If we see that a patient is diabetic, for example, the whole program is automatically adjusted to include specific appointments, such as regular blood tests.”

 

Knowledge is capital

This research is very multidisciplinary. Of course, it requires skills in IT and artificial intelligence, but the researchers must also acquire knowledge in the subjects involved, such as heat treatment, engineering and aeronautics. Last but not least, interviewing experts almost comes under sociology. The researcher feels strongly about this point: “experts’ knowledge is vital capital that must be preserved and passed on before it is too late. Once the experts leave, there is nothing I can do.”

 

Elise Vareilles, Mines Albi

Élise Vareilles promotes science among young girls

After a DEA (the ancestor of the Research Master’s 2) in IT at Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, Elise Vareilles had the opportunity to do a PhD on a European project about a heat treatment process. It was perfect for her, given that she prefers working on concrete projects rather than theoretical IT. “It’s motivating to know what it’s used for!” Thanks to this project she acquired knowledge in industrial engineering which helped her join Mines Albi in 2005. It is a choice she does not regret: “the work changes every day, and we meet lots of people. We write code, but do other things as well.” Elise Vareilles is also very committed to promoting science among young girls in the Elles Bougent and Women in Aerospace associations. “It’s important that girls don’t limit themselves,” she highlighted, “I go into high schools and am shocked by the beliefs held by some of them, who say they are not good enough to continue studying!”

 

 

Gender, TIC, Mixité, Chantal Morley, Télécom École de Management

Gender diversity in ICT as a topic of research

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Chantal Morley, a researcher at Institut Mines-Telecom Business School, works on the social construction of the masculinity of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Various empirical studies analyzed using a structurationist framework have allowed her to understand how stereotypes linking gender and technology are maintained or broken down through interactions, often spoken, on a daily basis. The notion of social inclusion led her to propose a framework for considering the inclusion of women in the professional world of IT as a change of culture and practices.

 

For Chantal Morley, the small number of women in ICT professions is a managerial and societal concern. Women take little part in the design of products and processes linked to ICT, which nevertheless shape the world we live in. These technologies are a major source of innovation and development, but women profit little from the fact. They also offer a potential for growth that is not being explored (European Commission 2013). Businesses that have implemented diversity policies struggle to recruit women in these technical professions (AFMD & CIGREF 2013) despite the fact that girls’ results, both in the scientific Baccalaureate and preparatory classes, demonstrate the existence of a pool of competent young women (French Ministry of Education, Higher Education and Research 2015).

 

Explaining the phenomenon

Chantal Morley believes that the small proportion of women in the field of ICT is not unrelated to instances of discrimination. A gender stereotype continues to prevail which notably upholds the belief of less talent and/or lower professional value among women in ICT professions compared with men, a form of the “differential valence of the sexes”, according to the expression by Anthropologist Françoise Héritier.

The continued existence of a stereotype that devalues women with regards to technology is a source of discrimination (fewer opportunities to advance professionally, difficulty entering informal networks, low tolerance of leadership behavior etc.). In seeking to understand how this stereotype can continue to exist in spheres which are subject to a gender equality regime (equality of pathways, diplomas, competitive exams etc.), Chantal Morley has shown that it slips subtly into daily interactions, usually without the people involved or those targeted noticing. Although barely noticeable, the inclusion of this behavior in practices helps maintain the idea that technical skills are part of a male identity. Chantal Morley has proposed a typology of gender typification behavior which provides a tool for identifying elements of discourse and micro-actions, often hard to spot, which reinforce or undermine the gender stereotype.

 

A change of culture is needed

People often think that adjusting the gender balance in digital technology will transform the image of technology, modify cultural practices and remove all obstacles facing women. However, the Researcher has highlighted that the gender stereotype is reinforced by both sexes. This observation, alongside an understanding of gender as a rational concept, led her to reflect on programs to encourage women to enter the field of technology. While they all target women, they all contribute to maintaining gender stereotypes.

Using reflections, research and practices in the social field, which highlighted the changes brought about by a switch from an approach in terms of exclusion to an approach based on the notion of inclusion, Chantal Morley has transposed this approach to analyze how ICT professions could cease to be the strongholds of a culture that maintains the “gendering” of digital technologies, according to the expression by Chabaud-Rychter & Gardey (2002). She has proposed a framework in which the inclusion of women in the professional world of ICT can be considered through the individual and collective capacity to act. This framework was used during a period of study leave at the University of Geneva to establish a diagnosis in several schools specializing in ICT in French-speaking Switzerland, and to establish guidelines for greater gender diversity.

 

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Recognition on a national level

Chantal Morley leads the Gender@Telecom teaching and research group which works on the social construction of gender representations and associated stereotypes. As a result of the group’s work, Télécom SudParis was awarded the Ingénieuses prize by the CDEFI (Conference of Deans of French Schools of Engineering) in 2016. This prize is in recognition of the online course titled “Féminin-masculin dans le monde du numérique : voyages et découvertes” and the educational measures for diversity first implemented in 2009. In November 2016, the course also won the “Coup de Cœur” (judges’ favorite) from the panel of judges for the Responsible Campus trophies.

Supported by Fondation Télécom, Gender@Telecom is looking for patrons in order to turn its SPOC into a MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) to be able to reach a wider audience.[/box]

 

Unveiling the history of women in ICT

To spread this culture of diversity across the Télécom SudParis and IMT BS campuses, Chantal Morley and the Gender@Telecom group have added to the offering of classes on gender and diversity with an online course called “Féminin-Masculin dans le monde du numérique : voyages et découvertes” (see inset). This SPOC (Small Private Online Course), launched at the start of 2016, is composed of three sections: the first sheds light on the little-known place of women in the history of ICT in the USA and Europe; the second section leads to reflections on the gender of a profession through the discovery of parity in ICT professions in countries such as Malaysia; the third section focusses on current stereotypes in the fields of ICT in order to learn how to recognize and break them down (How do they function? What are the effects? How are they developing today?) An in-depth analysis of the course revealed its contribution to the breaking-down of stereotypes and the empowerment of women with regards professions in digital technology.

 

Chantal Morley, Télécom École de Management, Sociologie du genre

From Management Information Systems to gender sociology

Chantal Morley is a Professor at Institut Mines-Telecom Business School. She holds a PhD in management science from HEC, an Accreditation to Lead Research (HDR) from IAE Montpellier-II, and a Masters in Gender Sociology from the EHESS (School of Higher Education in Social Sciences).

She began her career in the information systems consultancy sector. After writing a thesis on design methods, she entered the world of higher education and research with the creation of the Information Systems Department (DSI) at IMT BS.

She is the author of a reference work on managing information systems projects, and has co-written several works on management information systems, as well as a book on women in the workplace. She is a member of the editorial committee of the Systèmes d’Information et Management review. Over the past decade her research has mainly focused on the relationship between gender and IT.

 

French National Library

The French national Library is combining sociology and big data to learn about its Gallica users

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As a repository of French culture, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF, the French national Library) has always sought to know and understand its users. This is no easy task, especially when it comes to studying the individuals who use Gallica, its digital library. To learn more about them, without limiting itself to interviewing sample individuals, the BnF has joined forces with Télécom ParisTech, taking advantage of its multidisciplinary expertise. To meet this challenge, the scientists are working with IMT’s TeraLab platform to collect and process big data.

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[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ften seen as a driving force for technological innovation, could big data also represent an epistemological revolution? The use of big data in experimental sciences is nothing new; it has already proven its worth. But the humanities have not been left behind. In April 2016, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF) leveraged its longstanding partnership with Télécom ParisTech (see box below) to carry out research on the users of Gallica — its free, online library of digital documents. The methodology used is based in part on the analysis of large quantities of data collected when users visit the website.

Every time a user visits the website, the BnF server records a log of all actions carried out by the individual on Gallica. This information includes pages opened on the website, time spent on the site, links clicked on the page, documents downloaded etc. These logs, which are anonymized in compliance with the regulations established the CNIL (French Data Protection Authority), therefore provide a complete map of the user’s journey, from arriving at Gallica to leaving the website.

With 14 million visits per year, this information represents a large volume of data to process, especially since it must be correlated with the records of the 4 million documents available for consultation on the site — which include the type of document, creation date, author etc. — which also provide valuable information for understanding users and their interest in documents. Carrying out sociological fieldwork alone, by interviewing larger or smaller samples of users, is not enough to capture the great diversity and complexity of today’s online user journeys.

Researchers at Télécom ParisTech therefore took a multidisciplinary approach. Sociologist Valérie Beaudouin teamed up with François Roueff to establish a dialogue between the sociological analysis of uses through field research, on one hand, and data mining and modeling on the other. “Adding this big data component allows us to use the information contained in the logs and records to determine the typical behavioral profiles and behavior of Gallica users,” explains Valérie Beaudouin. The data is collected and processed on IMT’s TeraLab platform. The platform provides researchers with a turnkey working environment that can be tailored to their needs and offers more advanced features than commercially-available data processing tools.

Also read on I’MTech TeraLab and La Poste have teamed up to fight package fraud

What are the different profiles of Gallica users?

François Roueff and his team were tasked with using the information available to develop unsupervised learning algorithms in order to identify categories of behavior within the large volume of data. After six months of work, the first results appeared. The initial finding was that only 10 to 15% of Gallica users’ browsing activity involves consulting several digital documents. The remaining 85 to 90% of users represent occasional visits, for a specific document.

“We observed some very interesting things about the 10 to 15% of Gallica users involved,” says François Roueff. “If we analyze the Gallica sessions in terms of variety of types of documents (monographs, press, photographs etc.), eight out of ten categories only use a single type,” he says. This reflects a tropism on the part of users toward a certain form of media. When it comes to consulting documents, in general there is little variation in the ways in which Gallica users obtain information. Some search for information about a given topic solely by consulting photographs, while others consult solely press articles.

According to Valérie Beaudouin, the central focus of this research lies in understanding such behavior. “Using these results, we develop hypotheses, which must then be confirmed by comparing them with other survey methodologies,” she explains. Data analysis is therefore supplemented by an online questionnaire to be filled out by Gallica users, field surveys among users, and even by equipping certain users with video cameras to monitor their activity in front of their screens.

[tie_full_img]Photo d'une affiche de communication de la Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) avec pour slogan "Êtes-vous déjà entré à l'intérieur d'une encyclopédie ?", octobre 2016. Pour l'institution, rendre la culture accessible au public est une mission cruciale, et cela passe par un accès aux ressources numériques adapté aux utilisateurs.[/tie_full_img]

Photo from a poster for the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF), October 2016. For the institution, making culture available to the public is a crucial mission, and that means digital resources must be made available in a way that reflects users’ needs.

 

“Field studies have allowed us to understand, for example, that certain groups of Gallica users prefer downloading documents so they can read them offline, while others would rather consult them online to benefit from the high-quality zoom feature,” she says. The Télécom ParisTech team also noticed that in order to find a document on the digital library website, some users preferred to use Google and include the word “Gallica” in their search, instead of using the website’s internal engine.

Confirming the hypotheses also means working closely with teams at BnF, who provide knowledge about the institution and the technical tools available to users.  Philippe Chevallier, project manager for the Strategy and Research delegation of the cultural institution, attests to the value of dialogue with the researchers: “Through our discussions with Valérie Beaudouin, we learned how to take advantage of the information collected by community managers about individuals who are active on social media, as well as user feedback received by email.”

Analyzing user communities: a crucial challenge for institutions

The project has provided BnF with insight into how existing resources can be used to analyze users. This is another source of satisfaction for Philippe Chevallier, who is committed to the success of the project. “This project is the proof that knowledge about user communities can be a research challenge,” he says with excitement. “It’s too important an issue for an institution like ours, so we need to dedicate time to studying it and leverage real scientific expertise,” he adds.

And when it comes to Gallica, the mission is even more crucial. It is impossible to see Gallica users, whereas the predominant profile of users of BnF’s physical locations can be observed. “A wide range of tools are now available for companies and institutions to easily collect information about online uses or opinions: e-reputation tools, web analytics tools etc. Some of these tools are useful, but they offer limited possibilities for controlling their methods and, consequently, their results. Our responsibility is to provide the library with meaningful, valuable information about its users and to do so, we need to collaborate with the research community,” says Philippe Chevallier.

In order to obtain the precise information it is seeking, the project will continue until 2017. The findings will offer insights into how the cultural institution can improve its services. “We have a public service mission to make knowledge available to as many people as possible,” says Philippe Chevallier. In light of observations by researchers, the key question that will arise is how to optimize Gallica. Who should take priority? The minority of users who spend the most time on the website, or the overwhelming majority of users who only use it sporadically? Users from the academic community— researchers, professors, students — or the “general public”?

The BnF will have to take a stance on these questions. In the meantime, the multidisciplinary team at Télécom ParisTech will continue its work to describe Gallica users. In particular, it will seek to fine-tune the categorization of sessions by enhancing them with a semantic analysis of the records of the 4 million digital documents. This will make it possible to determine, within the large volume of data collected, which topics the sessions are related to. The task poses modeling problems which require particular attention, since the content of the records is intrinsically inhomogeneous: it varies greatly depending on the type of document and digitization conditions.

 

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plusOnline users: a focus for the BnF for 15 years

The first study carried out by the BnF to describe its online user community dates back to 2002, five years after the launch of its digital library, in the form of a research project that already combined approaches (online questionnaires, log analysis etc.). In the years that followed, digital users became an increasingly important focus for the institution. In 2011, a survey of 3,800 Gallica users was carried out by a consulting firm. Realizing that studying users would require more in-depth research, the BnF turned to Télécom ParisTech in 2013 with the objective of assessing the different possible approaches for a sociological analysis of digital uses. At the same time, BnF launched its first big data research to measure Gallica’s position on the French internet for World War I research. In 2016, the sociology of online uses and big data experiment components were brought together, resulting in the project aiming to understand the uses and users of Gallica.[divider style=”normal” top=”20″ bottom=”20″]

 

Godefroy Beauvallet, Innovation, Economics

Research and economic impacts: “intelligent together”

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What connections currently exist between the world of academic research and the economic sphere? Does the boundary between applied research and fundamental research still have any meaning at a time when the very concept of collaboration is being reinterpreted? Godefroy Beauvallet, Director of Innovation at IMT and Vice Chairman of the National Digital Technology Council provides some possible answers to these questions. During the Digital Technology Meetings of the French National Research Agency (ANR) on November 17, he awarded the Economic Impact Prize to the Trimaran project, which unites Orange, Institut Paul-Langevin, Atos, as well as Télécom Bretagne in a consortium that has succeeded in creating a connection between two worlds that are often wrongly perceived as opposites.

 

 

When we talk about the economic impact of research, what exactly does this mean?

Godefroy Beauvallet: When we talk about economic impact, we’re referring to research that causes a “disruption,” work that transforms a sector by drastically improving a service or product, or the productivity of their development. This type of research affects markets that potentially impact not just a handful, but millions of users, and therefore also directly impact our daily lives.

 

Has it now become necessary to incorporate this idea of economic impact into research?

GB: The role of research institutions is to explore realities and describe them. The economic impacts of their work can be an effective way of demonstrating they have correctly understood these realities. The impacts do not represent the compass, but rather a yardstick—one among others—for measuring whether our contribution to the understanding of the world has changed it or not. At IMT, this is one of our essential missions, since we are under the supervision of the Ministry of the Economy. Yet it does not replace fundamental research, because it is through a fundamental understanding of a field that we can succeed in impacting it economically. The Trimaran project, which was recognized alongside another project during the ANR Digital Technology Meetings, is a good example of this, as it brought together fundamental research on time reversal and issues of energy efficiency in telecommunication networks through the design of very sophisticated antennas.

 

So, for you, applied research and fundamental research do not represent two different worlds?

GB: If we only want a little economic impact, we will be drawn away from fundamental research, but obtaining major economic impacts requires a return to fundamental research, since high technological content involves a profound understanding of the phenomena that are at work. If the objective is to cause a “disruption”, then researchers must fully master the fundamentals, and even discover new ones. It is therefore necessary to pursue the dialectic in an environment where a constant tension exists between exploiting research to reap its medium-term benefits, and truly engaging in fundamental research.

“If the objective is to cause a disruption, then researchers must fully master the fundamentals”

And yet, when it comes to making connections with the economic sphere, some suspicion remains at times among the academic world.

GB: Everyone is talking about innovation these days. Which is wonderful; it shows that the world is now convinced that research is useful! We need to welcome this desire for interaction with a positive outlook, even when it causes disturbances, and without compromising the identity of researchers, who must not be expected to turn into engineers. This requires new forms of collaboration to be created that are suitable for both spheres. But failure to participate in this process would mean researchers having to accept an outside model being imposed on them. Yet researchers are in the best position to know how things should be done, which is precisely why they must become actively involved in these collaborations. So, yes, hesitations still exist. But only in areas where we have not succeeded in being sufficiently intelligent together.

 

Does succeeding in making a major economic impact, finding the disruption, necessarily involve a dialogue between the world of research and the corporate world?

GB: Yes, but what we refer to as “collaboration” or “dialogue” can take different forms. Like the crowdsourcing of innovation, it can provide multiple perspectives and more openness in facing the problems at hand. It is also a reflection of the start-up revolution the world has been experiencing, in which companies are created specifically to explore technology-market pairs. Large companies are also rethinking their leadership role by sustaining an ecosystem that redefines the boundary between what is inside and outside the company. Both spheres are seeking new ways of doing things that do not rely on becoming more alike, but rather on embracing their differences. They have access to tools that propose faster integration, with the idea that there are shortcuts available for working together more efficiently. In our field this translates into an overall transformation of the concept of collaboration, which characterizes this day and age –particularly due to the rise of digital technology.

 

From a practical perspective, these new ways of cooperating result in the creation of new working spaces, such as industrial research chairs, joint laboratories, or simply through projects carried out in partnership with companies. What do these working spaces contribute?

GB: Often, they provide the multi-company context. This is an essential element, since the technology that results from this collaboration is only effective and only has an economic impact if it is used by several companies and permeates an entire market. The company is then under certain short-term requirements, with annual or even quarterly requirements. From this point of view, it is important for the company to work with actors who have a slower, more long-term tempo; to ensure that it will have a resilient long-term strategy. And these spaces work to build trust among the participants: the practices and interactions are tightly regulated legally and culturally, which protects the researchers’ independence. This is the contribution of academic institutions, like Institut Mines-Télécom, and public research funding authorities, like ANR, which provide the spaces and means for inventing collaborations that are fruitful and respectful of each other’s identity.

 

Christian Roux, IMT, Humanities, Social Sciences

The major transformations of the 21st century: “the humanities and social sciences are essential”

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New materials, artificial intelligences, green energy, virtual reality, 5G… so many new innovations are impacting our society. The transformations they bring about result in changes to organizations, and redefine the role humans play in their environment, in both the professional and private realms. According to Christian Roux, Executive VP for Research and Innovation at IMT, this aspect must not be overlooked. He defends a systemic, multidisciplinary approach to the digital, productive and environmental transitions that are taking place. Here, he shares his view of the role the humanities and social sciences play in the reflections on these issues, giving us an enticing sneak-peak of the upcoming “Society, Business, Economy: Transformation in Progress” symposium that IMT is organizing on November 3 and 4 to present the latest developments in this area.

 

 

You believe that a systemic approach to the transitions caused by new technologies is essential. Why?

Christian Roux: Only a global approach can produce solutions that truly meet needs. A co-development approach that includes all the issues is therefore essential. Involving the humanities and social sciences in questions of technological innovations provides an opportunity for questioning their relevance, which prevents situations in which designers realize too late that a product or service is completely out of step with users’ needs. A very practical example of this is the industry of the future — or industry 4.0 — which is transforming processes through technologies such as augmented reality, which will change operators’ practices, by guiding their movements, for example. If we do not consider the human factor—the people who are the users—there’s a good chance the solution will miss the intended objective. The humanities and social sciences are therefore essential.

 

Is business a priority research area for IMT in the humanities and social sciences?

ChR: Our key areas are connected to the complex context of the major transformations that are taking place. Because businesses are particularly impacted by these transitions, it is naturally an area of interest. Companies are increasingly beginning to think in terms of networks, outside the walls. This raises the question of new forms of organization and creates heightened tension among the various areas within a company, such as in logistics. A new form also demands more responsible management, with an expected level of performance in this area as well. In general, companies undergo many changes due to the very far-reaching digitization. The concept of value is challenged, and there is a need to understand what it really is. This leads to a redefinition of the components that have traditionally made up a company, such as production, the use of this value, or design.

The question of design is also a major focus of our research. What changes are made to the decisive individual and collective processes involved in the various design phases of a product or service? This is the type of design and innovation question that our researchers are working on. Our interactions with the corporate ecosystem in this area are very valuable, particularly anything related to fab labs, open innovation, etc.

 

The corporate world is part of the human environment, but digitization also affects the personal sphere. What issues are your researchers exploring from that perspective?

ChR: The ethical aspects of technological innovations are an obvious issue. For example, the issues of the governance of algorithms, for example, is directly linked to questions on artificial intelligences. Humans are also part of new networks of connected objects, but what is their role in these networks? This is the question the Télécom École de Management’s Social Networks and Connected Objects Chair is seeking to answer.

The individual’s position as a consumer is also being redefined. This is the field that has been opened by the reflections on digital labor, in which crowdsourcing platforms are emerging as work methods, such as YouTube. What compensation does the user expect in return in this type of situation?

 

The issues that you mention involve regulatory aspects. What role can an institute like IMT play in this area? 

ChR: Our role is situated upstream of regulations. It involves advising public authorities and informing the debate on regulatory mechanisms. We can offer keys for analysis and understanding. The social sciences are fully integrated in this area, since the issue of regulation involves the concept of social compromise. Once the regulations have been established, we must be able to analyze them, especially for the purpose of studying and explaining the inadequacies. A good example of this is data management, in which a compromise must be found between protecting privacy and creating value. This is the purpose of the Chair on Values and Policies of Personal Information, which brings three of our schools together to focus on this issue, while the Innovation & Regulation Chair at Télécom ParisTech also studies these issues very closely.

 

How can these skills be integrated into a systemic approach?

ChR: First of all, the chairs that were mentioned above bring together several skills and disciplines, and involve industrial stakeholders who present their problems. We then develop places for experimentation, like the living labs, which are spaces where we can analyze human behaviors in a variety of controlled technological contexts. For IMT, the systematic approach represents, above all, the legacy of the French engineering training method, which is very broad-based from both a technological stand point and from the perspective of the humanities and social sciences, enabling the development of practical solutions to the problems at hand. Over time, this approach has inevitably been applied to the research we are conducting. Some of our schools are now over two hundred years old, and have always maintained a close connection with the corporate world and society.

 

music, Marc Bourreau, Télécom ParisTech

Digital transition: the music industry reviews its progress

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The music industry – the sector hit hardest by digitization – now seems to have completed the transformation that was initiated by digital technology. With the rise of streaming music, there has been a shift in the balance of power. Producers now look for revenue from sources other than record sales, and algorithms constitute the differentiating factor in the wide range of offers available to consumers.

 

Spotify, Deezer, Tidal, Google Music and Apple Music… Streaming is now the new norm in music consumption. Albums have never been so digitized; to an extent that raises the question: has the music industry reached the end of its digital transformation? After innumerable attempts to launch new economic models in the 2000s, such as purchases of individual tracks through iTunes, and voluntary contribution as for the Radiohead album In Rainbows, etc., streaming music directly online seems to have emerged as a lasting solution.

Marc Bourreau is an economist at Télécom ParisTech and runs the Innovation and Regulation Chair,[1] which is organizing a conference on September 28 on the topic: “Music – the end of the digital revolution?”. In his opinion, despite many artists’ complaints about the low level of royalties they receive from streaming plays, this is a durable model. Based on the principle of proportional payment for plays — Spotify pays 70% of its revenue to rights holders — streaming is now widely accepted by producers and consumers.

Nevertheless, the researcher sees areas of further development for the model. “The main problem is that the monthly subscriptions to these services represent an average annual investment that exceeds consumer spending before the streaming era,” explains Marc Bourreau. With initial subscriptions of around €10 per month, streaming platforms represent annual spending of €120 for subscribers – twice the average amount consumers used to spend annually on record purchases.

Because sites like Deezer use a freemium model, in which those who do not subscribe have access to the service in exchange for being exposed to ads, this observation enabled the researcher to confirm that an average music consumer will not subscribe to the premium offers proposed by these platforms. The investment is indeed too high for these consumers. To win over this target group, which constitutes a major economic opportunity, “one of the future challenges for streaming websites will be to offer lower rates,” Marc Bourreau explains.

 

Streaming platforms: where is the value?

However, rights holders may not agree with this strategy. “I think the platforms would like to lower their prices, but record companies also require a certain threshold, since they are dependent on the sales revenue generated by subscriptions,” explains Marc Bourreau. This decision prevents any type of price competition from taking place. The platforms must therefore find new differentiating features. But where?

In their offerings, perhaps? The researcher disagrees: “The catalog proposed by streaming sites is almost identical, except for a few details. This is not really a differentiating feature.” Or what about the sound quality, then? This seems possible considering the analogy with the streaming video industry, for which Netflix charges a higher fee for a higher quality image. But in reality, users do not pay much attention to the sound quality. “In economics, we call this a revealed preference: we discover what people prefer by watching what they do,” explains Marc Bourreau. But apart from a few purists, few users pay much attention to this aspect.

In fact, we must use algorithms to ascertain the value. The primary differentiation is found in the services offered by the platforms: recommendations, user-friendly designs, loading times… “To a large extent, the challenge is to help customers who are lost in the abundance of songs,” the economist explains. These algorithms allow listeners to find their way around the vast range of options.

And there is strong competition in this area due to the acquisition of start-ups and recruitment of talent in this field… Nothing is left to chance. In 2016, Spotify has already acquired Cord Project, which develops a messaging application for audio sharing, Soundwave, which creates social interactions based on musical discoveries, and Crowdalbum, which allows for the collection and sharing of photos taken during concerts.

Research in signal processing is also of great interest to streaming platforms, for analyzing audio files, understanding what makes a song unique, and finding songs with the same profile to recommend to users.

 

New relationships between stakeholders in the music industry

One thing is clear – sales of physical albums cannot compete with the constantly expanding range of the digital offering. Album sales are in constant decline. Performers and producers have had to adapt and find new agreements. Although artists’ income has historically been based less on album sales and more on proceeds from concerts, this was not the case for labels, which have now come to rely on events, and even merchandising. “The change in consumption has led to the appearance of what are called ‘360 ° deals’, in which a record company keeps all the revenue from their clients’ activities, and pays them a percentage,” explains Marc Bourreau.

 

Robbie Williams was one of the first music stars to sign a 360° deal in 2001, handing the revenue from his numerous business segments over to his record company. Credits: Matthias Muehlbradt.

 

Will these changes result in even less job security for artists? “Aside from superstars, you must realize that performers have a hard time making a living from their work,” the economist observes. He bases this view on a study carried out in 2014 with Adami,[2] which shows that with an equivalent level of qualification, an artist earns less than an executive counterpart — showing that music is not a particularly lucrative industry for performers.

Nonetheless, digital technology has not necessarily made things worse for artists. According to Marc Bourreau, “certain online tools now enable amateurs and professionals to become self-produced, by using digital studios, and using social networks to find mixers…” YouTube, Facebook and Twitter offer good opportunities for self-promotion as well. “Fan collectives that operate using social media groups also play a major role in music distribution, especially for lesser-known artists,” he adds.

In 2014, 55% of artists owned or used a home studio for self-production. This number is growing, since it was only 45% in 2008. Therefore, the industry’s digital transition has not only changed the means of music consumption, but also the production methods. Although things seem to be stabilizing in this area a well, it is hard to say whether or not these major digital transformations in the industry are behind us. “It is always hard to predict the future in economics,” Marc Bourreau admits with a smile, “I could tell you something, and then realize ten years from now that I was completely wrong.”  No problem, let’s meet again in ten years for a new review!

 

[1] The Innovation and Regulation Chair includes Télécom ParisTech, Polytechnique and Orange. Its work is focused on studying intangible services and on the dynamics of innovation in the area of information and communication sciences.

[2] Adami: A civil society for the administration of artists’ and performers’ rights. It collects and distributes fees relating to intellectual property rights for artistic works.

 

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Crowdfunding – more than just a financial tool

As a symbol of the new digital technology-based economy, crowdfunding enables artists to fund their musical projects using the help of citizens. Yet crowdfunding platforms also have another advantage: they allow for market research. In this way, Jordana Viotto da Cruz, a PhD student at Télécom ParisTech and Paris 13 University, under the joint supervision of Marc Bourreau and François Moreau, has observed in her on-going thesis work that project sponsors used these tools to obtain information about potential album sales. Based on an econometric study, she showed that for projects that failed to meet the threshold for funding, greater pledges for funding had a positive effect on the likelihood of these albums being marketed on platforms such as Amazon in the following months.

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Past, Sophie Bretesché, Mines Nantes, récit, traces, changement

From the vestiges of the past to the narrative: reclaiming time to remember together

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The 21st Century is marked by a profound change in our relationship with time, now merely perceived in terms of acceleration, speed, changes and emergencies. At Mines Nantes, the sociologist Sophie Bretesché has positioned herself at the interfaces between the past and the future, where memory and oblivion color our view of the present. In contexts undergoing changes, such as regions and organizations, she examines the vestiges, remnants of the past, giving a different perspective on the dialectic of oblivion and memory. She analyzes the essential role of collective memory and shared narrative in preserving identity in situations of organizational change and technological transformation.

 

A modern society marked by fleeting time

Procrastination Day, Slowness Day, getting reacquainted with boredom… many attempts have been made to try to slow down time and stop it slipping through our fingers. They convey a relationship with time that has been shattered, from the simple rhythm of Nature to that marked by the clock of the industrial era, now a combination of acceleration, motion and real time. This transformation is indicative of how modern society functions, where “that which is moving has substituted past experience, the flexible is replacing the established, the transgressive is ousting the transmitted“, observes Sophie Bretesché.

The sociologist starts from this simple question: the loss of time. What dynamics are involved in this phenomenon corresponding to an acceleration and a compression of work, family and leisure time, these objects of time reflective of our social practices?

One reason frequently cited for this racing of time is the unavoidable presence of new technologies arriving synchronously into our lives, and the frenetic demand for increasingly high productivity. However, this explanation is lacking, confusing correlation and causality. The reality is that of a sum of constant technological and managerial changes which “prevents consolidation of knowledge and experience-building as a sum of knowledge” explains the researcher, who continues: “Surrounded, in the same unit of time, by components with distinct temporal rhythms and frameworks, the subject is both cut off from his/her past and dispossessed of any ability to conceive the future.”

To understand what is emerging and observed implicitly in reality, an unprecedented relationship with time-history and with our memory, the sociologist has adopted the theory that it is not so much acceleration that is posing a problem, but the ability of a society to remember and to forget. “Placing the focus on memory and oblivion“, accepting that “the present remains inhabited by vestiges of our past“, and grasping that “the processes of change produce material vestiges of the past which challenge the constants of the past“, are thus part of a process to regain control of time.

 

Study in search of vestiges of the past

“This fleeting time is observed clearly in organizations and regions undergoing changes“, notes Sophie Bretesché, and she took three of these fields of study as a starting point in her search for evidence. Starting from “that which grates, resists, arouses controversy, fields in which nobody can forget, or remember together“, she searches for vestiges which are material and tangible signs of an intersection between the past and the future. First of all, she meets executives faced with information flows which are impossible to regulate, and an organization in which the management structure has changed three times in ten years. The sociologist conducts interviews with the protagonists and provides a clearer understanding of the executives’ activities, demonstrating that professions have nonetheless continued to exist, following alternative paths. A third study conducted on residents in the vicinity of a former uranium mine leads her to meet witnesses of a bygone era. Waste formerly used by the local residents is now condemned for its inherent risks. These vestiges of the past are also those of a modern era where risk is the subject of harsh criticism.

In the three cases, the sociology study partakes in the stories of those involved, conducted over long periods. While a sociologist usually presents study results in the form of a cohesive narrative based on theories and interpretations, a social change expert does not piece together a story retrospectively, but analyzes movement and how humans in society construct their temporalities, with the sociological narrative becoming a structure for temporal mediation.

These different field studies demonstrate that it is necessary to “regain time for the sake of time“. This is a social issue, “to gain meaning, reclaim knowledge and give it meaning based on past experience.” Another result is emerging: behind the outwardly visible movements, repeated changes, we will find constants which tend to be forgotten, forms of organization. In addition, resistance to change, which is now stigmatized, could after all have positive virtues, as it is an expression of a deeply rooted culture, based on a collective identity that it would be a shame to deny ourselves.

 

A narrative built upon a rightful collective memory

This research led to Sophie Bretesché taking the helm at Mines Nantes of the “Emerging risks and technologies: from technological management to social regulation” Chair, set up in early 2016. Drawing on ten years of research between the social science and management department and the physics and chemistry laboratories at Mines Nantes, this chair focuses on forms of regulation of risk in the energy, environmental and digital sectors. The approach is an original one in that these questions are no longer considered from a scientific perspective alone, because it is a fact that these problems affect society.

The social acceptability of the atom in various regions demonstrated, for example, that the cultural relationship with risk cannot be standardized universally. While, in Western France, former uranium mines have been rehabilitated within lower-intensity industrial or agricultural management, they have been subject to moratoriums in the Limousin region, where their spaces are now closed-off. These lessons on the relationship with risk are compiled with a long-term view. In this instance, the initial real estate structures offer explanations bringing different stories to light which need to be pieced together in the form of narratives.

Indeed, in isolation, the vestiges of the past recorded during the studies do not yet form shared memories. They are merely individual perceptions, fragile due to their lack of transfer to the collective. “We remember because those around us help“, reminds the researcher, continuing: “the narrative is heralded as the search for the rightful memory“. In a future full of uncertainty, in “a liquid society diluted in permanent motion“, the necessary construction of collective narratives – and not storytelling – allows us to look to the future.

The researcher, who enjoys being at the interfaces of different worlds, takes delight in the moment when the vestiges of the past gradually make way for the narrative, where the threads of sometimes discordant stories start to become meaningful. The resulting embodied narrative is the counterpoint created from the tunes collected from the material vestiges of the past: “Accord is finally reached on a shared story“, in a way offering a new shared commodity.

With a longstanding interest in central narratives of the past, Sophie Bretesché expresses one wish: to convey and share these multiple experiences, times and tools for understanding, these histories of changes in progress, in a variety of forms such as the web documentary or the novel.

 

Sophie Bretesché, Mines NantesSophie Bretesché is a Research Professor of Sociology at Mines Nantes. Head of the regional chair in “Risks, emerging technologies and regulation“, she is co-director of the NEEDS (Nuclear, Energy, Environment, Waste, Society) program and coordinates the social science section of the CNRS “Uranium Mining Regions” Workshop. Her research encompasses time and technologies, memory and changes, professional identities and business pathways. An author of 50 submissions in her field, co-director of two publications, “Fragiles competences” and “Le nucléaire au prisme du temps”, and author of “Le changement au défi de la mémoire“, published by Presses des Mines, she is also involved at the Paris Institute of Political Studies in two Executive Master’s programs (Leading change and Leadership pathways).