RESEARCH TOPICS
The phenomenon of human capital is
gaining greater importance in the field of corporate governance research.
Human capital is generally defined as the collection of skills and knowledge
possessed by individuals and deployed within the firm. The «traditional view»
of the industrial enterprise was of a space of embedded technology, with
little regard for the specific human competences that were employed there.
Today, on the other hand, human capital has greater importance because a
service-based economy depends almost exclusively on the skills and knowledge
of individuals.
These facts lead us to identify two important issues:
 What is the meaning and importance of financial ownership of a
company when an increasing part of the value created by that company depends
on the ownership and deployment of human capital?
How can the fickleness of
many shareholders, who see the firm as only a financial investment, be reconciled
with the need to nurture and develop a long term strategy to keep essential
human capital embedded within the firm? In order to understand this
complicated relationship, our research focuses on the link between changes in
ownership and turnover in personnel: do employees remain «faithful» to their
company even when shareholders do not? Our research makes use of the IFGE
database that brings together information on the most important
socio-professional indicators in French companies over the past five years.
This information can be crossed with other financial, economic, and social
data from companies, to better discern the relationships between them.
How can individuals increase their level of human capital within
the context of the firm?
Human capital can increase within the firm, but it
can also deteriorate (loss of skills, reputation, networks, etcÉ). Employees
are increasingly demanding action on the part of their firms to maintain
their levels of human capital. This is having an impact on firm governance.
Our research, mainly qualitative, focuses on the corporate governance of
firms using high levels of autonomous human capital (research laboratories,
financial institutions, etcÉ) in order to understand the interaction between
human capital and corporate governance, and efforts to increase human capital
through the mechanisms of corporate governance.
If you would like to contribute to this research stream, contact
 Bertrand Valiorgue
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ENDORSEMENT
«IFGE develops analytical frameworks that are always
useful to understand the ever growing complexity of the world»
Pascale Levet, head of Lab'ho ADECCO
 The IFGE database:
comprises the social
audits of the largest French firms. Crossing this data with firm financial
data opens a window onto the impact of changes in ownership on human resource
management practices within firms. A more detailed database dealing with the
subsidiaries of major industrial groupings in France is under construction.
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