Institutions, organizations and space: forms of proximity (In French)

Opposing heterogeneous agents, imposing choices, and making divergent interests compatible, are all political prerequisites for agent coordination. Although these political prerequisites are not entirely ignored in proximity literature, such literature does tend to insist, for the most part, on cognitive perspective: the biggest beneficial effect of proximity is that of facilitating knowledge-sharing between agents. The principal objective of this paper is to propose both political and cognitive conceptions of proximity. In order to do so, we use the concept of institution, to examine the relations between these concepts - proximity and institution. We obtain one principal result: proximity is an institutional fact, which itself divides up two sub-categories, organizational and geographical proximity. Organizational proximity refers to the cognitive and political coordination of agents. Geographical proximity between actors is a latent resource. This resource would only be activated if the agents share organizational proximity. This form of proximity means that actors integrate cognitive community, i.e. reach memory of organization made up of rules and routines, and integrate political community, i.e. take place in power structure.