La soutenabilité du modèle économique dual de la Croix-Rouge française en question

Since the arrival of a new management team in 2005, the French Red Cross (FRC) has been committed to a profound transformation of its internal organization and its governance. From a traditional humanitarian organization run by volunteers it turned into an associative company in charge of the administration of establishments. The French Red Cross belongs to non-profit organizations employers (with 17 700 employees, 53 000 volunteers and one billion euro budget). FRC develops charity and social activities in competitive and restricting environments. It must be confronted with three major challenges : transformation of its economic model with increasing scarcity ; a change of commitment and its willpower to transform society. With FRC's qualitative study since 2010 near salaried and volunteers (elected or not), the aim of this article is double : to give a name of this new FRC economic model and to ask the sustainability of this model with institutional isomorphism theory (Di Maggio et Powel, 1983), Enjolras (1998) and Bidet (2003). It follows from the monographic work that the FRC is facing a triple isomorphism : coercive, reducing public funding, mimetic, by the presence of managers at top management level coming from both private profit and public sectors, by impregnating a normative logic performance. Therefore the FRC adopts a "dual" economic model. This dual model corresponds to a juxtaposition of two economic models with two diametrically opposite logics. First, we find a "reciprocical" logic of the gift, and second, a logic of performance. The sustainability of the dual model of FRC (militant and managerial) is now weakened by arbitration under a technical and instrumental rationality.