Word: crozier
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...appointment as visiting professor of Social Relations for the Spring semester is hardly the Harvard student's first introduction to Crozier. He was also a visiting professor in 1967, and any student who has taken ??? course on France is undoubtedly ingrained with Crozier's hypothesis of French bureaucracy as a response to the special French view of authority and their lack of face-to-face relationships...
After leaving Harvard in 1967, Crozier became a professor of Sociology at Nanterre, the new American-style university outside of Paris, which was the breeding ground for the student revolt in May 1968. He could not have chosen a more agonizing time or place. After the failure of the moderate student strike in November of 1967 for smaller classes, a library, and less stringent degree requirements, the university turned from campus to battlefield...
THOUGH Cohn-Bendit's enrage's left few professors unscathed, they often fired their heaviest artillery at Crozier, who found himself to the right of everybody in the "reddest" department at Nanterre and probably all of France. Taking Crozier's reserved admiration for the American bureaucratic system as evidence of his pro-establishment and technocratic bias, the revolutionary students denounced him and taunted: "Mr. Crozier, is the American style of bureaucratic organization useful in Vietnam? Is it efficacious for liquidating the Vietnamese...
...would expect, a man as mild and unaggressive as Crozier found the year "a very great ordeal" and later wrote his American colleagues: "This is a hard time to be a sociologist ... Sociologists have been forced out of their traditional voyeurist position and made part of the sad game of survival politics and they don't know yet how to behave...
Surprisingly, Crozier is optimistic about the future of France despite the apparent lack of change following the turmoil of May-June, 1968. He is willing to speculate that "we are at the end of the old system" because of "the loss of faith by the people at the top." When this loss of faith eventually filters down to the lower echelons, change will become mandatory...