Résumé en anglais

The goal of our research is to gain a better understanding of organizational death, by looking at it as a process. This topic of research, with such an apprroach, is not very common in the litterature. The topic of organizational decline has received very little attention from researchers in management, and the topic of death even less. This lack of interest on the part of researchers contrasts with the unseemly large number of contributions on the concept of performance, which is perceived as "positive" and perhaps more exciting. However, decline and death are frequent events in the business world and their impact on organizational actors leaves no one untouched. A first reason to study organizational death is therefore empirical : a better understanding of organizational death could be helpful for business leaders of enterprises in difficulty. However, the main interest of our research is to fill a void in the litterature, on the process of death. We would like to answer the following question : What are the different processes at work behind organizational death ? We will distinguish three dichotomies : death due to external versus internal causes, sudden versus lingering death and formal legal death versus sociological death of organizations. Our qualitative methodology is based on eight empirical cases of organizational deaths and aims to show the multidimensionality of organizational death. We will first present a synthesis of the litterature, then our methodology of research and the first empirical results.