The KPI axis is based on the work of eight tenured researchers. It is co-led by Yvon Pesqueux, University Professor and Sylvaine CASTELLANO Professor at ESG Management School. Those eight researchers regularly collaborate with members of the LIPSOR laboratory of the CNAM and seven of them have published scientific articles or books during the last three years.
The KPI axis’ main objective is to study the grid of three fundamental concepts used in the analyses of organizations and management: knowledge, practices and institutions. Fundamentally related, these concepts enable the comprehension of a complex universe whose elements are always dynamic and continuously evolving on several scales, from the macroscopic level of regulatory frameworks to the microscopic one of organizational routines.

Philosophy and social sciences have initiated the idea of practice turn. From strategy to management control through the theories of learning and marketing it is now widely used by researchers in management and has become ubiquitous in the analysis of organizations, thereby offering new epistemological perspectives. Their links with the institutionalization, acquisition and transmission process are particularly analyzed in the KPI axis. Likewise, their implications in terms of methodology are also a constant concern within research.

This "practical perspective" has a special significance when combined with another major trend : the Knowledge management. Issues of learning and knowledge management indeed make practice and knowledge inseparably linked.
More specifically, the KPI axis seeks to understand the "knowledge in practice" within the dynamics of learning and knowledge transfer. Distancing itself from concepts such as best practice, it aims to understand what is involved in the organizing at both macro and meso (business transfer and organizational learning) and micro (transfer of knowledge and practice).

Institutional approach is now prevailing in organizational analyzes. Initiated in the late 1970s, but with historic basis in sociology, economics and anthropology this trend plans to focus on these obvious and shared facts of social and organizational life that gives it meaning and stability.
The work initiated in this research theme will focus on institutional dynamics and processes through the concepts of organizational legitimacy and stakeholder management.