Commitment revisited with the help of the concept of "self": experience of a family business in the retail sector.

Summary The aim of this thesis is to study internal and external commitment, using the "self", within family-owned retail companies to see if it can show a way to enrich the problematic of organizational commitment. This work was the occasion to build a methodological framework consisting of four phases: design of the research framework, collection of empirical information, construction of local knowledge, construction and dissemination of generic knowledge. During the empirical study, we conducted nearly sixty semi-structured interviews in four stores of a small independent group. In addition to these interviews, other information (observations, documents) was collected. The interpretation of this empirical information led to the construction of local knowledge. By comparing this knowledge with existing theories, we were able to construct generic knowledge: - If one adopts an attitude of openness to the other, if the organization's objectives are compatible with the objectives of the individuals, external commitment and internal commitment can develop through a recursive loop, The generic model of "self" construction built from Mead's work allows for a dynamic study of commitment, whether internal or external - Divergences between mutual expectations of behavior and between mutual perceptions of the behaviors adopted can lead to the development of negative recursive loops - The more individuals interact by communicating explicitly, the more they will feel recognized, respected and supported. The more individuals interact by communicating explicitly, the more they feel recognized, the more they will give meaning to their work, the more it will be possible to avoid the development of recursive loops that generate disengagement. We then looked at the dissemination of this knowledge and its implementation by looking at some examples.