Philippe Lorino is Distinguished Professor of Management Control and Organization Theory at ESSEC Business School (Paris) and an adviser to the French Nuclear Safety Authority. He has previously served as a senior civil servant in the French Government, in charge of industrial policies, and as a director in the finance department of an international computer company, in charge of designing new cost and performance management systems. He draws from pragmatist authors (philosophy, semiotics and social science) to study organizations as continuous processes of organizing, more precisely collective inquiries aimed at understanding and transforming collective activity, mediated by management techniques and tools.