Policy Change In Overorganized Societies

Many authors consider that we live in societies of organisations – interdependent organisations – and that this is a defining feature of modernity (Simon, 1997; Bromley and Meyer, 2016; Borraz, 2022; Grothe-Hammer & Jungmann, 2023, 2025; Arnold et al., 2025). This is a feature that continues to intensify to such an extent that we now readily speak of over-organised societies, or the ‘Organocene’ (Bergeron and Castel, 2024). The reasons for this over-organisation of societies are numerous and varied, but one may note the significance of the growing demand for coordination and cooperation, particularly in the fields of public action. In response to the observation that stakeholders are finding it increasingly difficult to coordinate and cooperate with those they need to fulfil their missions and achieve their objectives, new organisational structures are being created: networks, cross-functional structures, new processes and rules, digital solutions, etc., which it is hoped will enable stakeholders to coordinate and cooperate more effectively. The aim of this open session, to be held in English and French, will therefore be to explore how this organisational density and interdependence affects public policies and political aspirations to transform public action. Whilst the interdependence between different public policies has been highlighted as an explanation for the difficulty in changing public action (Bézès and Le Galès, 2026), this workshop will focus in particular on the relationships between organisations within the same public policy field or between organisations in different public policy fields, in an attempt to understand contemporary developments in ‘policy states’.