On 19 and 20 November, the Turgot club participated in the annual congress of the Institute of Psychoanalysis and Management (created in 1982), which is the oldest academic association in France. The members of the IPM (professionals and researchers) debate and publish on the sociological, psychological and psychoanalytical issues raised by the management of organizations.
The 2025 congress focused on the theme of “grey areas of management” and gave rise to about twenty papers and debates. The Turgot club, represented by Professor emeritus J-J. Pluchart (University of Paris I), presented research on the “grey areas and sensitive areas of scientific research”, the objective of which was to identify and map the practices relating to these areas and are observable in the scientific works. These practices include errors, fraud, manipulation, refutations and scientific retractions. Research shows that they are increasingly detected by Artificial Intelligence applications and made public by social networks. They can have detrimental impacts on the careers and reputations of researchers. Among the cases presented, two concerned ethical offences (fraud and manipulation) and three cases that did not violate scientific ethics in principle (errors, refutations and retractions). The ethical criteria is therefore not sufficient to characterize grey or sensitive practice. The questioning of concepts, models, theories or paradigms validated by the scientific community is sometimes a step in the process of construction and deconstruction of scientific knowledge. This research has therefore sought to show that the “clarification” of a grey area and the “desensitization” of a subject require an open debate between the researchers involved and a critical analysis of the sustainability of the research.
Jean-Jacques Pluchart
