Abstract
Almost everyone has had an experience of a visit to an IKEA store. Every day, 1 million visitors frequent these stores. What hides behind this yellow and blue logo? What makes it so typically Swedish? To answer in a simple succinct and synthetic way about these interrogations within a framework of ten pages is not an easy thing. Indeed, the success of a company and its competitiveness, and its failures and its disappearances are generally explained by an important whole set of factors or elements. These last ones retroact with the others, as the various elements or subsets would do it to compose a 'system'. By this observation, many theorists like Philippe Bernoux could assimilate companies to systems, for example, a whole set of elements in interaction, dynamic and organized according to a goal. Other theorists gathered in 'the school of the contingency', showed that the evolutions of these systems which are the companies, are strongly influenced by 'contingencies' i.e. with particular constraints. The whole of these constraints constitutes the environment in which companies evolve, and which can be apprehended through the angles, economic, social, technological, and also more particular aspects, for example, the regulation or the evolution of desires or the practices of the consumers.
