Project abstract

Scientific background and objectives
Description of project, methodology
Expected results
The following proposal « Business administration : private practices, public challenges – A historical perspective » was born from the observation that the general expansion of management and its methods in society are often challenged but have been more rarely researched by historians and management scholars altogether.
Business administration and its methods have expanded since the 19th century to pervade almost all organisations. Their development have gone beyond the private sector to government agencies, NGOs and foundations. While penetrating all types of organisation business administration has destroyed traditional boundaries between government and the private sector. Acquiring a new dimension far beyond functionality and business administration raises new issues in society. The question asked by pervasive business administration practices and systems are not only organisational or economic but political and societal ones. Such a phenomenon deserves a genealogy and a history.
The project ambition is to study the origins, apparition and the development of management practices, tools and systems that are far from being universal. Progressing from macro to micro, it is divided in three sections.
- « Private administration, public domain » studies management techniques development from the 19th century. Using a systemic approach it is concerned with corporate decision support techniques.
- « Managerial programmes » is looking at very current issues from a historical perspective. Using a set of widespread management themes, its aim is to understand their roots as to build a theory of their emergence. Four case studies will be studied in detail in that section: corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, oursourcing and knowledge management.
- « Managerial devices » is analysing the conditions of the emergence, diffusion and international transfer of more specific business administration practices/tools: strategic planning and management scorecard (tableau de bord).
The MPPEP project is coherent with a long tradition of international cooperation between history and business administration scholars. In France, this fruitful interdisciplinary work has however remained relatively unstructured to date. Using MPEEP as a backbone, the researchers will be able to reinforce and develop transfers between history and business administration scholars in terms of methods, data and knowledge diffusion.
To question the condition of emergence and the origins of management practices is indeed very valuable for management scholars. For a long time they have considered management tools, systems and practices as « natural » elements (data). But there is no data without past and management systems are heavily socially constructed and contextualised. A history of management tools and practices offers a sophisticated analytical framework to understand the phenomenon. Putting the roots of management tools in their national economical, political and sociological context and moreover looking at their evolution and their international transfer and adaptation provide a powerful way to understand their influence in today’s society.
Exploiting primary archival sources and using historical methodology, MPEEP has a triple objective:
• Structuring the research in management history as to capitalize and diffuse new knowledge;
• Identifying places and conditions of management practices emergence as to evaluate the pertinence of their current use;
• Building a theory of the emergence and diffusion of management tools, systems and practices.
The results of the research will be published in three separate edited volumes. The first one will be a multidisciplinary inventory of authors, practices and places where appear management methods changes. The second volume will be focused on corporate governance given the homogeneity of the topic. It will be based on an in-depth case study of the Crédit Lyonnais bank. The last volume will deal with the theory of the emergence and diffusion of business administration tools and practices.
In addition, participants are expected to publish papers in academic journals using partial results obtained during the project. As an example, a special issue of Long Range Planning on the contextualisation of strategy will be co-edited by two participants of the project in 2008.