Comments on Comments, or the Richness of Dialogue

If my initial essay at a minimum had the objective of generating a debate and fruitful exchanges, it has succeeded. Of course, probably because of the inevitable ambiguities of translation, some of Chris Kobrak’s, Andrew Popp’s, and Paul Tiffany’s comments suggest that a few further remarks are in order to clarify a set of ideas and allow further developments or discussions.

My first reaction was that, besides the geographical differences between the three commentators, the fact that they point to a parallel between the French situation and recent or older trends in Great Britain and the United States attests to how far the globalization of the discipline’s training or research structures has progressed. That stimulates two preliminary remarks. First, the fact that French business historians wrestle with the same questions, research problems, and institutional issues as their colleagues in other countries underscores the urgency of the debate initiated in these pages. France seemsmore open than some commentators might suggest when they stress its specific character and isolation from the international research community. Second, my colleagues’ reactions are an incentive to quickly address broader problems involving definitions, contents, and the project of the two disciplines my text concerns. On the one hand, business history is seen here as a growing scientific discipline oriented toward fundamental research and long-term knowledge. On the other, management is viewed here in the sense of being a science of action within capitalism whose aim is knowledge that practitioners can use in the short term. But let us return to the questions and ambiguities the commentators brought up.

(1) A first set of reactions, with different viewpoints depending on the comments, may focus on the idea of “usefulness” or “workable know-how,” in other words, the problem of the notion of utility in business and management/managers’ minds. Professor Popp rightly fears that the epistemological and intellectual position I suggest might lead to subordinating business history to academics’ and management practitioners’ objectives and criteria. In a way, I share his view. The point is not to establish a ready-to-use history that would abandon the project of critical distancing and methodological rigor. I will have the opportunity to return to this point in a moment. First, it is necessary to clarify the idea of “usefulness” or, to put it in a different way, the ways management practitioners or academics can appropriate business historians’ work and findings. From that viewpoint, some people in the management community (in the widest sense of the term—practitioners or academics) would probably have a very different definition of the usefulness of tappable knowledge from mine. That is precisely the source of the debate here. For some, looking at the issue from a narrow, somewhat outdated positivist tradition, historical knowledge’s utility should be measured by its potential to improve decision-making or how fast it can be practically implemented. In their view, business history should propose reproducible and measurable results, quantitatively if possible. Another stumbling block concerning utility involves gauging the possibilities of forecasting and anticipating the future that history would allow. Otherwise it would be useless for management science. Professor Tiffany seems to suggest that the discussion on history’s possibility to foresee the future is still ongoing. In France, historians firmly ended the debate in the 1970s. The project of management instrumentalizing history varies with sub-disciplines or with the methodological and epistemological positions of researchers or practitioners in the field of management. As my essay tries to show, in France, recent trends in human resources management, organizational studies, or strategic management have helped lay the groundwork for an updated positivism or a constructive dialogue. However, that prospect remains shaky because a form of orthodoxy still dominates marketing or finance and, more generally, academic management. In those conditions, it will be hard to set up a dialogue with business history unless, as Professor Tiffany proposes, management sciences and practitioners bring about their own epistemological and methodological, if not ideological, modernization.

The present crisis suggests that such a change will be possible only under the pressure of dramatic...