The Rise of Digital Management: From Industrial Mobilization to Platform Capitalism

This book analyzes the history of management, placing it in perspective with both American history and the genealogy of digital technology. Focusing on the years of industrial mobilization in the United States (from 1937 to 1945) and their extension into the Cold War, it shows particularly how ＂scientific management＂ was reconfigured and re-legitimized in favor of a new profoundly American geopolitics. In a context where the future was at a standstill, this research also explains what became of the managerial processes at the heart of capitalism from the 40s onwards: the shift from a managerial capitalism of calculation to a narrative capitalism made up of ＂desiring machines＂. This digital management no longer simply contributes, along with others, to unveiling and revealing the future. Aligned with the American obsession with novelty, it is the very process of revelation and unveiling, with managers and consumers alike becoming the intersecting subjects of desires borne of managerial apocalypses.

To explore this period of American history, the author has combined a triple narrative anchored in three types of archives: an intimate history of this reconfiguration from the presence in New York of Saint-Exupéry, Burnham and Wiener; a description of the great historical moment of industrial mobilization; and a philosophical speculation about reconfiguration and its links to American history.

François-Xavier de Vaujany is full professor of Management and Organization Studies at Université Paris Dauphine-PSL and researcher at DRM since 2010. His research deals with the societal and political dimensions of (new) ways of working and their management. He is particularly interested in the time and space dimensions of (new) ways of organizing work in our digital societies. By means of historical approaches, ethnographies and qualitative experimentations, he has thus explored various organizational phenomena such as major industrial companies, universities, maker spaces, coworking spaces, digital nomadism, investment banks or old religious organizations.