LABARDIN Pierre

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A growing share of the literature in the fields of marketing and organizational theory is focusing on the uses of the past. This paper aims to propose an analysis of these uses over the long run and concludes that these uses of the past may themselves be historicized.The paper uses accounting textbooks published in French from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. This study uses historical and organizational literature to account for observed variations.Two conceptualizations of the past can be found in the sources from the period studied, depending on the period one considers, each of them leading to a different marketing strategy. In the first one, the past is presented as providing most or even all the value of what is offered in the present, as past experience serves as a stepping stone to a better product. The second conception breaks with these mostly positive views and presents the past as a dangerous routine, from which one must be freed to innovate.Studying marketing uses of the past over the long run allows us to identify a limited set of possible sales pitches using the past to promote work and to identify the constraints orienting these pitches at any given time.

In the 18th century, the Compagnie des Indes was the emblematic figure of a trade that opened up to the new markets of America and the Far East, using large amounts of capital and motivated men whose undeniable successes could not, despite everything, prevent its ruin. How to explain and understand such a failure? A question that leads in a subsidiary way to that of its management: how efficiently did the East India Company manage its costs and expenses? Efficiency is understood here as the result of a rational use of the means that were put at its disposal in order to achieve a priority objective: the constitution of profits. The examination of the type of cost and expense management followed by the management highlights an organization and a governance framework marked by the permanent influence of the King's representatives. This was counterbalanced to some extent by the presence of competent administrators from the commercial and financial sectors, and the creation of a system of cost and expense management and control that was remarkably well developed for its time. The whole system was put at the service of a policy of rationalization and optimization of costs and expenses on a large scale. From the construction of the ships and their use to the management of an arsenal and a staff composed of both sailors and craftsmen, the Company constantly sought, and was certainly successful, in improving the economic performance of its resources. However, from the beginning of the second half of the 18th century, its management model came under strong criticism. First, from those who, like Dupleix, and because of their long practice of the system, had perceived its inadequacies. Then from those who, like Gournay, considered on a theoretical level that the granting of a commercial monopoly to a company could only be unfavourable. Each of these two protagonists proposed his own solution: while Dupleix pleaded for a sovereignist model of management, Gournay demanded a complete liberalization of trade. The failure of these new management models was, in the end, added to the failure of the Compagnie itself. It is in a critical analysis of these different management approaches that a new understanding of the causes of the Company's downfall opens up to the researcher. This analysis reveals the importance of the exceptional expenses that the Company had to assume, but it also underlines the difficulties it encountered in the management of its material and human resources, whose economic efficiency it was unable to promote sufficiently.

This thesis focuses on the possibilities of exercising power at a distance through accounting quantification, from a Foucauldian perspective. While the existing literature analyzes the conditions of effectiveness of action at a distance via accounting (Robson 1992), the objective of this work is, on the contrary, to identify factors that limit this effectiveness, by mobilizing the concept of territorialization (Mennicken and Miller 2012). This analysis was conducted using a historical approach, based on the case of accounting for forced labor in the penal colony of Guyana (1859-1873), placing our work within the current of New Accounting History. We have developed an interpretative methodological approach, ethno-accounting, which has allowed us to map the appearance of a certain number of choices and effects, which were confronted by the actors of the prisons involved in the process of accounting quantification imposed from the metropolis. We then show how the combination of a certain number of these choices and effects can generate a certain number of dynamics, potentially having unexpected consequences, which can ultimately prove to be contrary to the initial governmental program that the accounting was supposed to operationalize. This work, in highlighting the problems generated by accounting quantification in prison institutions, is part of broader historical and current questions. Thus, the methodology of ethno-accounting has allowed us to initiate new research perspectives on the current phenomenon of prison privatization linked to New Public Management. Moreover, our research object, prison accounting, has led us to revisit the controversies initiated by Foucault's Surveiller et punir (1975) among social historians of the prison, as well as the issues related to Foucauldian-inspired historical approaches in Organization Studies.

The article analyzes the 1980-1985 years of Manufrance in a context of deindustrialization. It is based on the analysis of two local newspapers (Loire-Matin and La Tribune Le Progrès) as well as on the private funds of the syndic Euchin held at the Archives Départementales de la Loire. It shows how, in a very particular economic, social and political context, a lack of understanding of the causes of the company's demise was born. The confrontation of the journalistic treatment and the company archives also brings to light elements that are invisible to the population and that shed light on the motivation of the actors during these five years.

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This article offers an accounting perspective on prudence. While the accounting principle of prudence was conceived as a mode of evaluation at the service of industrial capitalism and its sustainability, we show how it can be instrumentalized depending on the context. Through the case study of a large French company, Manufrance, in the early 1980s, we show how the principle of prudence can be used in practice for completely opposite purposes. Based on the study of the resale of Manufrance's real estate assets, we investigate how the non-recognition of unrealized capital gains allows for the generation of short-term profits and the liquidation of a firm in a certain opacity.

Review of the book Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution by Rebecca L Spang (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015, 360 pp.: ISBN 9780674047037).

This article is in line with the work of Asdal (2011), on the limits of accounting to effective action at a distance. By combining the notions of accounting inscription and territorialization, we show how factors of ineffectiveness of action at a distance can emerge from daily quantification practices. Using the historical case of the introduction of an accounting system in the prisons of Guyana in the 19th century, we detail a set of choices and effects faced by the actors in charge of accounting. We show how combinations of certain choices and effects reduce the effectiveness of remote action. Accounting procedures can encourage the perpetuation of pre-existing practices that they were supposed to modify. The processes of monetary valuation and data aggregation, by isolating quantified objects from other causal relationships, generate unexpected effects compared to those intended.

This study sheds light on the role of accounting in the French penal colonies of Guiana in the nineteenth century. The historiography of prisons is characterised by a dichotomy: On the one hand, Foucauldian studies focus on the changes in the methods used to govern prisoners in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, the social historiography highlights practices that differed greatly from the normalising practices highlighted by Foucault’s work on discipline and governmentality. Our research demonstrates how accounting was part of this two-faceted dynamic: A reading of accounting practices used by the mother country corroborates Foucauldian research by showing how accounting was used to influence French public opinion by presenting penal colonies as a moralising and profitable utopia. Conversely, local practices, which contrasted sharply with the mother country’s intentions, show that accounting contributed to a widespread system of corruption that kept the penal colonies under control. Our study highlights the dual role of accounting to reconcile the contradictions between the mother country and the penal colonies, and to link the moral rehabilitation of individuals to the profitability of the penal colonies.

This paper is part of the literature on the modalities of social control (Walker, 2016). It starts from an archival research on the implementation of cost calculation in the 1860s in the penal colony of Guyana, with a view to social control. The paper highlights two types of contributions: first, it allows for a deeper understanding of Walker's categories of social control (correct, restrain and confirmatory) by detailing the effects. Secondly, it enriches this literature by highlighting three consequences of social control: the phenomena of resistance on the one hand, the change in the initial objectives due to the changes induced by the accounting tool and finally the need to implement new tools to ensure social control.

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In this article, we propose to analyze the "visual and classificatory power" of accounting numbers (Quattrone, 2009; Busco and Quattrone, 2015) by means of Husserl's phenomenology, based on the study of a case of corporate restructuring. In this way, we propose to investigate the ways in which accounting images and inscriptions manage to act at a distance on individuals, by mobilizing the dynamics of perception. Taking up the Husserlian concept of image consciousness, we characterize the perception of accounting inscriptions as the product of the interaction of a perceptive object (image thing), a representation (image object) and a more or less observable reality (image subject). We show the interest of opting for this level of analysis by studying how accounting images gradually succeeded in transforming a painful company liquidation into an industrial and financial success. Our study focuses on the longitudinal analysis of the restructuring of a large French company in the early 1980s. Through phenomenological analysis, we contribute to the work dedicated to the study of accounting inscriptions and the visual powers of accounting, by specifying how they act by mobilizing in a flexible, fragile and even sometimes involuntary way, the levers of perception to the point of subjugating the representations of individuals.

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This study examines the history of a specific French rite: the bestowing of work medals in the French iron and steel industry. The paper compares two stages in the development and decline of this rite: first, the golden age of the award ceremonies in the 1930s and 1940s. second, the disappearance of the ceremonies in the 1960s and 1970s. The paper is based on the study of 52 speeches given in these ceremonies at two French companies (de Wendel and Schneider). We try to understand how and why these ceremonies – which also provided occasions for the disclosure of company financial information – thrived and subsequently declined. We identify a paradox: when the financial information given in the speeches was vague in the 1930s and 1940s, the rite flourished. When information became much more precise in the 1960s and 1970s, the rite declined and disappeared. We examine this paradox using the notion of rite as defined by Pierre Bourdieu and show how a speech is embedded in the etiquette that supports the rite. The analysis of these two dimensions (speech and etiquette) allows us to understand why limited financial disclosure could be effective and, conversely, why detailed disclosure could subvert the efficacy of the rite. The coherence between speech and etiquette is the central element to understanding this apparent paradox.

Research into accountancy has concentrated largely on professional accountants and has tended to ignore accounting clerks. Based on a micro-historical approach and the case of a French company as a starting point, this study explores the evolution of workspace and demonstrates how the space allocated to accountants changed during the inter-war period. We adopt Bourdieu's notion of social space to bring together spatial practices and overhead cost calculations, and Foucault's analysis of space to define office space mobility. This work sheds light on the influence of Taylorism on the accounting world, how it affected accounting clerks and, finally, the social downgrading that resulted from the reconfiguration of workspaces. This research contributes to the history of the workspace and to the history of the separation between accounting clerks and chartered accountants.

This paper proposes to reconstruct the sale of a set of warehouses, stores and leasehold rights in the context of a bankruptcy. Drawing on the work of Richard and ANT, this paper shows how valuation methods are inseparable from the position that each actor (including the firms mobilized to help set the fairest value) occupies in complex relationships. A discussion puts the previous observations into perspective: first by questioning the information that each mode of valuation conveys, then by questioning the impossible valuation of goods, then by highlighting the underlying function of valuation and finally by showing how this operation announces the financialization of the economy where we still are today.

While much research has focused on the determinants of outsourcing of support functions (particularly the information systems function), fewer studies have focused on the accounting function. Using the Ministry of Labor's REPONSE survey, our study is the first to focus on a sample of more than 3,000 establishments representative of the French economy. It identifies the factors that explain the practice of outsourcing the accounting function. It also invites us to compare these factors with those of other support functions. We show that outsourcing the accounting function can be associated with a managerial opportunity in terms of size and the influence of financial markets, constrained by factors of reticence in terms of age and union influence. A discussion puts these results into perspective with respect to the existing literature.

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The purpose of this article is to study accounting valuation practices in French bankruptcies following enactment of the Law of 1838. The research is based on a study of 500 files in the archives of the Paris Court of Commerce. After first presenting the main steps in the bankruptcy proceedings, it is shown how the self-interest of the agents – the bankrupt, the receiver, and the creditors – was built up through accounting valuation practices. The outcome of this analysis provides an insight into accounting valuation practices in nineteenth-century France and a better understanding of the self-interest of the agents in bankruptcy proceedings.

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The purpose of this article is to study accounting valuation practices in French bankruptcies following enactment of the Law of 1838. The research is based on a study of 500 files in the archives of the Paris Court of Commerce. After first presenting the main steps in the bankruptcy proceedings, it is shown how the self-interest of the agents - the bankrupt, the receiver, and the creditors - was built up through accounting valuation practices. The outcome of this analysis provides an insight into accounting valuation practices in nineteenth-century France and a better understanding of the self-interest of the agents in bankruptcy proceedings.

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This article aims to understand more about the origins of internal careers through a case study of accounting personnel at the French company Saint-Gobain at the turn of the twentieth century. The first section offers a review of various bodies of research that will allow us to define the notion of a career and explain its origins. Using this information, we outline our reasons for studying the careers of accounting clerks at Saint-Gobain. Drawing on quantitative data taken from staff registers, we reveal the emergence of an internal career practice marked by a certain hierarchy between the different positions within the company and access to hierarchically superior jobs through internal promotion. In the absence of regulation, this approach to internal career development can be explained by the needs that emerged from increasing bureaucratization and the development of companies. From this perspective, the introduction of career mobility among accounting personnel can be justified by the need for individual management of labor requirements.

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This thesis attempts to understand why and how the accounting function was created in French companies. This research is based on case studies, first accounting and then management literature, and on secondary sources. First, we recall that accounting was kept in the large companies of the 18th and early 19th centuries without there being an autonomous accounting function. The contrast is eloquent between a fairly elaborate technique that was disseminated in a very disparate way and a small number of accounting personnel. Secondly, we highlight a break in accounting knowledge from the beginning of the 19th century. Based on the rise in the number of bankruptcies, it gradually acquired sufficient legitimacy to become normative, allowing the appearance of institutions that it legitimized: teaching and accounting associations, the professional press and the liberal professions of accountants and consulting engineers. In one way or another, they contributed to the establishment, development and inevitability of the accounting function as a mode of organization of accounting in large companies. Finally, we define the accounting function. These are obviously intellectual (accounting) and material (mechanization, loose-leaf, etc.) techniques. But it is also a multiplication of functions where an increasingly elaborate division of labor is invented. Finally, the accounting function is the place where organization takes on its full importance through the problems of space, time and structure.

This thesis attempts to understand why and how the accounting function was created in French companies. This research is based on case studies, first accounting and then management literature, and on secondary sources. First, we recall that accounting was kept in the large companies of the 18th and early 19th centuries without there being an autonomous accounting function. The contrast is eloquent between a fairly elaborate technique that was disseminated in a very disparate way and a small number of accounting personnel. In a second step, we will highlight a break in accounting knowledge from the beginning of the 19th century. Based on the rise in the number of bankruptcies, it gradually acquired sufficient legitimacy to become normative, allowing the appearance of institutions that it legitimized: teaching and accounting associations, the professional press, and the liberal professions of accountants and consulting engineers. In one way or another, they contributed to the establishment, development and inevitability of the accounting function as a mode of organization of accounting in large companies. Finally, we define the accounting function. These are obviously intellectual (accounting) and material (mechanization, loose-leaf, etc.) techniques. But it is also a multiplication of functions where a more and more elaborate division of labor is invented. Finally, the accounting function is the place where organization takes on its full importance through the problems of space, time and structure.