Genèse et fondements du plan Monnet : l'inspiration américaine

French postwar planning has been interpreted as an avatar of a French mercantilist tradition or as smart adhoc tinkering. Archival research shows the shortcomings of both interpretations. It is proposed here that Monnet 's plan had intellectual and structural roots in American New Deal Keynesianism. A genealogy of French planning shows economies to be politically constructed sets of institutions. The role of cross-national transfer mechanisms in such institutional building is also underscored.Le 13 décembre 1945, dans un mémorandum adressé au Général de Gaulle, Jean Monnet proposait l'élaboration d'un plan national. Ce plan avait deux objectifs principaux. Il devait permettre d'accélérer la reconstruction de l'économie française tout en créant les conditions de sa modernisation. [Premier paragraphe

Does Europe mean americanization? The case of competition

This paper traces the process whereby competition has come to be valued in our economies. Taking a step back in history, we show how it all started not with competition but with cooperation in fact, in the last decades of the 19th century. Comparing Germany and the USA, we then show how national paths diverged after that. While cooperation remained the accepted and dominant rule in Europe, a particular understanding of competition, what we call oligopolistic competition, came to triumph in the United States. After World War II, this particular understanding was diffused to other parts of the world and particularly to Western Europe. When it comes to competition, we thus show that the basic and formal rules of the game that structure Europe today owe a lot, historically, to American models. However, we ponder in the conclusion on the limits to that process of “soft convergence”

Social networks and country-to-country transfer: dense and weak ties in the diffusion of knowledge

This article investigates the social network dimension in processes of cross-national transfer. The empirical focus is the conscious attempt to appropriate, in France after 1945, the American model of the large firm. Structural conditions—internal crisis and geopolitical dependence—created the context in which country-to-country transfer could take place. Our findings also show, however, that the transfer itself required the activation of concrete mechanisms and, there, social networks proved key. Our evidence shows in fact the tight and reciprocal interaction, the co-construction, as it were, of social networks on the one hand and processes of institutionalization on the other. Building upon our empirical findings, we propose furthermore that successful cross-national transfer hinges on a particular kind of network structure. In the story recounted here diffusion across national borders called for the smooth and successful articulation of two types of social networks—a cross-national “weak ties” network and national “strong ties” ones. In the end, this article accords with the current calls for cross-fertilization of institutional theory and social network theory. And we argue that both approaches are useful and complementary when dealing with country-to-country transfers

L'arrivée du management en France : un retour historique sur les liens entre managérialisme et Etat

La managérialisation de la sphère publique est aujourd'hui dans l'air du temps. La réforme de l'Etat semble passer par l'importation et l'appropriation des pratiques et de l'esprit du management - avec promesse à la clef d'une plus grande rationalité et d'une meilleure efficience. En faisant un retour en arrière sur le contexte et les conditions de l'arrivée du management en France après la deuxième guerre mondiale, cet article offre une autre perspective sur les développements contemporains. Le management, au sens moderne que l'on donne à ce terme, est à l'origine américain. Il est importé/exporté en France dans les années qui suivent la deuxième guerre mondiale, dans un contexte local de remise en cause profonde des institutions économiques et sociales d'avant guerre. L'Etat et les institutions publiques et semi-publiques sont alors les éléments moteurs du processus de transfert. A l'époque, la sphère publique modernise le secteur privé - en particulier en lui imposant une révolution managériale. Les développements contemporains sont, de fait, les conséquences directes et indirectes du processus déclenché alors - un effet boomerang pour l'Etat français de son initiative lointaine de "modernisation" de l'économie et de l'industrie

Genèse et fondements du plan Monnet : l'inspiration américaine

French postwar planning has been interpreted as an avatar of a French mercantilist tradition or as smart adhoc tinkering. Archival research shows the shortcomings of both interpretations. It is proposed here that Monnet 's plan had intellectual and structural roots in American New Deal Keynesianism. A genealogy of French planning shows economies to be politically constructed sets of institutions. The role of cross-national transfer mechanisms in such institutional building is also underscored.Le 13 décembre 1945, dans un mémorandum adressé au Général de Gaulle, Jean Monnet proposait l'élaboration d'un plan national. Ce plan avait deux objectifs principaux. Il devait permettre d'accélérer la reconstruction de l'économie française tout en créant les conditions de sa modernisation. [Premier paragraphe

Marketization: From Intellectual Agenda to Global Policy Making

A distinctive feature of the contemporary period of globalization is a powerful trend towards marketization in many regions of the world. The term “marketization” refers both to market ideologies and market-oriented reforms. A market ideology reflects the belief that markets are of superior efficiency for the allocation of goods and resources. In its most extreme form, this belief is associated with the commodification of nearly all spheres of human life. Market-oriented reforms are those policies fostering the emergence and development of markets and weakening, in parallel, alternative institutional arrangements. During the last decades of the twentieth century, the dominant market-oriented reform mix has included macroeconomic stabilization, privatization, deregulation, liberalization of foreign trade and liberalization of international capital flows (Simmons et al. 2003).Since the early 1980s, market ideology and market-oriented policies have spread fast and wide around the globe. Markets, the argument goes, are better at allocating resources and producing wealth than bureaucracies, cartels or governments. Furthermore, the global diffusion of marketization has had an impact well beyond the traditional boundaries of the economy. Marketization implies a redefinition of economic rules of the game but also a transformed perspective on states, regulation and their role. Marketization is questioning all forms of protective boundaries and barriers and having an impact, as a consequence, on social and also cultural and legal policies (Collectif Dalloz 2004; Thornton 2004). [First lines

Globalization as a double process of institutional change and institution building

Globalization is a word that suffers from overuse. Still, behind the overstretched concept lies the reality of an economic world that is not fully contained nor constrained by national boundaries. Economic organization and coordination increasingly reach across national borders and the impact is being felt both within the transnational sphere and, through rebound and indirect impact, at the national level as well. We started this book by acknowledging the need to take into account this transnational reality and its potentially quite significant impact. We now want to point, however, to its full complexity. [First paragraph

Evolving conceptualizations of organizational environmentalism

Over the past 30 years, organizations of many different kinds have introduced environmental preoccupations into decision-making, engaging with – and in many cases co-constructing – a striking array of rankings, best practices, standards and other governance tools. However, there has thus far been surprisingly little exploration of the evolving normative implications of environmentalism: existing organizational research treats environmentalism as a static, uniform and quasi-naturalistic phenomenon. In this article, we argue instead that environmentalism is fluid and multifaceted, evolving over time to produce differing conceptualizations that become affiliated with – and mobilized by – particular groups of actors. Using the theoretical framing of path generation, we identify how environmentalism follows a path characterized by episodes of re-conceptualization and re-labelling, a discursive evolution reflecting incremental yet consequential interactions with other institutional paths. We engage in a conceptual history to identify junctures where environmentalism meets with other institutional trajectories, facilitating shifts in meaning. We identify moments of crookedness in the transnational environmental path that are symbolically reflected in label changes – from the emergence of “sustainable development” in the 1980s, to “sustainability” in the 1990s, and more recently, an offshoot towards “resilience”. Those label changes are not only, we propose, symbolic markers but are also performative and entrench consequential regime transformations with regard to environmentalism. Through our exploration, we contribute to theory development while also generating empirical implications: theory-wise, we identify mechanisms of path generation that inform broader debates around path dependence. Empirically, we illustrate how different variants of environmentalism are connected to specific meaning systems, exhibiting affinity with different organizational fields

Globalization and Business Regulation

In the twenty-first century, global business regulation has come of age. In this article, we review the literature on globalization and business regulation from the angle of transnational governance, a recently evolving interdisciplinary field of research. Despite the multiplicity and plurality of regulatory platforms and products that have emerged over time, we identify common patterns of field structuration and parallel trajectories. We argue that a major trend, both in practice and in scholarly work, is a move away from an idealized convergence around a set of unified global rules; instead, our conceptualizations and our practices of transnational business regulation increasingly demonstrate a concern for the adaptability of transnational rules to resilient and resistant contextual specificities. Another important trend, both in practice and in scholarly fields, is a growing focus on the complex dynamics between rule making on the one hand and rule implementation and monitoring on the other