Le management a-t-il un langage professionnel ?

Albert David
Additional contact information
Albert David: DRM - Dauphine Recherches en Management - Université Paris Dauphine-PSL - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Does management have a professional language? Based on Beckmann's General Technology (1806) and Volume 3 of General Electric's Blue Books on The Work of a Professional Manager (1954), this article analyzes terms, particularly action verbs, and compares the two corpora. We conclude (1) that general management does indeed have the properties of a general technology in Beckmann's sense. ; (2) that the work of the professional manager as presented by General Electric does indeed take the form of a nomenclature with main entries and subdivisions, like Beckmann's general technology, but that, unlike Beckmann's nomenclature, a number of sub-activities are found in several of the four major management activities, and that the verbs used remain at a high level of generality; (3) that the terms used are indeed unambiguous, as in specialized and professional languages; (4) that there is a structure that broadly resembles hypernym/hyponym relationships, but this is only partial; (5) that General Electric's management language in 1954 contains no neologisms, adaptations or distortions of specific terms; and (6) that the General Electric corpus contains no labels, very few metaphors and platitudes, and virtually no jargon. General management therefore has a professional language, but in 1954, this language used only words from everyday language and reflected the technical nature of management as a general technology for collective action in a context of seeking efficiency and accountability.

Keywords: Management professionnel; langue de spécialité; histoire du management; langage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-06
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Conférence de l'AIMS (Association internationale de management stratégique), Jun 2025, Lille, France

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05534509

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().