Henri Zimnovitch

Berliet, the obstructed manager: too clever, too soon?

Marius Berliet, a pioneer of the car industry, was one of the first to introduce Taylorism in France. He wanted to implement standard costing techniques in his company at the very same time they were conceived in the USA, around the time of the First World War. Given that this technique was to become popular in France only during the 1950s, this article seeks to understand the reasons which prevented it from being applied at Berliets company forty years earlier. One obvious explanation is the burden of the cost accounting methods which prevailed in France until 1950. The paper also considers the hypothesis of a lack of interest, and skill by those who could have promoted this new technique, especially managers and engineers.

Epistemology and management science: Is accounting history still a legitimate subject of study?:

Is there any point in researching accounting history? To answer this question, the first part of this article considers some epistemological ideas based on Popperian and pragmatist philosophies. Using the conceptual framework developed by the philosopher André Comte-Sponville, the article proposes a distinction between scientific knowledge, sophism, scholastics and pragmatism. By applying this framework to management research methods, it shows that hermeneutic-historical and research-action approaches have some legitimacy in opposition to those methods based on passing trends or that degenerate into scholasticism. The second part illustrates the conceptual framework based on the particular case of accounting history. Its intellectual value is underlined as well as its contribution to the creation of new systems and to denouncing those based on sophism. We then warn of the risks facing this discipline should it ever fall into introspection and neglect and the impact it should have on management practices. The authors present a series of proposals for avoiding yielding to scholastics.

La « quarantaine » des coûts standard chez Saint-Gobain : 1920-1960

Standard costing, conceived in the first two decades of the 20th century in the United States, became widespread in American literature and entreprises between the two World Wars but was not introduced into Saint-Gobain until around 1960. This article investigates circumstances of the 40-years-period separating availability of the technique and its application in a noted French company. The time-lag taken by the French accounting profession to appropriate the technique is put forward as a primary but not exclusive cause.