No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 February 2015
This short essay elaborates on two points raised by Eric Godelier's article about resolving divisions between management science and business history in France. It outlines the segmentation of French higher education, especially in the area of business studies, and discusses some long-standing debates over legitimizing historical studies.
This piece has profited from discussions with Christopher D. McKenna and Hervé Laroche. The title of this article is taken from Nietzsche’s Use and Abuse of History (Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie fur das Leben), one of my favorite tracts on the benefits and limits of historical knowledge. Margaret MacMillan, the distinguished Oxford historian, has also used the title recently to introduce a series of essays on history. There is no copyright on titles, but I can find no acknowledgement of Nietzsche or the common translation of his insightful tract.
2. The Centre national de la recherche scientifique is the largest organization in France for encouraging and coordinating research in France. Founded in 1939 and under the administration of the Ministry of Education, it has an annual budget of approximately 3 billion euros and 30,000 employees, half of whom are engineers. Like the Max Planck Institute in Germany, but unlike NASA, in the United States, it helps set standards for research in a wide variety of areas.
3. In France, the Chambre de Commerce is called a private institution, even though it has many official functions and French companies are required to contribute to its budget.
4. Please excuse the sloppiness. The word ’relevant’ is at least a two-placed predicate, but in deference to my youth, I will use it in the slogan form of the 1960s.
5. See Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present, edited, selected, and introduced by Fritz, Stern (New York: Meridian Books, 1956).Google Scholar
6. Stuart Hughes, H., History as Art and as Science: Twin Vistas on the Past (New York: Torchbooks, 1964).Google Scholar Hughes concluded that history could only resemble science insofar as the discipline was practiced with a systematic examination of our assumptions and methods, as well as by developing a passionate vision of new intellectual pursuits. But he encouraged his readers to resist attempts to exclude all put scientific (positivist) knowledge and to remember that the heart of historical inquiry was the well-documented and artistically framed narrative.
7. I am indebted to Chris McKenna, who reminded me that management theorists derive many “facts” through interviews from unnamed sources, although this practice has become less widespread according to one of my colleagues, at least less important to cutting-edge management research.
8. It is rare that anything I write is validated within minutes. B efore the ink was dry on a draft, my esteemed colleague from our strategy department, Herve Laroche, voiced his strong disagreement with the limits I put on what we can hope to learn from the past, conirming that at least some of my colleagues would disagree with me. I was obviously schooled with more modest expectation regarding historical knowledge, perhaps best captured by Michael Howard when he wrote that “The past is infinitely various, an inexhaustible storehouse of events from which we can prove anything and its opposite.” The Lessons of History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 11. Though I do not agree with all of Howard’s views, we need to explore further the precise “lessons” and the kind of “theory” we can reasonably derive from the study of the past, at the very least, which kinds historians should be deriving.
9. Franco, Amatori and Jones, Geoffrey, “Introduction,” in Business History around the World, eds. Amatori, Franco and Jones, Geoffrey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).Google Scholar
10. Jonathan, Zeitlin, “Flexibility, Governance, and Strategic Choice in Industrial Society,” in Business History around the World, eds. Amatori, Franco and Jones, Geoffrey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).Google Scholar
11. Curiously, I irst learned this lesson from a wonderful book by one of France’s greatest historians, Marc, Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (New York: Knopf, 1971).Google Scholar Bloch recognized that history had a use in developing insight and stimulating action, but rejected a narrow “positivist” use of the past.