Description
This article is a contribution to the study of the spread of management innovations, methods and rhetorics. It particularly
concerns the influence of ideological and political factors, which have so far mostly escaped in-depth study. In particular,
we seek to understand to what extent a critique of society developed by social reformers can be a source of
inspiration for managers, leading them to change their practices and experiment with new devices. Relying on the framework
of historical change in management practices developed by Boltanski and Chiapello [
Criticisms of capitalism, budgeting and the double
enrolment: Budgetary control rhetoric and social reform
in France in the 1930s and 1950s
Nicolas Berland
a
, Eve Chiapello
b,
*
a
Universite´ Paris-Dauphine, DRM, Place du Mare´ chal de Lattre de Tassigny, 75775 Paris Cedex 16, France
b
HEC School of Management, 78 350 Jouy-en-Josas, France
Abstract
This article is a contribution to the study of the spread of management innovations, methods and rhetorics. It partic-
ularly concerns the in?uence of ideological and political factors, which have so far mostly escaped in-depth study. In par-
ticular, we seek to understand to what extent a critique of society developed by social reformers can be a source of
inspiration for managers, leading them to change their practices and experiment with new devices. Relying on the frame-
work of historical change in management practices developed by Boltanski and Chiapello [Boltanski, L., & Chiapello, E.
(2005). The new spirit of capitalism. London: Verso (Translation of Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme, Paris: Gallimard,
1999)], we study the speci?c development of budgetary control in France, examined in the light of the general political
and economic history of the 20th century. This framework simultaneously encompasses the dissemination of a new
accounting practice, the transformation of capitalist institutions and mo des of regulation in a given period and country,
and the programmatic discourses [Miller, P., & Rose, N. (1990). Governing economic life. Economy and Society, 19(1), 1–
31] associated with the historical move.
More exactly, what interests us is a double enrolment process. The business world promoters of budgetary control use
the rhetorics of social reformers to present budgetary control as a solution to the economic and social problems of their
time; conversely, social reformers promote budgetary control as a realistic, e?cient tool that can change the world. Ulti-
mately, a degree of alliance is possible around this management tool, although the extent to which the meanings each
group attributes to its action are shared may remain unclear. Based on an analysis of the writings of budgetary control
promoters of the 1930s and the 1950s, we show the close links between their discourse and the reforming ideas of their
time, and how we can trace through this corpus the evolution of this kind of political rationalities [Miller, P., & Rose,
N. (1990). Governing economic life. Economy and Society, 19(1), 1–31] associated with governing and managing corpora-
tions we call the spirit of capitalism [Boltanski, L., & Chiapello, E. (2005). The new spirit of capitalism. London: Verso
(Translation of Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme, Paris: Gallimard, 1999)].
Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Accounting change and accounting innovation
have become major themes for accounting
research in recent years (Bjørnenak, 1997; Burns &
Scapens, 2000; Chua, 1995; Jones & Dugdale,
0361-3682/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.aos.2008.04.004
*
Corresponding author. Tel.: +33 1 39 67 94 41; fax: +33 1 39
67 70 86.
E-mail addresses: [email protected] (N. Berland),
[email protected] (E. Chiapello).
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57
www.elsevier.com/locate/aos
2002). Sociologically based research in management
accounting using Foucauldian, Latourian or New
Institutionalism approaches has been widely
referred to in accounts of these changes (Baxter &
Chua, 2003). We adopt a sociological perspective
in this paper, studying the double enrolment of
social reformers’ rhetorics and accounting innova-
tions. Our work aims to answer three fundamental
research questions: Where do management innova-
tion and management rhetorics come from? How
is it that certain rhetorics spread at certain times?
How can we explain the changes over time in man-
agement discourses? This article proposes a theoret-
ical framework and tests it against some parts of the
history of budgetary control.
The originality of our approach lies in the empha-
sis placed on the role of social reformers and the
dynamics of capitalism. We argue that capitalism
may in certain circumstances, incorporate the cri-
tiques of the social reformers in order to regenerate.
We use the term social reformers for actors in society
who, upon encountering economic or social phe-
nomena they deem regrettable or maybe even highly
dangerous, simultaneously produce a critique of
society, a diagnosis of the risks it is running, and
proposals for reforms, regardless of whether these
reforms are considered realistic or utopian. The
reformers who become in?uential and whose opin-
ions are listened to are rarely lone crusaders; gener-
ally they are part of a social movement, attend
meetings of clubs or societies, organise conferences
and courses to popularise their ideas, and have fol-
lowers and propagators. A characteristic feature of
such reformers – who can be seen as conveyors of
political rationalities and programmes and as pro-
moters of speci?c technologies (Rose & Miller,
1992) – in this case budgetary control – is that they
are not necessarily in a position of power at the
beginning of the reform process. Often critical of
the dominant groups and public policies of their
time, they tend to position themselves as forces for
opposition and/or proposals. But their ideas may
be adopted by businesses or states, usually in order
to overcome a di?cult crisis. Their rhetoric thus
?nds itself transported to the very heart of the system
against which it was produced, and their proposals
put into practice. Their re?ection gives birth to ideas
for new devices, and brings about invention of new
management practices or tools which avant-garde
managers then experiment with. In this process of
incorporation of criticism into the capitalist organi-
sation, some members of the reforming social move-
ments may gain access to positions of power, but
ideas spread far beyond the actual actions of these
social reformers, as the reforming proposals are also
taken on board by avant-garde managers who are
followed by a wide range of people.
We argue that the dynamic process of capital-
ism’s incorporation of a critique is brought into
operation by business managers who decide to
change their practices based on the criticisms
received and any associated recommendations, or
political leaders who use the law or various specially
created or reformed institutions to change the regu-
lations governing business practices. The ?rst steps
taken by companies when incorporating a critique
are typically taken by avant-garde managers who
are interested in the ideas tossed around in reform-
ing circles and may even themselves be part of those
circles. It is often these managers’ experiences that
are later recounted, presented as examples, debated
and imitated when the di?usion process is set in
motion. This process will ultimately result in a mor-
phological transformation of capitalism, enabling it
to continue while simultaneously self-regenerating.
Such links between technologies and programmes
have already been highlighted in research by Miller
and O’Leary (1987, 1989, 1994), Miller and Rose
(1990), Miller (1990) and Rose and Miller (1992).
We add to this existing work a re?ective analysis of
the origins of political rationalities and programmes
of government, and the way in which they are con-
structed. We aim to show that some of these ideas,
which subsequently became very widespread, origi-
nated in the currents of criticisms of capitalism..
The case of budgetary control itself has never before
been studied from this angle. Our article is based on
an analysis of the discourses promoting budgetary
control in France from the 1930s to the 1950s, based
on two corpuses of texts. We concentrate on the
ideas that surrounded declarations made about bud-
getary control, putting it into perspective in relation
to economic and social problems at a national level,
or considering it in relation to moral imperatives for
the transformation of society. These discussions pro-
vide an insight into the ideological environment of
the promoters of budgetary control.
From the late 1920s to the 1960s a group of
accounting techniques developed in France, based
on a complex of practices rooted in scienti?c manage-
ment. Budgetary control is one of its tools, and devel-
oped alongside standard costing. ‘‘Budgetary
control” presupposes: (1) the existence of a ‘‘budget”,
i.e. a set of forecast ?gures expressed in accounting
N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57 29
language, covering the whole of the company’s activ-
ity, and (2) the production of reports comparing the
forecasts with what actually happened. Although
standard costing can be a help in preparing forecasts
– and is often discussed in the same writings as bud-
getary control, and attributed the same kind of socio-
political advantages – both techniques developed in a
loosely coupled relationship. The progress in France
of these two innovations, which ‘‘render visible the
ine?ciencies” (Miller & O’Leary, 1987, p. 241) dif-
fered: while budgetary control drifted fairly rapidly
from discourse to practice, the drift was slower for
standard costing.
1
The reason for going into no fur-
ther detail regarding the characteristics of budgetary
control,
2
is because its history is also the history of
the debates over the ‘‘right way” to use it, which
are themselves indissociable from the various ‘‘func-
tions” attributed to the tool (Berland, 1999b; Burc-
hell, Clubb, Hopwood, Hughes, & Nahapiet, 1980;
Ezzamel, 1994; Hopwood, 1978, 1983; Preston, Coo-
per, & Coombs, 1992). We shall see that the meaning
attributed to budgetary control changes through the
period studied. Our work focuses on programmatic
aspirations conferred on budgetary control, that is
on management discourses and not on management
practices as deployed within ?rms. However, partic-
ularly when a rhetoric accompanies the spread of a
new management technique, we suggest that the
study of discourses provides some information on
changes in practices. In so far as discourses cogni-
tively frame actors’ interpretations of a management
tool or practice, and in doing so they transform the
practice itself, making it conform further to the pre-
dominant interpretation. This echoes the theories
of Burchell et al. (1980), who showed the disconnec-
tion between the publicly stated roles of accounting
and the practice of accounting, but also the impor-
tance of o?cial roles in changing practices, account-
ing being ‘‘challenged and changed in the name of the
roles it is seen as serving” (Burchell et al., 1980, p. 10).
The ?rst part of this article is devoted to a pre-
sentation of our framework, together with a brief
explanation of our working method. The second
part will show how discussions of budgetary control
were involved in the debate on social issues in the
1930s and 1950s, and how the idea of budgetary
control changed between the two periods, in keep-
ing with changes in this debate. The third part then
further explores the productiveness of the theoreti-
cal framework put forward in The New Spirit of
Capitalism (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005), in order
to understand the evolution of business organisa-
tions between 1929 and 1960, as seen through the
history of budgetary control. While the second sec-
tion contains a point-by-point comparison of the
ideas put forward by the reformers and the budget-
ary control promoters, the third section aims to
describe the dynamics of the change in the
representations.
The dynamics of management rhetorics and their
relationship with management change
Previous studies have, like ours, taken an interest
in management fashions (Abrahamson, 1996), the
phenomena of institutionalisation (Barley & Tol-
bert, 1997) and disinstitutionalisation (Oliver,
1991) of practices, and the rhetorics that support
them (Watson, 1995; Zbaracki, 1998). We present
some of these studies and show how they can be
connected to the theoretical framework we use (Bol-
tanski & Chiapello, 2005), which we consider can
expand on previous work by adding analyses of
the role of reformers in management change.
Management rhetorics and management change
A number of studies aim to provide an account
of the historical changes in management techniques
with an interpretation of observed historical devel-
opments that goes beyond the simplistic and linear
view of history that techniques have improved con-
tinuously. To achieve this aim, researchers have to
draw up a history of the development of manage-
ment, and an explanatory framework for this
development. Barley and Kunda (1992), then Abra-
hamson (1997) share a view of history that distin-
guishes ?ve management rhetorics since the 19th
century: (1) welfare work; (2) scienti?c manage-
ment; (3) human relations and personnel manage-
ment; (4) systems rationalism; (5) organization
culture and quality. They then analyse this sequence
of periods as a cyclical phenomenon, arguing that a
succession of cycles exists, in which ‘‘normative”
theories (acting on employees’ emotions and state
1
Maybe, as Zimnovitch (1997, 2001) maintains, because in the
1930s this technique found itself in competition with the French
full cost method (of homogeneous sections).
2
For example what are the intended uses of budgetary control
reports, whether they are a basis for evaluation of the perfor-
mance of an entity or its managers, whether the forecasts are
global or broken down into components, with varying degrees of
detail as regards the organisation’s activities, or what is the
amount of complementary non-?nancial information.
30 N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57
of mind) alternate with ‘‘rational” theories (for-
mally de?ning working processes).
3
The historical framework adopted in this article is
also structured around historical phases, but with
longer durations, each encompassing a normative
time and a rational time. We thus identify a ?rst per-
iod running from the late 19th century to the crisis of
the1930s, marked by both ‘Welfare work’ and ‘Scien-
ti?c management’ ideas. A second period begins with
the e?orts made to emerge from the economic and
social crisis of the 1930s, then to rebuild the world
after the economic, moral and political crisis of the
Second World War, extending to the late 1960s when
the capitalist system encountered another crisis. This
second period combines the ‘Human relations and
personnel management’ ideas with ‘Systems rational-
ism’ ideas. Our third period opens with the crisis
which started in 1968 as a crisis of meaning, a refusal
of authority and rejection of mass society, and con-
tinued in the form of an economic crisis after the
1970s oil shocks. This period can be considered still
ongoing: ideas concerning ‘Organization culture
and quality’ are implemented, but new rational tools
are developed in parallel, for instance new proce-
dures for quality certi?cation, and forms of control
using information and communication technologies.
Each period is associated with what we call a spirit of
capitalism (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005).
Barley and Kunda (1992), and later Abrahamson
(1997) put forward di?erent explanations for the
alternation between normative and rational theo-
ries.
4
However, both studies analyse the cycles
essentially as the product of economic in?uence
(growth and degree of innovation), even though
they acknowledge that other factors may be taken
into consideration (political and social relations,
etc). Our own research acts on this intuition and
seeks to reach a fuller understanding by emphasis-
ing these ‘‘other” factors of change. The history of
management technologies (and the accompanying
discourses) is related in our work with the overall
history of capitalism, which cannot be summed up
as a cyclical, reassuring history of alternation
between ‘‘upward” and ‘‘downward” phases. Each
crisis is new and unique, or at least has signi?cantly
distinctive features, and so is the way out of the cri-
sis. History does not repeat itself in a neat and sty-
lised way. The managerial forms adopted at a given
period must be seen in relation to the institutional
organisation of the economic system at a given time,
and the way it is remodelled in each period by public
policies and the e?orts of all actors involved. Anal-
ysis of the history of management methods and
rhetorics cannot be disconnected from an institu-
tional analysis (Di Maggio & Powell, 1983; Scott,
1995). What happens in companies and in the pro-
duction of the normative discourses on management
cannot be dissociated from the forms of economic
regulations governing economic activity and the
policies of public or private bodies – which are con-
trolled to varying degrees by the political sphere –
that issue the regulations (Loft, 1986).
Institutions, political rationalities and the ‘‘spirit of
capitalism”
Historical analysis of management devices should
in our opinion take the political sphere into consid-
eration. This is exactly what Miller does in his work
with Rose and O’Leary. Rose and Miller (1992) pro-
pose to distinguish several levels in their study. First,
there are the political rationalities, i.e. ‘‘the changing
discursive ?elds within which the exercise of power is
conceptualized, the moral justi?cation for particular
ways of exercising power by diverse authorities” (p.
175). The spirit of capitalism of a period in our ana-
lytical framework occupies the same place as these
political rationalities, except that it primarily con-
cerns the discursive ?eld regarding how power is
exercised in the enterprise,
5
also encompassing the
de?nition of the enterprise itself, its general operat-
ing rules and its role in society. The spirit of capital-
ism has a moral form, like any political rationality,
3
By ‘‘normative theories”, Barley and Kunda (1992, p. 364)
mean ‘‘the idea that managers could more e?ectively regulate
workers by attending not only to their behaviour but their thoughts
and emotions”. Normative theories are central in periods 1, 3 and
5. The same authors use ‘‘rational theories” (1992, 364) to refer to
the rhetoric justifying ‘‘harsh discipline and even threats of violence
by appealing to an individualistic ethic of success”. According to
their analysis, these rational theories are central in periods 2 and
4.
4
First, cycles are said to succeed each other in response to
performances considered mediocre (the performance gap theory).
Second, these managerial cycles are thought to be constructed
around economic cycles such as Kondratie?’s pendulum theory:
in growth phases, rational theories are supposed to supplant the
normative theories presumed to dominate during when the cycle
is on a downturn. Barley and Kunda (1992) give precedence to
the pendulum theory, while Abrahamson (1997) considers these
two explanatory theories as complementary.
5
Miller and Rose (1992), following the work of Michel
Foucault, seek to reformulate the question of ‘‘the State” as
‘‘an investigation of the problematics of government”.
N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57 31
determining the ideals in whose name the governing
and managing of corporations is articulated. Any
spirit of capitalism also paints a moral portrait of
man perfectly well-adjusted to the enterprise of his
time, stating his qualities, and the qualities that the
system esteems and rewards: we say that it incorpo-
rates a response to anxiety over the fairness of the
capitalist process. Therefore, a ?rst set of arguments
included in the spirit of capitalism of one time
invokes the notion of fairness, explaining why capi-
talism is coherent with a sense of justice, and how
it contributes to the common good.
A second set of arguments describes the forms of
security that are supposed to be available to those
who are involved, both for themselves and for their
children. The last dimension focuses on what is pre-
sented as stimulating or exciting about an involve-
ment with capitalism – in other words, how this
system can help people to achieve ful?lment, and
how it can generate enthusiasm. The rhetorical con-
tent of the spirit of capitalism, i.e. these three catego-
ries of arguments,
6
alters over time. Nevertheless, we
consider that at any period the type of political ratio-
nality that is the spirit of capitalism must o?er
responses – albeit varying responses – to the three
dimensions of fairness, security and stimulation.
The table below summarises the three spirits of
capitalism that have succeeded each other since
the later 19th century, and the phases in the history
Table 1
Three spirits of capitalism
First spirit end of 19th
century–1930s
Second spirit 1940s–1970s Third spirit since 1980
Characteristic features
of the economic
organisation
Small family ?rms Managerial ?rms Network ?rms
Bourgeois capitalism Big industrial companies Internet and biotech
Mass production Global ?nance
States economic policy Varying and di?erentiated productions
Periods de?ned by
Barley and Kunda
(1992)
1. Welfare work; 2. Scienti?c
management
3. Human relations and
personnel management 4.
Systems rationalism
5. Organization culture and quality
What is the promise of
fairness?
Meritocracy valuing loyalty
and respect of conventional
proprieties, and in an
apparent contradiction,
successes in market
competition situations
Meritocracy valuing
e?ectiveness
New form of meritocracy valuing mobility,
ability to nourish a network, etc
Management by objectives
Each project is an opportunity to develop
one’s employability: more employability if
more mobility
What is the promise of
security?
Based on personal property
and relationships, charity
and paternalism
Based on long term planning,
life long careers and welfare
state
For the mobile and the adaptable
Companies will provide self-help resources
to enhance the ability to manage oneself
What is the promise of
stimulation?
Freedom from local
communities progress
Career opportunities No more authoritarian chiefs
Access to power positions
E?ectiveness possible in
‘‘freedom countries”
Fuzzy organisations
Innovation and creativity
Permanent change
6
The spirit of capitalism can be seen as a set of justi?cations
along these three dimensions (fairness, security, stimulation) in
order to improve involvement in the capitalist process. In the
theoretical framework we use, capitalistic accumulation requires
commitment from many people, although few have any real
chances of making a substantial pro?t and it is unrealistic to
think including these people by force (working to survive) is all
that is needed. One of the essential aspects of this involvement is
the ability to give ‘‘meaning” to one’s actions: this meaning goes
beyond the mere idea of generating pro?t, and is supplied by
what is called here the spirit of capitalism.
32 N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57
of management that are assumed by this analysis.
For each period, we show the argumentative con-
tent in terms of fairness, security and stimulation
(see Table 1).
In the same way as the political rationalities dis-
cussed by Rose and Miller (1992), the spirit of cap-
italism also incorporates an epistemology and is
formulated in a distinctive idiom. Thus, in each per-
iod, the management discourse has its own speci?c
vocabulary and concepts, which help contemporar-
ies to conceive the enterprise and its success factors.
The second level of analysis proposed by Rose
and Miller is the level of governmental technologies,
i.e. ‘‘the complex mundane programmes, calculations,
techniques, apparatuses, documents and procedures
through which authorities seek to embody and give
e?ect to governmental ambitions” (Rose & Miller,
1992, p. 175). ‘‘These ‘technologies of government’
seek to translate thought into the domain of reality,
and to establish ‘in the world of persons and things’
spaces and devices for acting upon those entities of
which they dream and scheme” (Miller & Rose,
1990, p. 8). This level is where we encounter man-
agement techniques and tools, such as budgetary
control, which can also be analysed as central
instruments for accomplishing the integration of
the spirit of capitalism into business management
practices. This explains why the management litera-
ture is considered a major receptacle for the spirit of
capitalism of a given period.
7
A history of management rhetorics and manage-
ment tools thus requires a history of change in polit-
ical rationalities, programmes of government and
governmental technologies. Miller and his co-
authors used this general framework to analyse var-
ious developments in management practices. Each
time, they sought to reconstitute the discursive envi-
ronment and programmes that fostered the spread
of a given management practice. Miller’s (1991)
study of the development of discounted cash ?ow
procedures as a management tool in the 1950s,
and the work by Miller and O’Leary (1987) relating
talk of ‘‘national e?ciency” and the early 20th cen-
tury eugenist ideologies to the development of stan-
dard costs in the UK are good examples (see also
Miller & O’Leary, 1989, 1994).
8
The approach taken
by Burchell, Clubb, and Hopwood (1985) to the
enthusiasm for value added in the 1970s is another
example of this type of study, which aims to place
the development of a management practice in the
context of broader ideological debates.
What we propose to do in this article is to asso-
ciate this approach with hypotheses on the origins
of the ideas that emerge at a given moment in his-
tory. Where do these ideas come from to structure
political rationalities and programmes of a period,
eventually fostering the development of certain gov-
ernmental technologies? This is where the frame-
work developed by Boltanski and Chiapello (2005)
can be useful.
The framework of change in The New Spirit of
Capitalism
One major characteristic of this work is the role it
attributes to criticisms of capitalism
9
in producing
changes in corporate practices and related ideolo-
7
Management literature comprises here all the normative texts,
mainly written by consultants in the recent period, which
particularly promote certain methods of organisation and certain
‘‘new” management practices. Boltanski and Chiapello (2005)
show that at a given period, there is no in?nity of ways to
describe the ‘‘new high performance organisation” or the
‘‘organisation of the future”: on the contrary, the models appear
to converge around a small number of proposals which in?uence
the spirit of the time. They based their e?orts (as Weber and
Sombart had done previously) on texts that provide moral
education on business practices. In their study, this meant two
bodies of work from the ?eld of management studies: one from
the 1960s; and one from the 1990s (each representing around 500
pages and 50 texts).
8
Miller and O’Leary (1989) show that the concepts of
organisational authority presented by American writers of
management literature from 1900 to 1940 were in keeping with
the USA’s political culture, and evolved with the debates in the
political arenas. In particular, the 1929 crisis and its consequences
are seen as a time of signi?cant challenge to previous models of
authority. This crisis led to a new management literature
represented by the writings of Mayo and Barnard. In a further
paper, Miller and O’Leary (1994) resituated the development of
Activity-based costing and empowerment practices in the USA in
the context of the 1980s American decline against Japan, and
related to the discursive ?eld of ‘‘New Economic Citizenship”.
9
Two types of criticism that have developed since the 19th
century have been examined by Boltanski and Chiapello (2005).
The ?rst is what the authors call the ‘‘social critique”. Here the
emphasis is on inequalities, misery, exploitation, and the sel?sh-
ness of a world that stimulates individualism rather than
solidarity. Its main vector has been the labour movement. The
second form of criticism, the ‘‘artistic critique”, ?rst emerged in
small artistic and intellectual circles, and stresses other charac-
teristics of capitalism. In a capitalist world, it criticises oppression
(market domination, factory discipline), the massi?cation of
society, standardisation and pervasive commodi?cation. It vin-
dicates an ideal of liberation and/or individual autonomy,
singularity and authenticity (Chiapello, 1998).
N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57 33
gies. These criticisms are produced by social reform-
ers and the social networks in which they partici-
pate. Their output is of course theoretical, aiming
to diagnose problems, draw attention to situations
considered negative, propose modi?cations, etc,
but also practical, with the implementation of vari-
ous campaigns belonging to what Tilly (1986) calls
the ‘‘repertoires of collective action” (propaganda,
training courses, demonstrations, strikes, boycotts,
etc). In general, the management practices in exis-
tence at a given time, especially those presented as
‘‘the best practices”, greatly depend on the type
and virulence of the criticism levelled at them. Some
of the transformations undergone by capitalism
since May 1968
10
can thus be analysed as a clever
integration of the critiques of the 1970s and their
demands for autonomy, creativity, more authentic
interpersonal relationships, etc. Similarly, it is sug-
gested that the transformations in progress over
the period covered by this article result partly from
the integration and adaptation of a certain number
of proposals originally formulated by the labour
movement, denouncing inequalities, poverty and
exploitation.
Criticism plays several roles in the change pro-
cess. First, it may produce ungovernability, a situa-
tion which encourages changes of method,
particularly for business managers, in order to
regain the capacity to govern. It also produces ideas,
with the essential part of the reforming vision tend-
ing to concentrate on the problematic aspects
revealed. Some of these ideas will be taken on board
and integrated into management practices for one
or more of the following reasons: (1) because while
satisfying the criticism they also serve pro?t, (2)
because they provide a means of motivating people
in a change process (even if the change is decided on
for reasons other than the pressure exerted by the
criticism), (3) or because this is the only way to
silence criticism when it is persistent and inventive,
and its virulence is beginning to undermine
employee motivation and cause disorganisation in
the enterprise. It can thus be said that a successful
critique is fated to be taken over and adapted.
According to this approach, the ideas that were
to arrive to construct new political rationalities con-
cerning the economy’s operation came from criti-
cism of capitalism. Their ideas are more widely
heeded when the economy is going through a major
crisis, as in the 1930s or 1970s. The advantage of
criticisms of capitalism is that, often ahead of oth-
ers, they identi?ed the contradictions and problems
generated by the way the economy operates. They
may also have fed re?ection on possible remedies
and analyses of the causes of di?culties. They thus
present themselves as existing reservoirs of reform-
ing ideas as and when necessary. In periods of great
change, such as the years marking the transition
from one spirit of capitalism to another, the ideas
originating in the critical movements are enrolled
to serve the reform of capitalism. They can be used
to promote new management devices. Their sup-
porters even occasionally suggest using a particular
technology to facilitate this transition. The tool is
reassuring, o?ering ways to grasp a problem and
solutions. It may be called on independently with-
out people necessarily being committed to the over-
all reform project. It is as if to engage more people,
particularly more business managers, in change, the
reformers had to propose tools and technologies
which in themselves can ‘‘enrol” people without
requiring a moral commitment to the cause (Callon
& Law, 1982; Callon, 1986; Latour, 1987). Addi-
tionally, it has been observed that certain promoters
of management tools, particularly the consulting
?rms whose objective is to sell new approaches to
businesses, sometimes adopt social reformers’ rheto-
ric and vocabulary to increase the success of the
tools they are promoting. In the case studied in this
article – budgetary control – the ideas germinated in
scienti?c management circles were taken over by the
reforming groups of the 1930s. They were intro-
duced into the plans for economic reform with the
10
The theoretical framework used as a basis here was initially
developed to propose an interpretation of changes in business
management methods in France from the post-May 1968 years.
In May 1968, France underwent a major period of social unrest,
marked by student demonstrations with suspension of lectures,
occupation of the Sorbonne university and barricades in Paris’
Latin quarter, and also by largescale workers’ strikes all over
France. These events led to the famous Grenelle agreements
between employers and unions, under the auspices of the State,
intended to end the insurrectional situation. In fact, the social
unrest continued throughout the following decade, albeit to a
lesser degree, centred on a critique of consumer society, with
demands for greater liberty – including sexual liberty – experi-
ments in worker autonomy with workers taking control of certain
factories, and the beginnings of the ecological movement. The
1970s also saw a revival of the Marxist critique of exploitation
and mass production, with particular interest in the Maoist and
Yugoslav variations on ‘‘real socialism”. This social agitation and
its underlying themes were in fact shared by most developed
countries over the period, although the most intense moments did
not always coincide in time. May 1968 is the French landmark for
what can be analysed as a global crisis of governability in western
countries.
34 N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57
purpose of organizing the economy to avoid ever
experiencing another 1930s-style crisis.
A two-way takeover of ideas is thus going on: (1)
takeover by the social reformers of the ‘‘budgetary
control” tool attracting the attention of business
managers, in order to promote their way of organiz-
ing the economy – budgetary control as a Trojan
horse for social reform; and (2) takeover by the pro-
moters of budgetary control of the social reformers’
ideas and the bright future they want to build, in
order to bring in the tool they recommend, which
?nds itself being attributed virtues not only of e?-
ciency but also of moral values – social reformism
as an aid in constructing the legitimacy and ideolog-
ical desirability of the budgetary control tool.
Sources, corpus and working methods
The history of budgetary control in France, the
UK and the US has attracted substantially less
attention than the history of cost calculation. It
has often been hypothesised that Europe followed
the example of US businesses, and that the develop-
ment of budgetary control essentially dated from
the end of the Second World War (see for example
Ashton, Hopper, & Scapens, 1995 for the UK, Cos-
su, 1986 for France). But more searching studies
have shown that the situation in Europe was in fact
fairly similar to the situation in the US.
11
Research
by Berland and Boyns (2002), Boyns (1998), Miller
and O’Leary (1987), Parker (2002), Solomons
(1952), Quail (1996), and Walsh and Stewart
(1993), for instance, have shown that budgetary
control dated from at least the 1930s in both
countries.
For France, three historic phases can be identi-
?ed in the development of budgetary control. The
?rst more or less covers the decade of the 1930s,
starting with the International Budgetary Control
Conference held in Geneva by the Institut Interna-
tional d’Organisation Scienti?que du Travail
(IIOST)
12
in 1930. The conference’s view of budget-
ary control was tinged with the rationalist thinking
of the Taylorian engineers promoting it, with the
accent above all on planning and technical di?cul-
ties. The second phase takes us to the end of the
1950s. In this phase, budgetary control was develop-
ing in an environment of postwar reform and the
construction of the Fordist compromise (Aglietta,
1976; Boyer & Mistral, 1978). Although it had not
lost its rationalist nature, budgetary control was
now being attributed other characteristics, such as
humanising the economy and encouraging decen-
tralisation within enterprises. The third phase covers
all of the 1960s, and sees the arrival in force of dis-
cussions on motivation in the workplace. The
emphasis is during this last period on use of the
budget as a target to be achieved, and budgetary
control as a means of motivation and performance
evaluation
13
(Mc Arthur & Scott, 1970; Taboulet,
Meyer, & Sallan, 1966).
This article covers the ?rst two phases only. Most
of the documents referred to for the second phase
date from the 1950s, a much more homogeneous
period in terms of history and ideology, when the
uncertainties of wartime had disappeared and the
postwar ideological battles had led to a new way
of understanding and governing the economy (Kui-
sel, 1981). In any case, the wartime period was a
‘‘slack period” for introduction of budgetary con-
trol systems in businesses.
For the purposes of the various analyses, we
studied both the history of budgetary control and
the economic (Carre´, Dubois, & Malinvaud, 1972),
social and political context (Boltanski, 1982; Kuisel,
1981) surrounding that history. Whereas primary
sources (archives and contemporary documents)
were used to describe the history of budgetary con-
trol (Berland, 1998, 1999a; Berland & Boyns, 2002),
a simple review of the existing literature was the
basis for our examination of the reforming ideas
with which we shall attempt to demonstrate budget-
ary control is linked. We thus based our work on
research by historians and sociologists who have
preceded us in the ?eld (Amoyal, 1974; Boltanski,
1982; Braudel & Labrousse, 1979; Cotta, 1984; Kui-
sel, 1981; Moutet, 1997), and highlighted the ideo-
logical continuity between the thinking of certain
pioneering groups in the 1930s and what was to
11
For the history of budgetary control in the US, see Chandler
(1962, 1977), Chandler and Deams (1979), Johnson and Kaplan
(1987), Kaplan (1984) and also research by Fleischman (2000),
Fleischman and Tyson (2007) and Tyson (1992).
12
A direct translation would be ‘‘International Institute for
Scienti?c Management”, but the English name for the organisa-
tion was the International Management Institute (IMI). At the
time of the conference, the director was Lyndall Urwick.
13
The seminal research by Argyris (1952) pre?gures this third
period, which in the academic world gave rise in the 1960s to a
broad stream of academic literature on motivation, human
behaviour and budgeting.
N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57 35
become the predominant new ideology concerning
the economy in the postwar period.
These studies show a parallel between the
increasing adoption of budgetary control and the
popularity of the ideas put forward by the 1930s
reformers. However, we also need to demonstrate
that this is more than mere coincidence, and that
the promotion of budgetary control used the newly
emerging economic ideology as a support (Lemarc-
hand & Le Roy, 2000). This requires sources that
could indicate a link between the major social and
economic issues of a period and budgetary control:
we use public writings of budgetary control promot-
ers. We show that they tend to adopt as their own
some of the criticisms expressed in by social reform-
ers. In the case of budgetary control, the promoters
drew their arguments from the e?ervescence of ideas
thrown up by seekers of alternatives to the market-
led order in the 1930s (Kuisel, 1981). Two corpuses
of around 30 texts were gathered, one concerning
the 1930s and the other the 1950s (see Appendix).
They consist of public writings that accompanied
the development of budgetary control (textbooks,
articles, conference papers, etc) (see Table 2). From
these documents we selected extracts taking a more
general look at the development of budgetary con-
trol, with reference to the main political and social
issues debated in the relevant period.
The texts selected are by authors who are central
to each of the two periods (recurring authors who
are highly active promoters of budgetary control,
or often cited) and signi?cant in terms of size (writ-
ings longer than one page). The importance of the
chosen extracts calls for two remarks. First, in terms
of volume, the set of extracts containing program-
matic elements is small compared to the total sum
of purely technical extracts, which are longer and
more detailed: the social and political commentaries
are often found in forewords, prefaces, introduc-
tions and conclusions of articles and books with
the body of texts being mainly technical. In terms
of social signi?cance, however, the selected texts
are important, all the more so as an underlying
political rationale common to all can be identi?ed.
Table 3 contains some ?gures indicating the extent
to which the corpus source texts are representative.
It shows that our corpus is far from marginal, being
an extract from a body of publications representing
between 37% and 41% of the references we were able
to access, and between 16% and 27% of all refer-
ences traced for the 2 periods.
These two corpuses were treated as follows: our
main objective was to highlight the economic and
social problems identi?ed by the authors in discuss-
ing budgetary control, and the speci?c or more gen-
eral solutions recommended to connect those ideas
to the period’s reforming currents. The quotations
in this article are taken from this thematic reading.
As is still the case today, the discourse on e?ciency
and the technical rationale is rarely the only dis-
Table 2
Main sources of evidence
Aspects studied Main sources
Economic context Braudel and Labrousse (1979), Carre´ et al. (1972) and Kuisel (1981)
History of reforming ideas Amoyal (1974), Boltanski (1982), Cotta (1984), Dard (1999), Kuisel
(1981) and Moutet (1997)
;
The double enrolment (reforming ideas adopted by budgetary
control promoters and the budgetary control tool adopted by
social reformers)
Two corpuses of texts speci?cally collected for the article consisting
of articles, conferences, lectures, and extracts from textbooks
"
History of budgetary control. The evolution of practices in
companies
Company archives studied in former research Berland (1998,
1999a) and Berland and Boyns (2002)
Table 3
Representativeness of the corpus
1930–1939 1949–1959
Total number of public texts on budgetary control identi?ed for
the decade concerned
200 128
Number of texts found in French libraries 87 85
Number of references in the corpuses: 33 (7 books and 26
articles)
35 (16 books or reports and 19 articles or
communications)
36 N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57
course to be found in texts promoting new manage-
ment practices. It is generally inserted into a history
reconstructed for rhetorical purposes, explaining
that the world has changed and that the new issues
faced by businesses require new practices or the
implementation of a new instrument (Boltanski &
Chiapello, 2005).
This explains why the reader may encounter gran-
diose ?ights of lyricism talking of the wellbeing of
humanity. One example comes from the lecture
given at the Sorbonne in 1958 by Jean Benoit, the
then managing executive of Pechiney, orchestrator
of the implementation of budgetary control within
the company and a tireless campaigner for the tool
(see below). He ended his address to students in
the following words: ‘‘You are all familiar with a for-
eign poet’s re?ection that we need a sort of ‘‘redemp-
tion of utilitarian man by artistic man”. I sincerely
believe that this expression is out of date, I believe
the time has come to unite all men of good will in this
country, whatever their origins, whatever their train-
ing, in order, as one of our workmen currently study-
ing to become a foreman says: ‘‘to build together a
common work with a view to constructing a better
world”. We hypothesise in this article that this non-
technical type of argument put forward by promot-
ers of budgetary control can be explained by the
links between the authors of these texts and the con-
?gurations of ideas conveyed more broadly by
reforming movements.
Budgetary control as part of the social debates in the
period 1930–1950
We ?rst present the people, networks and chan-
nels that spread budgetary control (Section ‘Promot-
ers of budgetary control and their relationships with
the reforming networks’). We shall see that several
promoters of budgetary control are also involved
in the work of reforming think-tanks and can thus
be considered as much reformers as promoters of
budgetary control. This is ?rst-level evidence in sup-
port of our double enrolment hypothesis.
We then (Section ‘The economic and social prob-
lems evoked by social reformers and promoters of
budgetary control’) describe the social and political
problems the authors of our corpus deemed relevant
to mention in writings on budgetary control. This
can be considered a ?rst, and fairly common, level
of enrolment. In these extracts, the authors attribute
historical importance to budgetary control by pre-
senting it as a solution to contemporary issues.
There is no indication as yet that they have more
broadly adopted the ideas of the reforming move-
ments of their time: admittedly, they identify the
same problems, but do they have the same general
solutions? Section ‘Reforming currents’ sets out to
answer this question. With reference to historians
of ideas, we describe the reforming currents of the
time known to have been at the source of socio-eco-
nomic solutions implemented during the ‘‘30 glori-
ous years”. We then show that these solutions are
also present in the texts of our corpus. This is a
much deeper level of enrolment, since certain pro-
moters of budgetary control in our corpus make
explicit reference to the reforming ideas of their
time.
Finally (Section 2.4), we show how the de?nition
of budgetary control evolved over the period in
coherence with the spirit of capitalism, which itself
interacted with the programmatic aims of the
reforming movements, as it is impossible to separate
the technical from the social, the former being
totally impregnated with the latter.
Promoters of budgetary control and their
relationships with the reforming networks
Four types of channel enabled the promoters of
budgetary control to develop their ideas: journals,
congresses, books and professional associations.
These channels can be monitored individually
through the 1930s. After 1945, there are too many
for individual consideration, but we attempt to pro-
vide a brief description in contrast to the previous
period.
Journals, congresses and books
Some journals were very active on the question of
budgetary control: up to 1940, Mon Bureau pub-
lished 22 articles on the subject, Organisation 29,
Me´ thodes 14, Le Commerce 9, L’Usine 8 and La
Comptabilite´ 5. A large number of other journals
also covered the issue occasionally (Berland,
1998). After 1945, there was some continuity in pub-
lications with writings by authors who were already
active before the war, published in the same jour-
nals, sometimes after name changes and mergers.
14
14
Gaston Commesnil, for instance, an author of the 1930s,
continued his work to keep accountants informed with the
publication of one article in 1955 and two in 1956 in the journal
Orga-Comptabilite´ .
N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57 37
Congresses were also a forum for discussion: the
?rst and the most important of these was held in
1930 in Geneva by the IIOST (Institut International
d’Organisation Scienti?que du Travail)
15
and was
entirely devoted to budgetary control. Almost all
the main actors for development of budgetary con-
trol in the 1930s took part in this congress. At least
six other congresses contained presentations on
budgetary control (Berland, 1998). After 1945,
many meetings and events were organised, well
illustrated by those attended by Jean Benoit (see
Appendix), an executive at Pechiney (see below for
a short biography).
Three books particularly merit attention for the
1930s. The ?rst signi?cant publication was by Dr
Ludwig in 1930. As far as we know this is the ?rst
book in French on budgetary control. The second
landmark book is by Satet (1936). This work is
unique for two reasons: the personality of its author
(see below for a short biography) and its content.
Satet describes many true-life cases, and his bibliog-
raphy lists most publications on budgetary control
released in a large number of countries. No subse-
quent work ever equalled this level of documenta-
tion. The third remarkable work of the 1930s must
be the book published by Mareuse (1938), who
takes a more conceptual approach with less empha-
sis on convincing his readership, which no doubt
explains the lack of any concrete examples.
In the postwar period, Paul Loeb of Alsthom
published a two-volume book on budgetary control
in 1956, presenting his own experience in educa-
tional form. Some new works marked this period.
Jean Parenteau (1945) began a long series of publi-
cations that were landmarks in the development of
the discipline. The proportion of books by teachers
began to grow; the tone began to change. Examples
and descriptions of pioneers’ experiences became
rarer, while a more general, more conceptual dis-
course on budgetary control practices gained
ground.
Professional associations
Various professional groups played an acknowl-
edged role in the spread of budgetary control. What
is particularly interesting about them for our pur-
poses is that they were also identi?ed by the histori-
ans of their time as hubs of activity for the
reforming imagination, as the place where each per-
iod’s great reformers were meeting and exchanging
ideas (Boltanski, 1982; Kuisel, 1981). Some authors
in our corpus belong to these associations or think
tanks, and some of the writings we study were pub-
lished by those groups.
One such group was the CNOF, Comite´ National
de l’Organisation Franc ßaise, created by the merger
between the Fayolian Centre d’Etudes Administra-
tives formed in 1919 and the Taylorian Confe´ rence
de l’Organisation Franc ßaise launched in late 1920
(Dard, 1999, p. 28). There were major tensions in
the CNOF during the 1930s as a result of the crisis;
its members argued ?ercely over the line to take:
whether to extend the organisation’s activities to
broad questions of society, or to restrict attention
to the organisation of labour. Due to this very argu-
ment, the CNOF was a highly fertile breeding
ground for ideas. Many authors in our corpus
belonged to the CNOF, and published articles on
budgetary control in its journal, the Bulletin du
CNOF. T. de Saint-Pulgent for example, Manager
of Printemps department stores, where he intro-
duced budgetary control, was a member. So was
Jean Benoit, mentioned earlier, and Jean Coutrot,
who dominated the whole prewar period, as he
was active in most clubs and associations of the time
and ideas circulated between them through him
(Dard, 1999). After 1945, the CNOF continued to
publish the bulletin launched in the 1930s for distri-
bution to businesses and managers. All in all, the
CNOF published no less than 39 documents on
budgetary control between 1930 and 1963. It was
also a training centre: by 1950, 20,000 engineers
and foremen had followed evening classes organised
by the CNOF (Boltanski, 1982, p. 189).
15
Present among the experts was McKinsey, the author of a
1922 book entitled Budgetary Control which became an impor-
tant reference. The other speakers all came to share their practical
experiences in budgetary matters, making the conference a
meeting of practitioners. 258 persons registered for the confer-
ence: 44 were Swiss, 39 German, 35 French, 33 British and 23 of
other nationalities. However, in the event only 197 were able to
attend, including 31 Frenchmen. The attendees were given
extensive documentation, including Anglo-American works but
also several French documents. The Frenchmen included P. de
Berc (Cie des Forges de Chatillon, Commentry et Neuves-
Maisons), G. Delmas (member of the board of the printing ?rm
Delmas, Chapon et Gounouilhon), H. Fayol (Fayol’s son and a
member of the board for Organisation e´ conomique moderne), M.
Lacoin (general secretary of Citroe¨n), P. Levy (management
attache´ for French national railways), A. Antoine (general
manager of Strasbourg electricity), J. Milhaud (Head of Indus-
trial organisation at the employers’ federation CGPF), T. de
Saint-Pulgent (general manager of Grands Magasins du Prin-
temps), R. Satet (Head of the Industrial organisation department
at the sectorial employers’ federation UIMM), J. de Vilmorin
(manager of Vilmorin-Andrieux et Cie, grain merchants).
38 N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57
Another active group was the CEGOS (Commis-
sion Ge´ ne´ rale d’Organisation Scienti?que du travail),
which became a well-known management consult-
ing ?rm after the war and was led by Octave Geli-
nier (propagator in the 1960s of Management by
Objectives, a complement to previous budgetary
control practices). Originally, the CEGOS was
formed in 1926 by the business employers’ organisa-
tion CGPF (Confe´ de´ ration Ge´ ne´ rale de la Produc-
tion Franc ßaise) (Dard, 1999, p. 105). It was
through the CEGOS that the future French full cost
method (of homogeneous sections) developed by
Emile Rimailho (published in 1928), who is also
one of the authors of our corpus, came into being
(Lemarchand, 1998). In the 1930s, the CEGOS
organised several managers’ meetings, many on
the theme of budgetary control. After the war, the
CEGOS continued its e?orts to spread budgetary
control through information meetings, but also
branched out into training (Boltanski, 1982, p.
189). It set up the Hommes et Techniques journal
and publishers, providing an opportunity for new
actors to express opinions in what was already an
old organisation. Among the published authors
were Jean Parenteau (1949), who wrote a ?rst article
on budgetary control, and Claude Charmont (1952)
who discovered ‘‘a new man in the company: the
management controller”. The CEGOS also contin-
ued its work through seminars. The most important,
‘‘Budgetary control: 6 French cases” (CEGOS, 1953)
took place from May 5th–7th 1952 and was
attended by many of the authors included in our
corpus. The CEGOS published a total of no less
than 91 documents on budgetary control between
1930 and 1964.
The very powerful employers’ organisation Union
des Industries Me´ tallurgiques et Minie` res (UIMM)
must also be mentioned. The head of its industrial
organisation departments was no other than R.
Satet, a pillar of the CNOF and also author of over
20 publications on budgetary control. In the early
part of his career, Satet himself introduced budget-
ary control to the printing ?rm Imprimeries Delmas.
A total of 15 UIMM publications were dedicated to
budgetary control between 1930 and 1962.
After the war, as part of the reconstruction e?ort,
speci?c measures were taken to improve productiv-
ity in French companies and make up for France’s
‘‘backward” situation. The General Planning Com-
mission (Commissariat Ge´ ne´ ral au Plan) became an
important venue for meetings and debates. A work-
ing party on productivity was formed there in 1948,
chaired by Jean Fourastie´ under the General Plan-
ning Commission. Subsequently a provisional pro-
ductivity committee (Comite´ provisoire de la
productivite´ ) was set up in 1949, then the AFAP
(Association Franc ßaise pour l’Accroissement de la
Productivite´ – French association for increased pro-
ductivity) in 1950. To help the French ‘‘bring things
up to standard”, the Americans on the Marshall
Plan Mission in France proposed that missions of
company heads and unionists should visit the
USA. One of the AFAP’s main functions was to
organise these missions, of which 450 took place
(between 1950 and 1953) involving more than
4000 members, company managers, engineers, cad-
res (approximately 45%), union representatives
(approximately 25%), top-ranking civil servants,
economists, psychologists and sociologists (approx-
imately 30%) (Boltanski, 1982, p. 157?; Kuisel,
1981, p. 262?). The actual audience reached by these
productivity missions is still a subject of debate
between historians of this period. At least ten mis-
sion reports discussed the issue of budgetary
control.
The central role of certain authors
In consulting the large number of publication
sources mentioned above, it is impossible not to
be struck by the central importance of some
authors, who are encountered in various capacities.
One example is Jean Benoit, already mentioned
several times, who can be considered one of the
most important sources on budgetary control in
the postwar years. He was an industrialist who
had quite a signi?cant lecturing activity. A gradu-
ate of the Ecole des Mines in Saint-Etienne, he
joined AFC (one of the companies making up
Pechiney) at the age of 26 (Cailluet, 1995). Four
years later, he was the director of the Argentie`re
plant, where he had been remarked in 1932 for
his good performance in terms of production costs.
A member of the French national management
committee CNOF in the 1930s, he worked with
Clark to establish budgetary control at Pechiney.
From 1939, he managed the industrial organisation
department in charge of reorganising the company.
At the time of his sudden death in 1962, he was the
company’s general secretary. In parallel to his
brilliant career at Pechiney, he had an important
public life, teaching at the Ecole Nationale
d’Administration, the Ecole de Guerre and the
INSEAD. He was a founder member of the man-
agement control institute ICG – Institut de controˆle
N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57 39
de gestion, and the research centre for company
managers CRC (Centre de recherche et d’e´ tudes
des chefs d’entreprise) at Jouy en Josas. He also
represented Pechiney at the French national
employers’ association CNPF, and was a member
of the accounting standards board CNC (Conseil
National de la Comptabilite´ ). He was the author
of many publications and without a doubt one of
the founding fathers of budgetary control in
France.
Robert Satet is another central character, whose
focus on budgetary control dates from the 1930
Geneva congress. In 1927, he was a member of the
Taylor Society, and in the same period he was
involved in the creation and leadership of the
CNOF. From 1930, he was the Head of the Scien-
ti?c Management department at the UIMM, a pow-
erful branch of the employers’ organisation CGPF.
According to the October 1936 issue of the Bulletin
du CNOF, Satet was Head of the legal department
of the Eastern France Foundry and Mines commit-
tee (Comite´ des Forges et Mines de fer de l’est de la
France). He was also a lecturer at the EOST (Ecole
d’Organisation Scienti?que du Travail), a school
in?uenced by the CNOF (Boltanski, 1982, p. 189;
Collective, 1965), at Louvain University in Belgium,
and at France’s Ecole Nationale Supe´ rieure des PTT.
He presented case studies on budgetary control to
the business administration training centre CPA
(Centre de Perfectionnement a` l’Administration des
a?aires), and released at least one publication
through the CEGOS in 1942. Finally, these skills
were directly placed at the service of companies
through consulting activities. He was very open to
international views and travelled, probably several
times, to America where he visited local ?rms and
examined their management system (Satet, 1942).
He turned all these contacts and experiences to the
collective bene?t, with no less than 57 publications
over the period 1926–1958. Many of these publica-
tions concern budgetary control. His major work
is his book of 1936, which concerns precisely that
technique.
Paul Loeb of Alsthom provides a further exam-
ple of these avant-garde managers, acting as a liais-
ing agent or intermediary between the di?erent
worlds: the world of in-?rm management practices
and techniques, and the worlds of socio-political
ideals and social reform in reforming groups. Loeb,
a graduate of France’s prestigious higher education
establishment, the Ecole Polytechnique, brought
budgetary control to Alsthom (one of the pioneer-
ing ?rms) in the 1930s, in conjunction with Auguste
Detoeuf.
16
He was involved in the work of the
CEGOS and the CNOF, and in 1956 published a
dense two-volume review whose preface sets out
the author’s social ideals.
The central role in the spread of budgetary con-
trol played by professional associations participat-
ing in thought on reform during the 1930s (which
would give rise to ideas implemented after the
war), and by the avant-garde managers who came
into contact with the ideas debated there, is an ini-
tial re?ection of what we have called the ‘‘double
enrolment” of budgetary control and social reform.
It is very di?cult in certain authors’ work to sepa-
rate what relates to their professional interest in a
management practice they wish to promote from
what relates to their hopes of building a better
world through that practice.
After this general overview of the places and peo-
ple central to the spread of budgetary control, we
can legitimately focus our discussion on a limited
number of writings mainly derived from those
sources (Table 4).
We now analyse the content of the writings
collected, beginning our exploration by addressing
the socio-political challenges mentioned by our
authors in texts that are all designed to promote
budgetary control. This is a ?rst level of magni?-
cation of their issues and enrolment, as major eco-
nomic and social problems, nothing less, are what
budgetary control is supposed to be able to help
solve.
The economic and social problems evoked by social
reformers and promoters of budgetary control
The people who developed budgetary control in
France thought it could provide the answer to sev-
eral problems under debate during the period. Three
types of problem were discussed in reforming cir-
16
A fellow graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique which he entered
in 1902, Detoeuf was the ?rst president of Alsthom from 1928 to
1940. He was very open to modernist currents and in 1936 gave a
famous speech to the X-Crise group (which was central to the
reforming ideas of the period) entitled ‘The end of the free
market’ (La ?n du Libe´ ralisme). He was also one of the founders
of the journal Les Nouveaux Cahiers formed to campaign for a
single, compulsory union bringing together employees and
employers under corporatist ideas. But Detoeuf is no doubt best
known for his collection of aphorisms written at the end of the
1930s, Propos d’O.L. Barenton, con?seur(The words of O.L.
Barenton, confectioner). (Kuisel, 1981).
40 N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57
cles. (1) First, economic problems. The depression
and the resulting social problems lay at the core of
thinking in the 1930s, and still preyed on people’s
minds after the war. In addition to these issues,
the post-1945 period had to face the problems of
rebuilding a country worn out by war. (2) Second,
there are moral problems, both before the war
because the economic system is considered inhu-
mane, and after the war due to the Fascistic drift
of the Vichy government, and collaboration with
Nazi power by certain factions of the French elite.
(3) Finally, the threatening presence of the Soviet
Union and an active workers’ movement spurred
on the search for a third way between the free-mar-
ket economy, accused of having caused the crisis
and the associated tragic social and political conse-
quences, and State socialism.
We now look more closely at these issues that
preoccupied the reformers of the period, and show
that the literature on budgetary control echoed
those concerns. To ‘‘sell” budgetary control, the
authors in our corpus go further than simply listing
its advantages in terms of economic e?ciency at
individual ?rm level; they also present it as a more
general solution to the problems encountered by
the French economy on condition it is relatively
widespread, thereby re-shaping capitalism and
enabling it to endure through self-regeneration, in
keeping with the ‘‘third way” plan. Budgetary con-
trol thus appears as the central management tool,
actualizing in practice the second spirit of capital-
ism, which was to emerge from the period’s histori-
cal turmoil.
Reforming the economy to avoid ever experiencing
another such crisis
The major source of preoccupation in the 1930s
was of course the economic depression, which came
late to France but nevertheless had a lasting impact
on the country (Braudel & Labrousse, 1979). This
situation opened the way for strong criticism of
the free market economy,
17
which was accused of
sowing disorder and creating an uncontrollable,
unpredictable situation. In continuation of this
diagnosis, the social reformers took economic
reform as their primary objective. The industrialists’
instinctive reaction was to form cartels which
destroyed almost all competition. Some considered
this a temporary development until market mecha-
nisms could come back into operation, while others
saw it as a new way of organising the economy so as
to make it controllable. Rationalisation, careful, sci-
enti?c study of production, and development of
plans, particularly at industry sector level, were also
seen as means of taming the market’s destructive
mechanisms.
The desire to reform the economy so that no such
crisis could ever happen again is clear in the output
of the budgetary control promoters of the 1930s.
Pulvermann (1930) resituated budgetary control in
this e?ort to control capitalism: ‘‘the budget should
be de?ned as a search to plan and take measures to
use all the serious data obtainable. In this way, we
can distinguish and limit the speculative aspects of
capitalism”. Schmidt (1930) also thought that bud-
getary control would be a guard against future cri-
ses. ‘‘The development of the budget concept,
particularly the long-term investment budget cover-
ing whole decades, is a response by the capitalist
economy to the reproach ?rst expressed long ago
by representatives of the socialist economy, that it
lacks foresight in the event of crises, which can only
be avoided by such a method”.
Table 4
Central sources of budgetary control promotion
Books Congresses and events Journals Organisations and professional associations
Satet (1936) Geneva, IIOST (1930) Mon bureau CNOF
Rimailho (1936) Bulletin du CNOF CEGOS
Loeb (1956) Jean Benoit’s Lectures Hommes et Techniques Commissariat au Plan
CEGOS (1953) (1950s) (CEGOS) (General Planning Commission),
Parenteau (1959) AFAP- (Productivity Missions)
17
Self-adjusting economic mechanisms appeared to have gone
o? the rails, and many observers, including Detoeuf, could not
accept mass employment as the cost of modern economic
adjustment. J. Coutrot, for example, complained: ‘‘There is a
kind of deep-seated ferocity among these economic anarchists. . .
typical of the recluse who washes his hands of human su?ering and
accepts and even applauds the operation of impersonal mechanisms
that crush others” (quoted by Kuisel, 1981, p. 106).
N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57 41
National reconstruction
Present from the 1930s onwards, the desire to
establish a renewed economic system was mingled
after the war with the imperative of national recon-
struction. In the late summer of 1944, France found
itself in a critical situation, much more di?cult in
fact than in 1919. An intensive investment policy
was decreed, partly to the detriment of consump-
tion. Low-cost production in massive quantities
was also necessary to meet the needs for basic prod-
ucts rapidly. The French economy was on course for
industrialisation by forced march.
A Keynesian-style growth-based economic policy
was adopted. In contrast to the prewar Malthusian
policies, it was founded on productivity gains
achieved through Taylorism, and fairly shared
between employers and employees, a mode of
expansion considered Fordist by the regulation the-
orists (Aglietta, 1976; Boyer & Mistral, 1978). US
aid to European countries contributed to this recon-
struction, but came with a certain number of struc-
tural reform demands attached. For the US,
securing capitalism was important in this Europe
where the Soviet grip had suddenly tightened. This
external aid also required organisation to distribute
it as best appropriate to current and future needs.
To oversee the whole operation, a major planning
e?ort began, involving French businesses. They sent
representatives to talks with ministers for joint prep-
aration of ?ve-year plans. Planning thus became a
language shared by business and the State.
18
The
productivity missions were part of this great project.
There was an intensive propaganda campaign to
support the productivity drive and the American
example.
The ?rst chapter of the accountants’ mission
report (OECCA, 1951) goes into great detail on
the characteristics of the modern US enterprise,
and the other chapters are devoted to various
aspects of US ?rms’ organisation and accounting
techniques, particularly budgetary control. This ?rst
chapter strikes up the Fordist creed of the time:
‘‘High salaries”, ‘‘mass production” and ‘‘production
lines” are presented as early as page 8 as the pillars
of the new economic organisation. The report stres-
ses that ‘‘American employers consider that if they
are to survive in a free economy, it is their responsibil-
ity to develop productivity while at the same time
increasing total wages paid to blue-collar workers
and guaranteeing job security. These general ideas
are commonly expressed in the industrial and com-
mercial communities, as well as in the universities,
where the professors cooperate in the development
of a modern philosophy of the industrial world.”
Recovery from the moral disorder
In the post-war world, the desire to reform the
economic system was accompanied by another pri-
ority: to recover from the ‘‘moral disorder” of the
Third Republic and the Vichy government. As early
as 1944, ‘‘the psychological climate in which eco-
nomic reform occured was one of struggle. What
began as an international war against Nazism
increasingly became a civil war against Vichy and
its supporters. The internal enemy, in economic terms,
which was held heavily responsible for the defeat of
1940 and accused of being the mainstay of collabora-
tion, was capitalism in general and the trusts in par-
ticular.” (Kuisel, 1981, p. 188). There was a need
to ‘‘build a better, or more moral, institutional life”.
This would involve a break from the IIIrd Republic,
but also the Vichy government, considered ‘‘stained
with national disgrace”. What was required was
‘‘transcending liberalism, which had brought egotism,
disorder, and backwardness under the republic, and
destroying corporatism, which had ended in subjuga-
tion under Petain. Alongside the ‘‘hardline” republic
would be an organised, yet free, economy dedicated
to human dignity, economic equality, growth and
the national interest” (Kuisel, 1981, p. 188).
The question of the moral rebuilding of society
even found its way into texts on budgetary control:
what budgetary control would foster was not only a
better economic system, but also a more moral,
humane system. In his book published in 1956, for
instance, Loeb stated that: ‘‘It is not an exaggeration
to claim that a genuine budgetary humanism has been
born. (. . .) Man wants to control the forces which for
so long have enslaved him. Through budgeting, he
intends henceforth to direct the economy, put all the
resources of nature at his service”. Loeb again,
speaking to CEGOS (1953) declared that budgetary
control ‘‘is inseparable from the profound social
18
In contrast to a bureaucratic approach where needs are
decided ‘‘at the top”, in Jean Monnet’s mind the aim was to
associate the interested parties in order to acquire persuasive
force. To identify the country’s needs, a new national statistics
o?ce (INSEE) was set up to replace the former Statistique
Ge´ ne´ rale de France (SGF) (Desrosie`res, 1998; Volle, 1977). The
construction of national accounting is part of the same move-
ment. The story has been told by the actors involved, in Fourquet
(1980). Their experiences give a fairly good idea of the desire for
reform at the time, and its tentative trial-and-error progress.
42 N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57
preoccupations, since production is made for men, not
men for production: the enterprise must endeavour to
guarantee stability of employment for its personnel,
to free them from the constant worries of employees,
their fear of having no work, to avoid periods when
they are overburdened with overtime being followed
by short-time rationing of work.”
Jean Benoit (1954), at a conference, raised several
themes related to this new economic humanism,
with explicit reference to budgetary control: ‘‘the
aim is not only to provide economic subsistence and
fairness in form, but to foster the ful?lment of individ-
ual initiatives;” ‘‘man does not live on bread and
wages alone, but on aspirations and ideals;” ‘‘The
company manager must not only be a constructor of
products, but also and perhaps above all a constructor
of men.”
The search for a ‘‘third way” and a new form of
cooperation between employers and employees
As early as the 1930s, social reformers began to
search for a ‘‘third way” between economic liberal-
ism and state socialism. The main concern in the
1930s for employers, whether progressives or not,
was to ?nd a solution to the failure of capitalism
and the development of socialism, which was seen
as ideologically unacceptable. The arrival in power
in 1936 of the Front Populaire and its nationalisa-
tion programme only made the need for an alterna-
tive solution all the more glaring. The period of
crisis was also a time when the con?ict of interests
between employers and employees, theorised by
Marxism, became more obvious and more worry-
ing. This intensi?ed the search for new forms of
cooperation between employers and employees. Of
course that preoccupation was nothing new (it is
found for example in the writings of F.W. Taylor
and more generally in the Fayolian and Taylorian
movements), but budgetary control was seen as able
to make a contribution. Its promoters reformulated
Taylor’s idea that ‘‘rational study” could bring
about progress in employer–employee collaboration
and a move towards fairer division of the value
created.
Emile Rimailho (1936) explained how budgetary
control is connected with scienti?c management in
this intended collaboration: ‘‘the study and elemen-
tary preparation of work was where supervisors
learned about working in collaboration; budgetary
control is where managers learn about working in col-
laboration”. Edmond Landauer (1930) explained at
considerable length that analysis of variances from
budget was ‘‘the only rational form of employee
pro?t sharing”, because ‘‘budgetary control of costs
provides every participant in production with an exact
budget for the part of the task that is his. Going over
budget or staying within budget depends only on him,
his e?orts and his intelligence”. (. . .) Therefore, with
no fear of ever making an error, everyone can be
attributed a percentage of the saving. (. . .) Many
industrialists know that high salaries increase the pur-
chasing power of the masses, and are useful for indus-
try prosperity. However, they are afraid to grant
them, for fear of increasing costs. The system of
granting bonuses for savings on budgeted allowances
removes this fear, since wage increases are inexorably
associated with falling costs (. . .). In giving concrete
expression to the interests of job providers and job
takers, budgetary control is thus not only an instru-
ment for economic prosperity, but also (maybe ?rst
and foremost!) a means of ensuring peaceful indus-
trial relations.” Furthermore, ‘‘Based on scienti?-
cally established standards [budgetary control] can
reward each person’s e?orts according to merit, and
provides a fair, practical solution to the controversial
problem of access to a fair share in the company’s
pro?ts”.
19
After the war, the new Fordist economic regime
was seen as an acceptable solution by the people
who before the war had been seeking a third way.
The old problematics had also taken on new rele-
vance because of the power of the communist move-
ment, which had emerged strengthened from the
war years, and the violence of contemporary politi-
cal and union contestation, which some feared
would result in communist rule. It was urgent to
provide guarantees of the intention to share the ben-
e?ts of future growth, and to ?nd a new equilibrium
for employer–employee relations within the
organisation.
In accordance with this preoccupation, the writ-
ings on budgetary control were careful to explain
how budgetary control is capable of resolving
the class con?ict, and often professed their belief
in the Fordist solution, which dominated most
19
Penglaou (1935) can also be quoted for the 1930s. ‘‘In this new
technique, the forecast, based on highly detailed programmes and
budgets, gives rise to a sort of work charter, which will be the ?rm’s
law for the period concerned. . . Budgetary control becomes a
management method that entails interdependence of all the ?rm’s
component bodies, bringing about coordination, and harmony
between resources.”
N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57 43
discourses at the time. We can quote again the
report issued by the 1951 OECCA mission: ‘‘It
appears that the USA is seeing the blossoming of a
new manager class (. . .) which, fully conscious of its
responsibilities and prerogatives, does its best to inte-
grate and harmonise its e?orts with those of the work-
ing class, with the general goal of greater productivity
and promoting well-being”.
Jean Milhaud, in a lecture on budgetary control
in 1952 (CEGOS, 1953), explained we are in: ‘‘a
time when constructive e?orts are being made at all
levels of the company to underline the eminent place
of man in production and make him an enlightened
partner in management’s action (. . .) We also know
that only those enterprises with a budget system that
branches out to its extreme can calculate the immedi-
ate repercussions of simpli?cations proposed at the
level of a particular department or workstation, and
thus distribute some of the expected savings to the
originators of the suggestions, according to their pol-
icy. In such a case, ?nancial and human management
techniques are interdependent.”
Thus, the writings in our corpuses point up the
economic and social problems which were under
debate during the period. We now show that our
authors did not simply consider budgetary control
as a potential solution to the problems discussed.
On a deeper level, the evidence suggests some of
them supported the models of society recommended
by the various reforming currents. This calls for a
more detailed examination of those currents.
Reforming currents
Three main con?gurations of reforming ideas
have been identi?ed from the work of the historians
and sociologists. These ideas seek to supply
responses to the various challenges described above.
All three are intricately interrelated, borrowing
themes from each other while remaining individu-
ally distinct. As Boltanski (1982) and Kuisel
(1981) point out, these three currents are more in
continuum than in opposition. The ideas are in fact
closely related, but expressed di?erently. The ?rst
(corporatism) disappeared with the war, but the sec-
ond (planisme, then technocracy) adapted and suc-
cessfully lasted beyond 1945. The third, which is
di?cult to classify – we shall call it ‘‘economic
humanism” – sprang up in reaction to war, and also
doubtless in response to American in?uence. Often
dominated by a minority elite, these new philoso-
phies sought new foundations for economic growth,
and grew in importance with the rise of new social
groups such as the middle classes. This was a genu-
ine ‘‘work of ideological rede?nition”, mainly con-
cerning the bourgeoisie who were looking for a
‘‘third way”.
Corporatism
Corporatist doctrine places the collective interest
at the centre of society; it is thus in direct opposi-
tion to free market capitalism. Already deeply
rooted in European culture (Cotta, 1984), this
movement must be seen in the light of the rise of
fascism, which took place at the same period in
Germany and Italy. Corporatism’s big idea was
the recreation of corporations, similar to the former
guilds (me´ tiers), professional bodies made up of
individual practitioners of the same craft, regardless
of class, i.e. workers and employers together.
‘‘These bodies would assume the task of arbitrating
industrial disputes, ?xing work conditions, controlling
prices, and determining the quality and even the quan-
tity of the output. And in a corporatist state a system
of professional representation elected an economic
assembly that bypassed party politics and strengh-
tened the republic’s competence in economic a?airs”
(Kuisel, 1981, p. 103). Nevertheless, for corporat-
ists, the state was not supposed to direct the econ-
omy, as only corporatist organisations were
considered competent to do so.
Corporatism, which stems from Catholic social
doctrine and the Christian critique of materialism
and individualism, can be seen as a reaction to other
concepts of society that were put forward at that
period, namely the free market economy, accused
of generating chaos, sel?shness and materialistic
attitudes, and Marxism, criticised for stirring up
class hatred and destroying social solidarity. Trades
unionism was not considered any more acceptable,
since it expressed the same class struggle. Corporat-
ism advocated replacing the working class revolu-
tion by a spiritual revolution in which the di?erent
social classes, once organised, should work together.
Turning its back on the impersonal nature of large-
scale capital, the corporatist society would be based
on the small businessman and his patriarchal vir-
tues: personal responsibility would be directly
invested into the job to be done, the capital and
the jobs would be in the same hand, and employ-
ment relations would be magically transformed by
paternalism (Boltanski, 1982). The aim was thus
to restore social order and harmony within business
organisations. ‘‘They were social conservatives who
44 N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57
wanted to revive such cherished values as hierarchy,
family, discipline, class conciliation, religion and
work” (Kuisel, 1981, p. 102).
One of corporatism’s most noticeable impacts
during the 1930s lay in the support it provided to
restrictive practices and cartels between producers.
Rather than being governed by market forces, the
economy could be managed collectively in an opti-
mal manner. Cartels were not a new phenomenon
under corporatism, but corporatism provided them
with justi?cation. This ideological current reached
its zenith under the Vichy regime, which ‘‘o?cialised
as State ideology, and in its institutions gave concrete
form to, most of the themes dear to the catholic engi-
neers of the nineteen thirties” (Boltanski, 1982, pp.
132). After the war, some of these ideas persisted,
but with profound transformations.
References to the corporatist ideas turn up regu-
larly in the texts examined, for example in Musil
(1930): ‘‘The use of its methods [i.e. the methods of
budgetary control] and the acceptance of its princi-
ples engender the right mental attitude for better
cooperation and better coordination of individual
e?orts.” Similarly, Bourquin (1937) believed that
budgetary control could help structure the French
industrial scene in a purely corporatist logic: ‘‘These
standard prices (. . .) can be compared with informa-
tion supplied by competitors, thus providing a solid
basis for negotiation when an agreement is introduced
between producers. Practical experience shows that
the ?rst measure to be taken is to develop standard
prices, which will be useful for all members of a cor-
poration, enabling them to see the situation as it is
and talk the same language”. Pulvermann (1930),
after a long discussion of the di?culty of establish-
ing forecasts, related this e?ort to cartelisation: ‘‘In
this matter, it is down to science to supply at least a
few fundamental rules, and it falls to the unionsand
the cartels, working together on an international level,
to consolidate the situation by practical means”.
The IIOST congress of 1930 shows that for the
reformers (represented here by Serruys, a member
of the Economic Committee of the Society of
Nations (SDN)), the link between the corporatist
approach and the budget is clear; he explains that
‘‘there are collective methods which should be fol-
lowed, there are e?orts to be made by the unions
and professional bodies. Budgetary control must leave
the purely individual domain of one factory’s experi-
ence and become the concern of a whole profession,
or a whole sector of industry.” (Serruys, 1930). At
the same congress, meanwhile, Satet proposed set-
ting up ‘‘national groups for budgetary control”, say-
ing that the CNOF could take charge of this for
France. The di?erent countries’ national committees
would then be federated into ‘‘international budget-
ary control groups organised by industry”.
Planisme and technocracy
While corporatism sought to overcome” the
anarchy of individualism” by, as Kuisel (1981, p.
102) puts it, ‘‘reconstituting the natural cells of social
organism”, the planners were looking for a way ‘‘to
manage the economy”. They wanted to preserve the
free market system by adapting it and reducing the
social tensions it generated. They believed that sys-
tem needed structural reform to combat the violent
economic disorder created by market capitalism.
The main tool of this new order was economic plan-
ning. Kuisel (1981) distinguishes two major trends
in planisme: neo-liberalist planners and syndicalist-
socialist planners.
20
These trends form the basis
for the interventionism that took place after 1945.
Technocracy is another expression of planisme;
the term only appeared after 1945. It refers to a cer-
tain concept of decision-making (Kuisel, 1981),
according to which there is only one right solution,
that can be found by experts. This is shown primar-
ily in the desire expressed by certain intellectuals to
introduce a ‘‘planned” sector, which would contrib-
ute to e?cient regulation of the economy. Manage-
ment of this sector would be entrusted to a ‘‘body of
men governing the pace of the economy without hav-
ing any personal interest in any of the enterprises, but
guided only by team spirit as regards the people under
them” (Coutrot, 1936). For its advocates, this plan-
ning would make it possible to establish ‘‘fair
prices”, make accurately e?cient use of production
resources and achieve ‘‘the distribution of prosper-
ity” (Coutrot, 1936).
The development of technocracy and planisme in
the 1930s continued after the war with French-style
planning and the Keynes-inspired policies that were
in operation at the time. But in contrast to the
‘‘back to the land” policies of the Vichy regime,
20
‘‘While the ?rst embraced planning to perfect capitalism, the
second did so to build socialism” (p. 105). These two currents had
several points in common: reason, controls, and planning were to
replace the natural mechanisms of the market. Neo-liberal
planisme attracted managers, engineers and high-ranking civil
servants, people who valued forecasting, controls, self-discipline
and cooperative networks. Socialist trades unionist planners, on
the other hand, were in favour of nationalisations, rigorous
interventionism and trades unions.
N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57 45
the postwar reformers chose a ‘‘forced march”
industrialisation approach to ?rst rebuild the coun-
try, then catch up with other industrial nations. The
ideas were quite similar to pre-war thinking, except
that technocracy was now totally converted to Key-
nesianism,
21
and there was massive importation of
American concepts of management.
The planners’ ideas, meanwhile, are visible, to
take one example, in Coes (1930): ‘‘in adopting the
budget procedure, we are thus recognising the impor-
tance of looking far ahead, and showing that we
believe in the possibility of forecasting, and the prac-
tical usefulness of forging ahead in the light of what
has been planned”. Serruys (1930), as already seen
for corporatism, appears to have combined it with
planisme: ‘‘In short, a budget clashes with the initia-
tive of the organized collective operations. (. . .) And
this is how a budget that is controlled, studied
together (. . .) cannot only be a part of bene?cial, con-
certed private initiatives, but must also contribute to
recti?cation, one could almost say guidance, of the
nations’ economic policies”. In the opening pages
of his book, Ludwig (1930) writes ‘‘the introduction
of the budget in an industrial operation (. . .) requires
the innovation of a new economic guiding principle, a
principle that assimilates the advances of economic
science, and is opposed to the laxity of old commer-
cial tradition”. Reitell and Lugrin (1936) also
explain that thanks to budgetary control we move
‘‘from anarchic freedom to a freedom directed, sup-
ported and controlled by bodies with the necessary
capacities and technical equipment”.
In fact, regarding ?rms’ internal organisation the
planners’ ideas are so close to those held by the pro-
moters of budgetary control that it is hard not to see
this as a result of the double enrolment we seek to
describe. The central importance attributed to the
governmental technologies of budget and budgetary
control by the planners, and the hopes of regulating
capitalism held by promoters of budgetary control,
appear to be superimposable discourses. Develop-
ment of budgetary control bene?ted to the full from
the passion for planning that a?ected all French
reformers of the time, whether neo-liberal, corporat-
ist or socialist. All appeared to agree on at least this
point. Implementation of State planning under the
Vichy government, then, in a di?erent way, by the
Keynesian postwar state, can be seen as part of this
major trend. It is di?cult not to see this craze as an
e?ect of competition from ‘real socialism’ countries,
whose planning projects are adopted to abolish cap-
italism, not to control it.
22
Economic humanism
The most obvious American contributions to
French business concern the methods for social con-
trol and settlement of con?ict within the enterprise.
This is re?ected in the importation of human
resource technologies inspired by the Human Rela-
tions movement, which recommended increased
decentralisation of decision-making within the orga-
nisation as a means of increasing managers’ respon-
sibility and motivation. Perhaps a better term would
be ‘‘economic humanism”, a phrase coined by Cou-
trot (1936), as the ideas developed after the war
were not totally new, and it is not always easy to dis-
tinguish between theories brought in from America
and those taken up from the 1930s. The standard
example of economic humanism in action in the
1930s is the case of the shoe manufacturer Bata,
often analysed and referred to in reforming circles
before the war, but without attracting great interest
in the business world. It was introduced by Hyacin-
the Dubreuil
23
in a book published in 1936, and was
21
1945 saw the establishment of the ENA, Ecole Nationale
d’Administration, designed to replace the Ecole Libre des
Sciences Politiques as supplier of high-ranking civil servants.
Meanwhile in economic teaching, Keynesian ideas were taking
over from the doctrinary free market ethic (Kuisel, 1981, p. 215).
22
Penglaou (1931), for instance, thought it necessary to explain
that budgets are not the ?rst stage towards socialisation of
production resources typical of a planned economy such as the
USSR. Pulvermann (1930) also discusses the theme that making
forecasts was long considered a suspect activity, because it was
seen as socialism.
23
Hyacinthe Dubreuil is one of the period’s most interesting
characters. A bluecollar worker and former CGT union member,
he began travelling in 1927 and was engaged as a mechanic at
Ford in the US (in Detroit). This experience was the basis for his
bestselling book Standards, which placed him at the centre of
debates on scienti?c management. Dubreuil appears to have had
a dual-faceted personality: on one hand, he was a popular
investigator into workers’ conditions, and on the other a
marginal but persistent campaigner for a new organisation of
workshops that could achieve ‘‘workers’ liberation” (Ribeill,
2003). He argued for the creation of economically and ?nancially
‘‘autonomous workshops”, where the worker could learn about
work management and receive ‘‘the means of ful?lling his
existence on all three levels, economic, intellectual and moral,
for otherwise hopes of achieving social peace will always be in
vain”. From 1930 to 1938, Dubreuil held o?ce at the Interna-
tional Labor Organisation. His numerous writings left a mark on
the entire period.
46 N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57
taken up by certain other authors (e.g. Landauer,
Coutrot, and others). The fact that it was taken
up by promoters of budgetary control is a sign of
the in-depth knowledge some of them had of con-
temporary reforming ideas. Thomas Bata’s major
contribution lies above all in his management of
personnel. His ‘‘key idea was to work on the working
class mentality so as to take it from an employee men-
tality to an entrepreneur mentality” (Landauer,
1933). He introduced a supervisor for each work-
shop, who worked for the company but formed an
autonomous team with his workmen. The various
workshops were linked by a system of internal
transfer prices. The aim was to make employees as
autonomous as possible, putting them ‘‘in the boss’s
shoes”, using the method successfully developed in
France by Lucien Rosengart and known as the
‘‘small businessmen method (me´ thode des petits
patrons)”. Bata’s principles consisted of giving more
responsibility to actors in the business. Rimailho
(1936) and Satet and Voraz (1947) noted the impor-
tance of these autonomous groups in the healthy sit-
uation at Bata. This example was almost forgotten
after the war even though the issues it raised became
much more widespread, and formed the new man-
agement ideology.
The notion of responsibility centres, largely
absent from business practices in the 1930s, devel-
oped in the 1950s as organisations’ desire for greater
decentralisation grew, and is one consequence of the
emergence of these ideas. All the thought systems of
the traditional employer class were challenged. The
?nal objective, however, remained the same: to suc-
ceed in increasing cooperation between employers
and employees. In the words of Boltanski (1982),
the goal was to ‘‘achieve what corporatism had failed
to do, but by other means” (p. 160).
The big new idea of the postwar period, decen-
tralisation, is present in the texts we studied. As J.
Benoit remarked (1956, author’s capitals): ‘‘the most
e?cient management method once a business reaches
a certain scale is THE METHOD WHICH SEEKS
AND INVOLVES APPROVAL AND PARTICI-
PATION BY THE LARGEST POSSIBLE NUM-
BER OF ALL INTERMEDIATE LEVEL
EMPLOYEES, the method in decentralised form.”
(p. 9). He tirelessly repeats this theme in his lectures,
for example in 1958 at the Sorbonne: ‘‘We also need
an organisation based on decentralisation and trust.
(. . .) We need to organise matters so that the hum-
blest employee still retains a certain feeling of free-
dom, initiative, responsibility and dignity.” (p. 6).
Similarly, for Guillaume (1958), ‘‘budgetary control
can also be used as a canvas for general application
of the principles of human relationships and public
relations” because it is based on delegations of
power and authority, and can establish bottom-up
and top-down communication along the hierarchy.
It should not be forgotten that the Fordist creed
and pro-American management propaganda were
widely put forward by our corpus authors in the
1950s, often on returning from productivity
missions.
Thus the ideas and solutions proposed by the
reform currents are also expressed in the texts writ-
ten by the promoters of budgetary control in each of
the two periods. Evidence of this is found whatever
the level used for analysis of double enrolment,
whether it be certain authors’ direct membership
of reforming circles (Section ’Promoters of budget-
ary control and their relationships with the reform-
ing networks’), presentation of budgetary control as
a solution to the major issues addressed by the
reformers (Section ‘The economic and social prob-
lems evoked by social reformers and promoters of
budgetary control’), or the degree to which the bud-
getary control promotional discourse is embedded
in discursive worlds even more strongly marked by
the reforming currents (the prewar corporatist or
planners’ idiom or the postwar Fordist creed at
macro-economic level, presented in the form of eco-
nomic humanism in micro-economic practices) (Sec-
tion ‘Reforming Currents’).
The political rationalities that budgetary control
is likely to serve evolve with time, but it is also strik-
ing that as the subjects of concern to reformers and
promoters of budgetary control changed over time,
their conception of budgetary control also altered.
We now show the malleability of the de?nition of
a governmental technology as it is penetrated by
changing political rationalities.
Budgetary control: a concept that evolves in
association with reforming ideas
It is impossible to separate the socio-political
from the technical. Programmatic aspects are incor-
porated and rei?ed in what is subsequently pre-
sented initially as purely technical. Budgetary
control is gradually transformed according to the
programmes it is intended to serve, while as a tech-
nical object retaining a certain independence of the
N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57 47
discourse, and also putting up some resistance to its
enrolment. The work of adjusting its characteristics
and uses to new political rationalities is a social
work in its own right, requiring new investment in
form (The´venot, 1984) likely to bring about change
in the form and ?x it for a while. When this remod-
elling occurs, the interpenetration of the political
and the technical is clear, for example from our
selected texts. Next, the form may circulate while
apparently devoid of any ideology. Once the black
box is closed, the traces of the various enrolments
that transformed it are obliterated (Latour, 1987).
This phenomenon, in our opinion, explains why
for management tools, most discourses remain in
the technical register: cruising speed is reached for
a tool that can now circulate in a form that needs
no further explanation, defence or justi?cation. Peo-
ple simply need to be taught how to use the tool,
without needing to understand the underlying rules
and to adhere to the underlying values. At least two
meanings of budgetary control existed successively
over the period studied.
A rationalization tool
The 1930s de?nition of budgetary control
stressed its usefulness as a rationalisation tool. This
rationalisation was coherent with both the planners
and the corporatist approach. It was the corner-
stone of the third way sought by reformers, and in
keeping with the Taylorian schema, it was hoped
it would take society beyond the class struggle.
Rationalisation of industry was to be achieved by
the planning e?ort demanded by budgetary control
and coordination at national level. It was generally
considered that when problems are considered in a
rational way, it is possible to solve them. This desire
to create rational order is found in most of the texts
from the 1930s. Satet (1936), for example, supplies
the following de?nition: ‘‘budgetary control based
on an accurate examination of everything that can
be expressed in ?gures in a ?rm, whatever its nature,
form or importance, consists of strict analysis of past
events and forecasts of probable events, in order to
establish a rational plan of action.” Behind this view
of budgetary control, there is a very mechanical
dimension: it is the tool used to rationalise manage-
ment’s tasks, just as time and motion studies had
resulted in rationalisation of workers’ tasks. Some
went as far as to consider budgetary control as a
way of introducing a kind of Esperanto for all com-
pany members. For example, Commesnil, in the
CNOF review, expressed his hope for the emergence
of a new common language and standard values.
Classi?cation of accounts on the same basis within
the company, he argued, should make it possible
to make compare its various departments. The
internal coordination made possible by budgetary
control could be extended to coordination external
to the company.
A motivation tool
After the Second World War, budgetary control
began to play a broader role. No longer con?ned
to a merely technical dimension, it also took on a
‘‘human resources” dimension. It was now a man-
agement tool that would foster personal ful?lment
in the workplace by granting greater freedom to
the individual. However, its original dimensions
remained: budgetary control was still seen as a tool
for forward planning, coordination and optimisa-
tion. Now, though, it was seen more frequently than
before as a means of motivation for managers. The
major source of this motivation was the decentralisa-
tion of authority structures, which developed in par-
allel with budgetary control. The as yet unknown
idea of raising motivation through ?xing objectives,
and the debates about the right level of objective-?x-
ing needed to motivate senior employees were only
to be added to this picture in the 1960s.
De?nitions of budgetary control also became ful-
ler. In 1951, the report produced by the accoun-
tants’ productivity mission stated that budgetary
control was ‘‘a set of coordinated forecasts for a lim-
ited period of time, generally the year, established so
as to allow early identi?cation of operating conditions
and Pro?t and Loss account items, dividing these
forecasts up in such a way that it is possible to appoint
a person responsible for each one, systematic reconcil-
iation at ?xed periods, generally monthly, of the
actual results in the various management areas with
the forecast results, speedy communication of the
related information not only to Management, but to
the persons responsible, down to fairly low levels in
the hierarchy” (OECCA, 1951). In the list of the
‘‘aims” of budgetary control given by the authors
of the same report, the foreground was no longer
occupied by the issue of rationalizing the economy.
The following aims were listed ‘‘in order of impor-
tance”: ‘‘(1) For Management, it is a convenient
way of decentralising responsibility without forfeiting
48 N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57
control; (2) It is the simplest way of practising man-
agement by exception at all levels of the hierarchy
and for all management factors; (3) It is a means of
showing everyone the road Management intends to
follow in directing the company. (. . .) It is the means
of indicating in detail to each co-worker what is
expected of him, and thus making the necessity of per-
sonal e?ort an accessible notion; (4) It is a very reli-
able way of detecting certain errors in organisation,
particularly duality of responsibilities.” (p. 36)
We have just seen that the history of budgetary
control is closely related to the incorporation into
economic practices of ideas that originally germi-
nated in reforming circles. The number of such cir-
cles was on the increase in the 1930s in response to
what was analysed as a deep-seated crisis of capital-
ism. The renewal of budgetary control was possible
after the war through in-depth reforms and a shift in
state policies. In business, a new style of manage-
ment developed, which altogether gave rise to what
Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) identify as the sec-
ond spirit of capitalism. Their work is devoted to
the transition from the second to the third spirit
of capitalism, and the picture it paints of this second
spirit based on a corpus of management texts dating
from the 1960s corresponds to a fairly late period,
with Management By Objectives appearing as the
central device, while it had not yet been mentioned
in the 1950s texts studied for this article. And yet
it is well known that MBO were added to budgetary
control practices. Budgetary control is not an innoc-
uous tool in the history of 20th century capitalism.
It occupies the position of one of the central man-
agement tools that can be used to perform the sec-
ond spirit of capitalism. This partly explains why
it developed in parallel to the growing success of
reforming ideas of the 1930s. The materials col-
lected for this article also provide an exceptional
opportunity to further understanding of the gradual
transition from the ?rst to the second spirit of
capitalism.
Gradual transformation of the spirit of capitalism as
seen through the budgetary control tool
The spirit of capitalism of a period, Boltanski
and Chiapello (2005) have suggested, should always
promise three things: security, stimulation and fair-
ness. Below, through the texts of our corpus, we
examine how these three promises were a?ected
over the period studied, generating a signi?cant
change in the spirit of capitalism.
The promise of security
In the ‘?rst’
24
spirit of capitalism, security was to
be guaranteed by the very form of the economic fab-
ric, woven from small family run businesses building
on local networks and trust of the kind found in
family relationships. Security was to be achieved
through protection of personal relationships within
the family in its broadest sense (if the employee-
employer relationship is taken into account). In big-
ger enterprises, active paternalism by the company
director was to provide the workers with a form
of protection.
But this form of security, speci?c to the ‘‘?rst”
spirit of capitalism, was shattered in the inter-war
period, which saw the development of ?nancial cap-
italism and large companies that turned their backs
on the family business capitalism, and also the eco-
nomic crisis of the 1930s, resulting in a signi?cant
fall in paternalistic protection. The reformers did
not all have the same solutions to recommend in this
situation. Corporatism was more interested in the
old form of the promise of security, and its propos-
als were along the lines of abolition of international,
impersonal ?nancial capitalism in order to go back
to capitalism founded on small-businesses and per-
sonal relationships. In contrast, the planners and
Taylorian economists thought it was possible to
build a new form of security through rational orga-
nisation of labour and planning. In general, discus-
sions of budgetary control, even when the authors
were totally in agreement with the corporatist idea
of coordination by profession, tended to give prior-
ity to the new form of security.
The speakers at the 1930 conference frequently
underlined the promise of security conveyed by bud-
24
This article talks of the ‘‘?rst”, ‘‘second”, and ‘‘third” spirits
of capitalism with reference to Table 1, which only concerns late
capitalism. Under no circumstances is it suggested that the ?rst
spirit referred to in this way is the spirit of the original capitalism,
the only one of interest to M. Weber. Although Boltanski and
Chiapello (2005) follow Weberian tradition in placing the
ideologies underlying capitalism at the heart of their analyses,
their use of the concept of the spirit of capitalism departs slightly
from the standard approach. For Weber, the concept of spirit is
part of an analysis of the ‘‘types of practical rational behaviours”,
and ‘‘practical incentives to action”, which because they make up
a new ethos, have made it possible to break with traditional
practices, develop calculative mentalities, remove moral condem-
nation of pro?t and start the process of unlimited accumulation.
Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) do not aim to explain how
capitalism came about, but to understand how in various periods
it has succeeded in attracting the actors needed to generate pro?t.
N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57 49
getary control. One example is Jadot (1931), who
noted: ‘‘I think that if budgetary control had been
used everywhere in worldwide industry, we would
not have seen the irrational excesses of production
observed in most industries, and consequently the cur-
rent crisis would not have been so catastrophically
intense as it is”. Coes (1930), meanwhile, explained
that ‘‘from one essential standpoint, the main aim of
budgetary control is to provide a means of control,
to restrain and stabilise ?uctuations in business vol-
umes, which would otherwise be irregular.” Serruys
also remarked (1930): ‘‘Once we have shown public
opinion (. . .) that it is necessary to make forecasts,
and adjust the activity to those forecasts, perhaps
we will prevent these wide ?uctuations.”
These hopes in the construction of a new form of
security through planning took concrete form in the
postwar period. The Keynesian state adopted the
philosophy of planning, and the advocates of bud-
getary control were thus recommending a tool that
was perfectly suited to the ideas of the public
reformers. The spectre of the mass unemployment
experienced in the 1930s was still haunting all
e?orts to construct a new form of security in the
1950s. For example, Loeb (in CEGOS, 1953) dis-
cussed his desire to avoid unemployment for as
many as possible. Budgetary control would provide
a solution, since better rationalisation of production
resources would mean that the labour force could
be used in a more regular manner: ‘‘and in this
way, we will be able to eliminate, or at least reduce
the number of, those notices posted outside the
employment o?ces advertising for workers to enter
the labour market, and which most unfortunately
bring to mind their counterparts, the notices in shops
showing the items they want to sell o? on their
buyer’s market. It will be a long-term e?ort, and
the company must be able to pursue this strategy
using its own resources, without ignoring the e?orts
made by the government.”
For the National Productivity Committee
(Comite´ National de la Productivite´ ), budgetary con-
trol was more than just a technical end for compa-
nies. It was a political, micro-economic arm in the
struggle against the inactivity forced on employees
(unemployment) that was generated by a lack of
rationalisation. Their pamphlet ‘‘The Budget, Your
Best Tool” (1952) stressed the regular production
levels attained thanks to budgets and forecasting.
The idea is to replace adjustments, which take place
to the detriment of employees, by greater rational-
ity. Coordination and regular ?ows should make it
possible to avoid occasional periods of unemploy-
ment, and also costly overtime. If the worker
can work in peace and con?dence, in the knowledge
that full employment is guaranteed, then he partici-
pates more actively and contributes to improved
productivity.
Jean Parenteau (with the help of the CEGOS, of
which he was a member) published one of the most
important postwar books on budgetary control. In
his introduction to the third edition in 1959, he jus-
ti?ed the use of new control techniques: ‘‘The collec-
tive enterprise represents, more than a pool of capital,
a set of social interests: for a certain number of people
and families, living conditions are linked to those of
the company, and if it fails, employment and the pov-
erty it causes are the immediate consequences. The
company manager has a duty to maintain the level
of activity in his workshops, and he can only achieve
this by very close supervision of his enterprise.
Accounting is the most e?cient way for him to exer-
cise such supervision.”
The promise of stimulation
The ‘‘?rst” spirit of capitalism declared its faith
in technical progress, and promised ful?lment for
the entrepreneur. This promise appears to have
remained unchanged in the 1930s, even though, as
we have seen, the spirit of capitalism had already
begun a transformation in its proposals concerning
security.
Taylorian engineers continued in the tradition of
the Saint-Simonians, referring to previous experi-
ments in French-style management.
25
The enthusi-
asm of the 1930s was generated by the ever greater
progress being achieved by mankind in controlling
the world through reason, science and technical
knowledge. From this point of view, budgetary con-
trol in the 1930s carried a promise of stimulation
totally in keeping with the ?rst spirit of capitalism.
For example, Coes (1930) explained that: ‘‘When a
man has accepted the idea that the adoption of a bud-
get is not there to restrict or con?ne him, but that it is
in fact a way of making him master of his own task
instead of being dominated by that task, then we have
removed one of the major points of resistance to the
budget”.
25
See, for example, the case of Rimailho mentioned by
Lemarchand (1998), or the case of Coutrot described by Dard
(1999).
50 N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57
This ambition to control the world through sci-
ence, including management science, was much less
marked in the years following Second World War:
the horrors of Nazism and the atomic bomb had
disillusioned the champions of technical knowledge
and the liberation of mankind through science. The
promise of stimulation thus had to be renewed and
altered in the 1950s. During that period, the prom-
ised momentum was expected to come from decen-
tralisation of responsibilities and personal
ful?lment in the workplace. The seeds of this new
promise of stimulation were already present in the
1930s, through the example of the Czech company
Bata. Whereas it had not interested a very wide
audience in the thirties, the situation was di?erent
after the Second World War. The productivity mis-
sions provided one opportunity to develop this new
promise of stimulation, through importation of
American human resource technology and France’s
discovery of Fordism. Returning from a mission to
the US (OECCA, 1951), the French accountants
were highly enthusiastic about American business:
‘‘There is no con?ict between social welfare and the
company’s interest in survival. Both coexist in har-
mony, both obeying the same rational rule, both are
measured at the same time and by the same stan-
dard.” Another example can be found in J. Benoit’s
often-quoted speeches: for him, the accountants and
controllers were to be at the heart of economic
renewal, and its use to serve humanity.
The promise of fairness
A dual form of fairness underpinned the ?rst
spirit of capitalism. First, emphasis was placed on
a market type of fairness (Boltanski & The´venot,
2006), a type of social Darwinism where the most
competitive survives. This form of fairness is coher-
ent with the free market ethic prevalent in late 19th
century/early 20th century France. The market was
believed to be self-regulating, and underperformers
were eliminated. This form of fairness cohabited
with a highly contrasting ‘‘domestic” fairness (Bol-
tanski & The´venot, 2006), which emphasised ?delity
to tradition and respect of the father ?gure. People
were treated according to their position in the
domestic hierarchy and their respect of bourgeois
precedence. The dutiful son inherited his father’s
place because he was the heir, not because he was
competent, as an ‘‘industrial” fairness might
require, nor because he was the most competitive,
which would be in keeping with market type
fairness.
This curious alliance contained in the promise of
fairness of the ?rst spirit of capitalism was greatly
a?ected by the growing criticism of the free market
economy in the 1930s, a great motivation for seekers
of the ‘‘third way”. Domestic fairness, meanwhile,
was never really challenged – although that was to
change signi?cantly in the 1950s.
Over the whole period, a new promise of ‘‘indus-
trial” fairness – characteristic of the second spirit of
capitalism – was gathering force. This was built on a
hierarchy of competence, selection and promotion
of the best performers, an ideal social order capable
of legitimising the new social group formed by pro-
fessionals and managers (cadres), which by de?ni-
tion, could not claim legitimacy by ownership as
grounds for its authority.
The seeds of this new promise were visible in cer-
tain texts of the 1930s. Musil (1930), for instance, in
an article titled ‘‘Cooperation, manager training,
wellbeing of the Nation”, declared that: ‘‘Budgetary
control methods have a point of excellence: they pro-
vide criteria that can be used to assess merit, and
therefore enable the manager to appreciate to what
extent the individual assumes his responsibilities suc-
cessfully and continuously.” Landauer (1930) was
also sensitive to the new form of fairness which
should result from budgetary control: ‘‘Based on sci-
enti?cally established standards, it [the budget]
makes it possible to reward everyone’s e?orts accord-
ing to merit, and provides a fair, practical solution to
the highly controversial problem of fair distribution of
corporate pro?t.”
The period following the second world war
extended this promise (the great advantage of bud-
getary control was, according to J. Benoit, that it
‘‘replaced human judgment, which is always awkward
and delicate, with judgement by ?gures”), but added
to it the a?rmation of a more important place for
Man in the production process, and a promise of
fairer distribution of the fruits of growth, which
budgetary control was believed to facilitate.
Analysing the shift from the ?rst spirit of capital-
ism to the second, based on the texts on budgetary
control, we see that the transformation did not hap-
pen at the same pace for the three promises of secu-
rity, fairness and stimulation. The ?rst spirit appears
to have reached a crisis when its promise of security
turned out to be incapable of standing up the depres-
sion of the 1930s, and market type fairness was chal-
lenged by the failures of the free market system
N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57 51
revealed by the same crisis. The solutions for each of
these dimensions placed priority on rationalisation
systems, whether in the form of Taylorism or plan-
ning. These new systems were seen in the 1930s as
capable of calming the newly emerging anxieties
concerning security and fairness, while being a natu-
ral extension/continuation of the ?rst spirit in their
enthusiasm for scienti?c knowledge and con?dence
in technical progress. Security by forward planning,
and fairness by calculation were contemplated, but
these proposals were only e?ectively implemented
after the war. It was also only after the war that
the promise of stimulation was reconstructed around
the central concept of personal ful?lment in the
workplace through decentralisation of responsibili-
ties, and the break from the ?rst spirit of capitalism
was thus ?nalised. The transformations in the con-
cept of budgetary control during the 1960s, not cov-
ered in this article, continue the de?nition of this
stimulation dimension with the MBO system and
the quality of the new meritocracy.
Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) suggest that the
shift from the second spirit of capitalism to the
third also took place at di?ering paces for the var-
ious promises. However, this time, the stimulation
promises has been the most signi?cant, the ?rst to
enter the crisis and the ?rst to remould its propos-
als, while the new promises of fairness and secu-
rity are taking their time to settle into practical
form.
Conclusion
This article has tested a certain number of
hypotheses on the relationships between the dissem-
ination of a management technique and the reform-
ing ideologies of a period, in continuation of the
work by Miller and O’Leary (1987, 1989, 1994),
Miller and Rose (1990), Miller (1990), Rose and
Miller (1992) who discuss the relationships between
political rationalities and governmental technologies.
These relationships are placed here in a dialectic
schema of transformation of the ideologies that
accompany capitalism (Boltanski & Chiapello,
2005), which attributes an important role to the crit-
ical discourses on capitalism and the work of social
reformers to change it. The framework for change in
society is based on the sequence: (1) crisis, (2) criti-
cism of capitalism-reform proposals, (3) incorpora-
tion of those proposals and transformation of
capitalism. In the case under examination, budget-
ary control was promoted as a solution, which –
generalised to all companies and associated with
suitable national economic policies – would be able
to discipline capitalism and bring about both secu-
rity for workers and a merit-based form of fairness
in the workplace. This formula, which lies at the
core of justi?cations speci?c to the second spirit of
capitalism (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005) gained
resonance in people’s minds as the models of society
recommended by 1930s reforming think-tanks
were increasingly accepted, and practices evolved
accordingly (intensive training in management tech-
nologies imported from the US after 1945, dissemi-
nation of budgetary control practices, reform of
structures at State level, etc).
This consubstantiality of budgetary control and
the mentality typical of the second spirit of capital-
ism also explains why it was so easy to observe the
double enrolment process: the tool was adopted by
reforming currents as a solution to the problems of
their time, and the reforming discourses were used
for its promotion.
We were able to describe this enrolment at dif-
ferent levels: ?rst, we saw that certain major think
tanks had taken the lead in publications on bud-
getary control, and that the principal promoters
of budgetary control were themselves members
of these reforming groups. We also showed that
not only did the writings promoting this manage-
ment technique tend to present budgetary control
as a solution to the economic, social and moral
troubles under debate in reforming circles, but
often there was a rhetorical background consisting
of the models of society or organisations recom-
mended by the main reforming currents (at least,
by those that historians have taught us to con-
sider as pioneering arenas in the search out for
a third way between economic liberalism and
State socialism, and where the policies imple-
mented ?rst by Vichy, then by the Keynesian
postwar state, were devised).
As the material we have worked on for this study
consists mainly of public discourses, we have been
unable to demonstrate directly the in?uence of these
discourses on the practices and mentality of anony-
mous practitioners; at best, we can hypothesize. The
?rst change in practice is the increasingly wide-
spread adoption of budgetary control by ?rms over
the period, which we know from other work was a
real observed phenomenon. This spread took place
in a context of high mobilisation for reforming pro-
jects, although we have no way of knowing whether
the technique would in fact have spread without this
52 N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57
mobilisation, by dint of its own e?ciency or other
factors, such as power struggles. Nevertheless, the
theoretical analysis frameworks we use tend to take
discursive activity seriously, and consider that it
plays at least a cognitive role (in?uencing actors’
modes of interpretation) and a political role (legiti-
mising certain forms of order to the detriment of
others). For this reason we can also hypothesize that
the practice of budgetary control itself changed with
the shift in its de?nition from a rationalization tool
to a motivation tool. Longitudinal case studies on
budgetary control practices and devices and their
evolution in various ?rms could provide informa-
tion on the way political discourses are translated
(or not translated) into the particular human/non-
human arrangements studied (Latour, 1987). We
hypothesize that beyond the singularity of the situ-
ations studied, it would be possible to ?nd similari-
ties between the arrangements of a given period as
long as the situations studied belong to the same
institutional con?guration, i.e. are fairly closely
linked by devices and networks that produce and
reproduce it and which are inextricably technical,
political, cognitive and moral.
This study asks the question of the uneven
importance of various tools, according to the insti-
tutional features of capitalism at a given time and
in a given place. Some tools, such as budgetary con-
trol, appear to ‘‘sign” the mentality of a period bet-
ter than others. This remark is akin to the work of
Bryer (2000a, 2000b) highlighting the existence of
an accounting signature that evolves with certain
states of the economic system, and also the work
by Lordon (2000) on the eminent role currently
played by ‘‘shareholder value” and its various mea-
surement instruments in today’s regulation of capi-
talism. According to our own analysis framework,
certain management instruments are more impor-
tant than others, because they equip the trials a soci-
ety deems central at a given moment (Boltanski &
Chiapello, 2005; Bourguignon & Chiapello, 2005).
The way they organise these trials is a sign of the
preoccupations that engendered the tool, and of
speci?c points of interest in the criticism, which
tends to focus on certain problems that vary with
the period, as well as a set of particular values and
representations – in other words, a mentality. It
can be hypothesised that the more central a manage-
ment tool is, the more its establishment has involved
intense discursive activity and an enrolment of
socio-political rhetoric going beyond arguments of
economic e?ectiveness alone, and the more it has
taken place under the in?uence of a systemic trans-
formation of the economic system.
These considerations also make it possible to
understand the close interdependence between
the concept of a practice (or the de?nition of a
management tool) and the most predominant
social and economic political rationalities of a
period. In the case of budgetary control, we have
seen how it was loaded with changing program-
matic aspirations, gradually becoming a tool for
increasing responsibility and motivation, having
started as a project marked by a desire to ration-
alise.
Various frameworks now exist to analyse the
varying forms of capitalisms existing in di?erent
countries at a given time, or at di?erent times in
the same country (see for example Boyer, 2002;
Crouch & Streeck, 1996; Hall & Soskice, 2001).
On the whole, however, these analyses tend to
ignore both the world of ideas (although they
study and compare the institutions, they tend to
neglect ideologies as social institutions) and the
role of governmental technologies. Some account-
ing research is itself inspired by these frameworks,
e.g. Puxty, Willmott, Cooper, and Lowe (1987),
but not much has examined the institutional role
of accounting devices in speci?c economic con?g-
urations. This article has attempted to show that
it is possible to extend analyses of di?erent types
of capitalism into analyses concerning the move-
ment of political ideas, and that accounting prac-
tices could also ?nd a place in such a research
programme.
Acknowledgements
Previous versions of this article have been pre-
sented at the seventh Interdisciplinary Perspectives
on Accounting Conference in Madrid (2003), the re-
search seminar of the sociology department of the
Universita` degli studi di Milano-Bicocca (2003),
the research seminar of the doctoral School in Man-
agement of the University of Paris XII-Cre´teil
(2005) and a seminar organized at the Institut fu¨ r
Sozialforshung in Frankfurt (2006) where we at-
tracted a certain amount of pertinent criticism from
attendees. We have had opportunity to discuss all or
parts of this article with Thomas N. Tyson (our dis-
cussant in Madrid 2003), Trevor Boyns, Yannick
Lemarchand, Ge´rard Koenig and Patrick Friden-
son. The comments of two anonymous reviewers
were also very valuable and made us improve a lot
N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57 53
the paper. Our thanks are extended to all. We are
also indebted to Ann Gallon for her much appreci-
ated editorial help.
Appendix: Corpuses of reference texts
A brief description of the corpus referred to is
given below, but for reasons of space bibliographi-
cal references are only provided for the texts cited
in the article.
1930s
The starting point for budgetary control in
France and Europe is certainly the international
conference held in Geneva from July 10th–12th
1930 on the theme of budgetary control organised
by the IIOST. There are two sources for consulting
the speakers’ presentations made to the Geneva
conference:
– IIOST (1930), Confe´ rence internationale du con-
troˆle budge´ taire, Gene`ve, rapports de la confe´-
rence, 2 volumes available for consultation at
the French Bibliothe` que Nationale.
– Special issues summarising the conference was
also published in the business journal Mon
Bureau in August and September 1930, quoting
the following:
Coes (1930), Di?culte´s et re´sistances fre´quem-
ment rencontre´es dans l’instauration de la
proce´dure budge´taire, Mon bureau, Septem-
bre, pp. 389–392.
Jadot (1931), Le controˆ le et la gestion des
entreprises a` l’aide du budget, Mon bureau,
May, pp. 291–293.
Landauer E. (1930), Les bases d’un budget des
de´penses, Mon bureau, August, pp. 349–350.
Musil M.F. (1930), Principes et me´thodes du
controˆ le budge´taire – Ses aspects ge´ne´raux,
Mon Bureau, Septembre, pp. 398–399.
Pulvermann H. (1930), Les organismes cent-
raux de l’administration industrielle et le con-
troˆ le budge´taire, Mon Bureau, Septembre, pp.
400–401.
Schmidt M. (1930), Le budget d’investisse-
ment, les a?ectations de capital et le syste`me
budge´taire, Mon bureau, August, pp. 351–352.
Serruys D. (1930), Le syste`me budge´taire et
l’organisation e´conomique nationale et inter-
nationale, Mon Bureau, September, pp. 395–
397.
Other sources for the 1930s
Ludwig H. (1930), Le controˆle budge´ taire dans les
entreprises industrielles, Librairie franc ßaise de docu-
mentation G. Claisse, Paris.
Satet R. (1930), La Confe´ rence Internationale du
controˆle budge´ taire, IUMM, Gene`ve.
Penglaou C. (1931), ‘‘Le budget conside´re´ comme
base de la de´termination et du controˆ le des cre´dits
accorde´s par les banques”, Mon Bureau, Octobre
et novembre, p. 621 and 716.
Saint-Pulgent (de) T. (1934), ‘‘Le controˆ le budge´-
taire aux grands magasins du Printemps”, Ce´gos,
Document OA7, 8 p.
Penglaou C. (1935), ‘‘Le controˆ le budge´taire –
Son introduction dans les entreprises”, L’Organisa-
tion, Feb, 65–68.
Satet R. (1936), Le controˆle budge´ taire, Dunod,
Paris.
Reitell C. et Lugrin J.P. (1936), ‘‘Le controˆ le des
frais d’exploitation par la me´thode des taux stan-
dards et du budget variable”, Bulletin du Comite´
National Belge de l’Organisation Scienti?que, Oct,
265–275.
Bourquin M. (1937), Me´ thodes modernes de
re´ partition et de controˆle des frais ge´ ne´ raux dans
l’industrie, Dunod, Paris.
Mareuse M. (1938), Le controˆle de gestion dans
les entreprises, Dunod, Paris.
About the case of the Czech shoe manufacturer
Bat’a (or Bata), we quoted:
Coutrot J. (1936), L’humanisme e´ conomique – Les
lec ßons de juin 1936, Editions du centre polytech-
nicien d’e´tudes e´conomiques, Paris.
Dubreuil H. (1936), L’exemple de Bat’a. La libe´ -
ration des initiatives individuelles dans une entre-
prise ge´ ante. Paris, B. Grasset
Landauer E. (1933), L’oeuvre de Thomas Bat’a,
Bulletin du CNOF, june, 177–185.
Rimailho E. (1936), L’organisation a` la franc ßaise,
Paris.
1950s
We quote the following report produced by the
productivity missions:
OECCA (1951), La comptabilite´ au service de la
productivite´ aux Etats-Unis – Rapport pre´liminaire
de la mission franc ßaise des experts comptables,
AFAP-OECCA, Paris.
Among all the works of Jean Benoit, we quote:
54 N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57
Benoit J. (1954), Controˆ le a` l’usage de la direc-
tion, Xe International congress on scienti?c man-
agement (Congre` s international de l’organisation
scienti?que), Bulletin du CNOF, May, 22–25.
Benoit J. (1956), La pre´vision de le controˆ le
budge´taire, Workshop, January 20th–21th,
Rennes, 29 p. (in Pechiney archives 001–7-30994).
Benoit J. (1958), La gestion des entreprises et son
e´volution, A lecture given at La Sorbonne Uni-
versity, (in Pechiney archives 001–7-30994).
Many others conferences are stored in the Pechi-
ney archives 001–7-30994., the ‘‘Jean Benoit Lec-
tures”, for instance:
1951. La productivite´ , expe´ rience dans l’industrie,
A lecture given at the Institut des Hautes Etudes
de De´fense Nationale.
1952. Le controˆle budge´ taire franc ßais en 6 expe´ ri-
ences. CEGOS workshop of May 5th–7th 1952.
Benoit gave three talks, on ‘‘Budgetary control
in the United States”, ‘‘The management indica-
tors used by general managers in the US” and
‘‘The role of the management controller” 1953.
Internal memo from Pechiney.
1955. A general manager’s tableau de bord,
Speech given by Raoul Vitry, CEO of Pechiney,
but written by Jean Benoit.
1958. Re?ection on the organisation, A lecture
given to the Naval Warfare College (Ecole de
guerre navale). This lecture was given several
years in succession until Benoit’s death in 1962.
1960. A large ?rm’s experience in organisation
and methods. Army organisation committee
(Comite´ d’organisation de l’arme´ e de terre).
1961. Lecture to the Regional productivity com-
mittee, Lyon.
Other sources for the 1950s
Comite´ National de la Productivite´ (1952), Votre
meilleur outil, le budget – Le budget par la comptab-
ilite´ pour la productivite´ , Socie´te´ auxilliaire pour la
di?usion des e´ditions de productivite´, Paris.
Charmont C. (1952), Un homme nouveau dans
l’entreprise, le controˆleur de gestion, Hommes et
Techniques, May, 23–26.
CEGOS (1953), Le controˆle budge´ taire, 6 expe´ ri-
ences franc ßaises. Paris,Hommes et Techniques.
Loeb P. (1956), Le budget de l’entreprise, Paris,
PUF.
Guillaume M. (1958), La gestion budge´ taire des
entreprises, Anvers, Editions Nauwelaerts.
Parenteau J. (1959), Controˆle de gestion par me´ th-
ode budge´ taire, Paris,Hommes et Techniques.
Quotations from historical material for periods not
included in the 2 corpuses.
Satet R. (1942), Le controˆle budge´ taire – Cours de
l’Ecole d’Organisation Scienti?que du Travail, Ecole
d’Organisation Scienti?que du Travail, Paris.
Parenteau, J. (1945), Calcul des prix de revient et
comptabilite´ industrielle, Paris: Cegos.
Parenteau J. (1949), La comptabilite´, le controˆ le
budge´taire et les prix standards, Hommes et Tech-
niques, 53 Mai, 27–29.
Collective (1965), EOST, l’Ecole d’Organisation
Scienti?que du Travail, Bulletin du CNOF, special
issue, CNOF, Aouˆ t-septembre.
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N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57 57
doc_614289344.pdf
This article is a contribution to the study of the spread of management innovations, methods and rhetorics. It particularly
concerns the influence of ideological and political factors, which have so far mostly escaped in-depth study. In particular,
we seek to understand to what extent a critique of society developed by social reformers can be a source of
inspiration for managers, leading them to change their practices and experiment with new devices. Relying on the framework
of historical change in management practices developed by Boltanski and Chiapello [
Criticisms of capitalism, budgeting and the double
enrolment: Budgetary control rhetoric and social reform
in France in the 1930s and 1950s
Nicolas Berland
a
, Eve Chiapello
b,
*
a
Universite´ Paris-Dauphine, DRM, Place du Mare´ chal de Lattre de Tassigny, 75775 Paris Cedex 16, France
b
HEC School of Management, 78 350 Jouy-en-Josas, France
Abstract
This article is a contribution to the study of the spread of management innovations, methods and rhetorics. It partic-
ularly concerns the in?uence of ideological and political factors, which have so far mostly escaped in-depth study. In par-
ticular, we seek to understand to what extent a critique of society developed by social reformers can be a source of
inspiration for managers, leading them to change their practices and experiment with new devices. Relying on the frame-
work of historical change in management practices developed by Boltanski and Chiapello [Boltanski, L., & Chiapello, E.
(2005). The new spirit of capitalism. London: Verso (Translation of Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme, Paris: Gallimard,
1999)], we study the speci?c development of budgetary control in France, examined in the light of the general political
and economic history of the 20th century. This framework simultaneously encompasses the dissemination of a new
accounting practice, the transformation of capitalist institutions and mo des of regulation in a given period and country,
and the programmatic discourses [Miller, P., & Rose, N. (1990). Governing economic life. Economy and Society, 19(1), 1–
31] associated with the historical move.
More exactly, what interests us is a double enrolment process. The business world promoters of budgetary control use
the rhetorics of social reformers to present budgetary control as a solution to the economic and social problems of their
time; conversely, social reformers promote budgetary control as a realistic, e?cient tool that can change the world. Ulti-
mately, a degree of alliance is possible around this management tool, although the extent to which the meanings each
group attributes to its action are shared may remain unclear. Based on an analysis of the writings of budgetary control
promoters of the 1930s and the 1950s, we show the close links between their discourse and the reforming ideas of their
time, and how we can trace through this corpus the evolution of this kind of political rationalities [Miller, P., & Rose,
N. (1990). Governing economic life. Economy and Society, 19(1), 1–31] associated with governing and managing corpora-
tions we call the spirit of capitalism [Boltanski, L., & Chiapello, E. (2005). The new spirit of capitalism. London: Verso
(Translation of Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme, Paris: Gallimard, 1999)].
Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Accounting change and accounting innovation
have become major themes for accounting
research in recent years (Bjørnenak, 1997; Burns &
Scapens, 2000; Chua, 1995; Jones & Dugdale,
0361-3682/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.aos.2008.04.004
*
Corresponding author. Tel.: +33 1 39 67 94 41; fax: +33 1 39
67 70 86.
E-mail addresses: [email protected] (N. Berland),
[email protected] (E. Chiapello).
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57
www.elsevier.com/locate/aos
2002). Sociologically based research in management
accounting using Foucauldian, Latourian or New
Institutionalism approaches has been widely
referred to in accounts of these changes (Baxter &
Chua, 2003). We adopt a sociological perspective
in this paper, studying the double enrolment of
social reformers’ rhetorics and accounting innova-
tions. Our work aims to answer three fundamental
research questions: Where do management innova-
tion and management rhetorics come from? How
is it that certain rhetorics spread at certain times?
How can we explain the changes over time in man-
agement discourses? This article proposes a theoret-
ical framework and tests it against some parts of the
history of budgetary control.
The originality of our approach lies in the empha-
sis placed on the role of social reformers and the
dynamics of capitalism. We argue that capitalism
may in certain circumstances, incorporate the cri-
tiques of the social reformers in order to regenerate.
We use the term social reformers for actors in society
who, upon encountering economic or social phe-
nomena they deem regrettable or maybe even highly
dangerous, simultaneously produce a critique of
society, a diagnosis of the risks it is running, and
proposals for reforms, regardless of whether these
reforms are considered realistic or utopian. The
reformers who become in?uential and whose opin-
ions are listened to are rarely lone crusaders; gener-
ally they are part of a social movement, attend
meetings of clubs or societies, organise conferences
and courses to popularise their ideas, and have fol-
lowers and propagators. A characteristic feature of
such reformers – who can be seen as conveyors of
political rationalities and programmes and as pro-
moters of speci?c technologies (Rose & Miller,
1992) – in this case budgetary control – is that they
are not necessarily in a position of power at the
beginning of the reform process. Often critical of
the dominant groups and public policies of their
time, they tend to position themselves as forces for
opposition and/or proposals. But their ideas may
be adopted by businesses or states, usually in order
to overcome a di?cult crisis. Their rhetoric thus
?nds itself transported to the very heart of the system
against which it was produced, and their proposals
put into practice. Their re?ection gives birth to ideas
for new devices, and brings about invention of new
management practices or tools which avant-garde
managers then experiment with. In this process of
incorporation of criticism into the capitalist organi-
sation, some members of the reforming social move-
ments may gain access to positions of power, but
ideas spread far beyond the actual actions of these
social reformers, as the reforming proposals are also
taken on board by avant-garde managers who are
followed by a wide range of people.
We argue that the dynamic process of capital-
ism’s incorporation of a critique is brought into
operation by business managers who decide to
change their practices based on the criticisms
received and any associated recommendations, or
political leaders who use the law or various specially
created or reformed institutions to change the regu-
lations governing business practices. The ?rst steps
taken by companies when incorporating a critique
are typically taken by avant-garde managers who
are interested in the ideas tossed around in reform-
ing circles and may even themselves be part of those
circles. It is often these managers’ experiences that
are later recounted, presented as examples, debated
and imitated when the di?usion process is set in
motion. This process will ultimately result in a mor-
phological transformation of capitalism, enabling it
to continue while simultaneously self-regenerating.
Such links between technologies and programmes
have already been highlighted in research by Miller
and O’Leary (1987, 1989, 1994), Miller and Rose
(1990), Miller (1990) and Rose and Miller (1992).
We add to this existing work a re?ective analysis of
the origins of political rationalities and programmes
of government, and the way in which they are con-
structed. We aim to show that some of these ideas,
which subsequently became very widespread, origi-
nated in the currents of criticisms of capitalism..
The case of budgetary control itself has never before
been studied from this angle. Our article is based on
an analysis of the discourses promoting budgetary
control in France from the 1930s to the 1950s, based
on two corpuses of texts. We concentrate on the
ideas that surrounded declarations made about bud-
getary control, putting it into perspective in relation
to economic and social problems at a national level,
or considering it in relation to moral imperatives for
the transformation of society. These discussions pro-
vide an insight into the ideological environment of
the promoters of budgetary control.
From the late 1920s to the 1960s a group of
accounting techniques developed in France, based
on a complex of practices rooted in scienti?c manage-
ment. Budgetary control is one of its tools, and devel-
oped alongside standard costing. ‘‘Budgetary
control” presupposes: (1) the existence of a ‘‘budget”,
i.e. a set of forecast ?gures expressed in accounting
N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57 29
language, covering the whole of the company’s activ-
ity, and (2) the production of reports comparing the
forecasts with what actually happened. Although
standard costing can be a help in preparing forecasts
– and is often discussed in the same writings as bud-
getary control, and attributed the same kind of socio-
political advantages – both techniques developed in a
loosely coupled relationship. The progress in France
of these two innovations, which ‘‘render visible the
ine?ciencies” (Miller & O’Leary, 1987, p. 241) dif-
fered: while budgetary control drifted fairly rapidly
from discourse to practice, the drift was slower for
standard costing.
1
The reason for going into no fur-
ther detail regarding the characteristics of budgetary
control,
2
is because its history is also the history of
the debates over the ‘‘right way” to use it, which
are themselves indissociable from the various ‘‘func-
tions” attributed to the tool (Berland, 1999b; Burc-
hell, Clubb, Hopwood, Hughes, & Nahapiet, 1980;
Ezzamel, 1994; Hopwood, 1978, 1983; Preston, Coo-
per, & Coombs, 1992). We shall see that the meaning
attributed to budgetary control changes through the
period studied. Our work focuses on programmatic
aspirations conferred on budgetary control, that is
on management discourses and not on management
practices as deployed within ?rms. However, partic-
ularly when a rhetoric accompanies the spread of a
new management technique, we suggest that the
study of discourses provides some information on
changes in practices. In so far as discourses cogni-
tively frame actors’ interpretations of a management
tool or practice, and in doing so they transform the
practice itself, making it conform further to the pre-
dominant interpretation. This echoes the theories
of Burchell et al. (1980), who showed the disconnec-
tion between the publicly stated roles of accounting
and the practice of accounting, but also the impor-
tance of o?cial roles in changing practices, account-
ing being ‘‘challenged and changed in the name of the
roles it is seen as serving” (Burchell et al., 1980, p. 10).
The ?rst part of this article is devoted to a pre-
sentation of our framework, together with a brief
explanation of our working method. The second
part will show how discussions of budgetary control
were involved in the debate on social issues in the
1930s and 1950s, and how the idea of budgetary
control changed between the two periods, in keep-
ing with changes in this debate. The third part then
further explores the productiveness of the theoreti-
cal framework put forward in The New Spirit of
Capitalism (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005), in order
to understand the evolution of business organisa-
tions between 1929 and 1960, as seen through the
history of budgetary control. While the second sec-
tion contains a point-by-point comparison of the
ideas put forward by the reformers and the budget-
ary control promoters, the third section aims to
describe the dynamics of the change in the
representations.
The dynamics of management rhetorics and their
relationship with management change
Previous studies have, like ours, taken an interest
in management fashions (Abrahamson, 1996), the
phenomena of institutionalisation (Barley & Tol-
bert, 1997) and disinstitutionalisation (Oliver,
1991) of practices, and the rhetorics that support
them (Watson, 1995; Zbaracki, 1998). We present
some of these studies and show how they can be
connected to the theoretical framework we use (Bol-
tanski & Chiapello, 2005), which we consider can
expand on previous work by adding analyses of
the role of reformers in management change.
Management rhetorics and management change
A number of studies aim to provide an account
of the historical changes in management techniques
with an interpretation of observed historical devel-
opments that goes beyond the simplistic and linear
view of history that techniques have improved con-
tinuously. To achieve this aim, researchers have to
draw up a history of the development of manage-
ment, and an explanatory framework for this
development. Barley and Kunda (1992), then Abra-
hamson (1997) share a view of history that distin-
guishes ?ve management rhetorics since the 19th
century: (1) welfare work; (2) scienti?c manage-
ment; (3) human relations and personnel manage-
ment; (4) systems rationalism; (5) organization
culture and quality. They then analyse this sequence
of periods as a cyclical phenomenon, arguing that a
succession of cycles exists, in which ‘‘normative”
theories (acting on employees’ emotions and state
1
Maybe, as Zimnovitch (1997, 2001) maintains, because in the
1930s this technique found itself in competition with the French
full cost method (of homogeneous sections).
2
For example what are the intended uses of budgetary control
reports, whether they are a basis for evaluation of the perfor-
mance of an entity or its managers, whether the forecasts are
global or broken down into components, with varying degrees of
detail as regards the organisation’s activities, or what is the
amount of complementary non-?nancial information.
30 N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57
of mind) alternate with ‘‘rational” theories (for-
mally de?ning working processes).
3
The historical framework adopted in this article is
also structured around historical phases, but with
longer durations, each encompassing a normative
time and a rational time. We thus identify a ?rst per-
iod running from the late 19th century to the crisis of
the1930s, marked by both ‘Welfare work’ and ‘Scien-
ti?c management’ ideas. A second period begins with
the e?orts made to emerge from the economic and
social crisis of the 1930s, then to rebuild the world
after the economic, moral and political crisis of the
Second World War, extending to the late 1960s when
the capitalist system encountered another crisis. This
second period combines the ‘Human relations and
personnel management’ ideas with ‘Systems rational-
ism’ ideas. Our third period opens with the crisis
which started in 1968 as a crisis of meaning, a refusal
of authority and rejection of mass society, and con-
tinued in the form of an economic crisis after the
1970s oil shocks. This period can be considered still
ongoing: ideas concerning ‘Organization culture
and quality’ are implemented, but new rational tools
are developed in parallel, for instance new proce-
dures for quality certi?cation, and forms of control
using information and communication technologies.
Each period is associated with what we call a spirit of
capitalism (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005).
Barley and Kunda (1992), and later Abrahamson
(1997) put forward di?erent explanations for the
alternation between normative and rational theo-
ries.
4
However, both studies analyse the cycles
essentially as the product of economic in?uence
(growth and degree of innovation), even though
they acknowledge that other factors may be taken
into consideration (political and social relations,
etc). Our own research acts on this intuition and
seeks to reach a fuller understanding by emphasis-
ing these ‘‘other” factors of change. The history of
management technologies (and the accompanying
discourses) is related in our work with the overall
history of capitalism, which cannot be summed up
as a cyclical, reassuring history of alternation
between ‘‘upward” and ‘‘downward” phases. Each
crisis is new and unique, or at least has signi?cantly
distinctive features, and so is the way out of the cri-
sis. History does not repeat itself in a neat and sty-
lised way. The managerial forms adopted at a given
period must be seen in relation to the institutional
organisation of the economic system at a given time,
and the way it is remodelled in each period by public
policies and the e?orts of all actors involved. Anal-
ysis of the history of management methods and
rhetorics cannot be disconnected from an institu-
tional analysis (Di Maggio & Powell, 1983; Scott,
1995). What happens in companies and in the pro-
duction of the normative discourses on management
cannot be dissociated from the forms of economic
regulations governing economic activity and the
policies of public or private bodies – which are con-
trolled to varying degrees by the political sphere –
that issue the regulations (Loft, 1986).
Institutions, political rationalities and the ‘‘spirit of
capitalism”
Historical analysis of management devices should
in our opinion take the political sphere into consid-
eration. This is exactly what Miller does in his work
with Rose and O’Leary. Rose and Miller (1992) pro-
pose to distinguish several levels in their study. First,
there are the political rationalities, i.e. ‘‘the changing
discursive ?elds within which the exercise of power is
conceptualized, the moral justi?cation for particular
ways of exercising power by diverse authorities” (p.
175). The spirit of capitalism of a period in our ana-
lytical framework occupies the same place as these
political rationalities, except that it primarily con-
cerns the discursive ?eld regarding how power is
exercised in the enterprise,
5
also encompassing the
de?nition of the enterprise itself, its general operat-
ing rules and its role in society. The spirit of capital-
ism has a moral form, like any political rationality,
3
By ‘‘normative theories”, Barley and Kunda (1992, p. 364)
mean ‘‘the idea that managers could more e?ectively regulate
workers by attending not only to their behaviour but their thoughts
and emotions”. Normative theories are central in periods 1, 3 and
5. The same authors use ‘‘rational theories” (1992, 364) to refer to
the rhetoric justifying ‘‘harsh discipline and even threats of violence
by appealing to an individualistic ethic of success”. According to
their analysis, these rational theories are central in periods 2 and
4.
4
First, cycles are said to succeed each other in response to
performances considered mediocre (the performance gap theory).
Second, these managerial cycles are thought to be constructed
around economic cycles such as Kondratie?’s pendulum theory:
in growth phases, rational theories are supposed to supplant the
normative theories presumed to dominate during when the cycle
is on a downturn. Barley and Kunda (1992) give precedence to
the pendulum theory, while Abrahamson (1997) considers these
two explanatory theories as complementary.
5
Miller and Rose (1992), following the work of Michel
Foucault, seek to reformulate the question of ‘‘the State” as
‘‘an investigation of the problematics of government”.
N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57 31
determining the ideals in whose name the governing
and managing of corporations is articulated. Any
spirit of capitalism also paints a moral portrait of
man perfectly well-adjusted to the enterprise of his
time, stating his qualities, and the qualities that the
system esteems and rewards: we say that it incorpo-
rates a response to anxiety over the fairness of the
capitalist process. Therefore, a ?rst set of arguments
included in the spirit of capitalism of one time
invokes the notion of fairness, explaining why capi-
talism is coherent with a sense of justice, and how
it contributes to the common good.
A second set of arguments describes the forms of
security that are supposed to be available to those
who are involved, both for themselves and for their
children. The last dimension focuses on what is pre-
sented as stimulating or exciting about an involve-
ment with capitalism – in other words, how this
system can help people to achieve ful?lment, and
how it can generate enthusiasm. The rhetorical con-
tent of the spirit of capitalism, i.e. these three catego-
ries of arguments,
6
alters over time. Nevertheless, we
consider that at any period the type of political ratio-
nality that is the spirit of capitalism must o?er
responses – albeit varying responses – to the three
dimensions of fairness, security and stimulation.
The table below summarises the three spirits of
capitalism that have succeeded each other since
the later 19th century, and the phases in the history
Table 1
Three spirits of capitalism
First spirit end of 19th
century–1930s
Second spirit 1940s–1970s Third spirit since 1980
Characteristic features
of the economic
organisation
Small family ?rms Managerial ?rms Network ?rms
Bourgeois capitalism Big industrial companies Internet and biotech
Mass production Global ?nance
States economic policy Varying and di?erentiated productions
Periods de?ned by
Barley and Kunda
(1992)
1. Welfare work; 2. Scienti?c
management
3. Human relations and
personnel management 4.
Systems rationalism
5. Organization culture and quality
What is the promise of
fairness?
Meritocracy valuing loyalty
and respect of conventional
proprieties, and in an
apparent contradiction,
successes in market
competition situations
Meritocracy valuing
e?ectiveness
New form of meritocracy valuing mobility,
ability to nourish a network, etc
Management by objectives
Each project is an opportunity to develop
one’s employability: more employability if
more mobility
What is the promise of
security?
Based on personal property
and relationships, charity
and paternalism
Based on long term planning,
life long careers and welfare
state
For the mobile and the adaptable
Companies will provide self-help resources
to enhance the ability to manage oneself
What is the promise of
stimulation?
Freedom from local
communities progress
Career opportunities No more authoritarian chiefs
Access to power positions
E?ectiveness possible in
‘‘freedom countries”
Fuzzy organisations
Innovation and creativity
Permanent change
6
The spirit of capitalism can be seen as a set of justi?cations
along these three dimensions (fairness, security, stimulation) in
order to improve involvement in the capitalist process. In the
theoretical framework we use, capitalistic accumulation requires
commitment from many people, although few have any real
chances of making a substantial pro?t and it is unrealistic to
think including these people by force (working to survive) is all
that is needed. One of the essential aspects of this involvement is
the ability to give ‘‘meaning” to one’s actions: this meaning goes
beyond the mere idea of generating pro?t, and is supplied by
what is called here the spirit of capitalism.
32 N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57
of management that are assumed by this analysis.
For each period, we show the argumentative con-
tent in terms of fairness, security and stimulation
(see Table 1).
In the same way as the political rationalities dis-
cussed by Rose and Miller (1992), the spirit of cap-
italism also incorporates an epistemology and is
formulated in a distinctive idiom. Thus, in each per-
iod, the management discourse has its own speci?c
vocabulary and concepts, which help contemporar-
ies to conceive the enterprise and its success factors.
The second level of analysis proposed by Rose
and Miller is the level of governmental technologies,
i.e. ‘‘the complex mundane programmes, calculations,
techniques, apparatuses, documents and procedures
through which authorities seek to embody and give
e?ect to governmental ambitions” (Rose & Miller,
1992, p. 175). ‘‘These ‘technologies of government’
seek to translate thought into the domain of reality,
and to establish ‘in the world of persons and things’
spaces and devices for acting upon those entities of
which they dream and scheme” (Miller & Rose,
1990, p. 8). This level is where we encounter man-
agement techniques and tools, such as budgetary
control, which can also be analysed as central
instruments for accomplishing the integration of
the spirit of capitalism into business management
practices. This explains why the management litera-
ture is considered a major receptacle for the spirit of
capitalism of a given period.
7
A history of management rhetorics and manage-
ment tools thus requires a history of change in polit-
ical rationalities, programmes of government and
governmental technologies. Miller and his co-
authors used this general framework to analyse var-
ious developments in management practices. Each
time, they sought to reconstitute the discursive envi-
ronment and programmes that fostered the spread
of a given management practice. Miller’s (1991)
study of the development of discounted cash ?ow
procedures as a management tool in the 1950s,
and the work by Miller and O’Leary (1987) relating
talk of ‘‘national e?ciency” and the early 20th cen-
tury eugenist ideologies to the development of stan-
dard costs in the UK are good examples (see also
Miller & O’Leary, 1989, 1994).
8
The approach taken
by Burchell, Clubb, and Hopwood (1985) to the
enthusiasm for value added in the 1970s is another
example of this type of study, which aims to place
the development of a management practice in the
context of broader ideological debates.
What we propose to do in this article is to asso-
ciate this approach with hypotheses on the origins
of the ideas that emerge at a given moment in his-
tory. Where do these ideas come from to structure
political rationalities and programmes of a period,
eventually fostering the development of certain gov-
ernmental technologies? This is where the frame-
work developed by Boltanski and Chiapello (2005)
can be useful.
The framework of change in The New Spirit of
Capitalism
One major characteristic of this work is the role it
attributes to criticisms of capitalism
9
in producing
changes in corporate practices and related ideolo-
7
Management literature comprises here all the normative texts,
mainly written by consultants in the recent period, which
particularly promote certain methods of organisation and certain
‘‘new” management practices. Boltanski and Chiapello (2005)
show that at a given period, there is no in?nity of ways to
describe the ‘‘new high performance organisation” or the
‘‘organisation of the future”: on the contrary, the models appear
to converge around a small number of proposals which in?uence
the spirit of the time. They based their e?orts (as Weber and
Sombart had done previously) on texts that provide moral
education on business practices. In their study, this meant two
bodies of work from the ?eld of management studies: one from
the 1960s; and one from the 1990s (each representing around 500
pages and 50 texts).
8
Miller and O’Leary (1989) show that the concepts of
organisational authority presented by American writers of
management literature from 1900 to 1940 were in keeping with
the USA’s political culture, and evolved with the debates in the
political arenas. In particular, the 1929 crisis and its consequences
are seen as a time of signi?cant challenge to previous models of
authority. This crisis led to a new management literature
represented by the writings of Mayo and Barnard. In a further
paper, Miller and O’Leary (1994) resituated the development of
Activity-based costing and empowerment practices in the USA in
the context of the 1980s American decline against Japan, and
related to the discursive ?eld of ‘‘New Economic Citizenship”.
9
Two types of criticism that have developed since the 19th
century have been examined by Boltanski and Chiapello (2005).
The ?rst is what the authors call the ‘‘social critique”. Here the
emphasis is on inequalities, misery, exploitation, and the sel?sh-
ness of a world that stimulates individualism rather than
solidarity. Its main vector has been the labour movement. The
second form of criticism, the ‘‘artistic critique”, ?rst emerged in
small artistic and intellectual circles, and stresses other charac-
teristics of capitalism. In a capitalist world, it criticises oppression
(market domination, factory discipline), the massi?cation of
society, standardisation and pervasive commodi?cation. It vin-
dicates an ideal of liberation and/or individual autonomy,
singularity and authenticity (Chiapello, 1998).
N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57 33
gies. These criticisms are produced by social reform-
ers and the social networks in which they partici-
pate. Their output is of course theoretical, aiming
to diagnose problems, draw attention to situations
considered negative, propose modi?cations, etc,
but also practical, with the implementation of vari-
ous campaigns belonging to what Tilly (1986) calls
the ‘‘repertoires of collective action” (propaganda,
training courses, demonstrations, strikes, boycotts,
etc). In general, the management practices in exis-
tence at a given time, especially those presented as
‘‘the best practices”, greatly depend on the type
and virulence of the criticism levelled at them. Some
of the transformations undergone by capitalism
since May 1968
10
can thus be analysed as a clever
integration of the critiques of the 1970s and their
demands for autonomy, creativity, more authentic
interpersonal relationships, etc. Similarly, it is sug-
gested that the transformations in progress over
the period covered by this article result partly from
the integration and adaptation of a certain number
of proposals originally formulated by the labour
movement, denouncing inequalities, poverty and
exploitation.
Criticism plays several roles in the change pro-
cess. First, it may produce ungovernability, a situa-
tion which encourages changes of method,
particularly for business managers, in order to
regain the capacity to govern. It also produces ideas,
with the essential part of the reforming vision tend-
ing to concentrate on the problematic aspects
revealed. Some of these ideas will be taken on board
and integrated into management practices for one
or more of the following reasons: (1) because while
satisfying the criticism they also serve pro?t, (2)
because they provide a means of motivating people
in a change process (even if the change is decided on
for reasons other than the pressure exerted by the
criticism), (3) or because this is the only way to
silence criticism when it is persistent and inventive,
and its virulence is beginning to undermine
employee motivation and cause disorganisation in
the enterprise. It can thus be said that a successful
critique is fated to be taken over and adapted.
According to this approach, the ideas that were
to arrive to construct new political rationalities con-
cerning the economy’s operation came from criti-
cism of capitalism. Their ideas are more widely
heeded when the economy is going through a major
crisis, as in the 1930s or 1970s. The advantage of
criticisms of capitalism is that, often ahead of oth-
ers, they identi?ed the contradictions and problems
generated by the way the economy operates. They
may also have fed re?ection on possible remedies
and analyses of the causes of di?culties. They thus
present themselves as existing reservoirs of reform-
ing ideas as and when necessary. In periods of great
change, such as the years marking the transition
from one spirit of capitalism to another, the ideas
originating in the critical movements are enrolled
to serve the reform of capitalism. They can be used
to promote new management devices. Their sup-
porters even occasionally suggest using a particular
technology to facilitate this transition. The tool is
reassuring, o?ering ways to grasp a problem and
solutions. It may be called on independently with-
out people necessarily being committed to the over-
all reform project. It is as if to engage more people,
particularly more business managers, in change, the
reformers had to propose tools and technologies
which in themselves can ‘‘enrol” people without
requiring a moral commitment to the cause (Callon
& Law, 1982; Callon, 1986; Latour, 1987). Addi-
tionally, it has been observed that certain promoters
of management tools, particularly the consulting
?rms whose objective is to sell new approaches to
businesses, sometimes adopt social reformers’ rheto-
ric and vocabulary to increase the success of the
tools they are promoting. In the case studied in this
article – budgetary control – the ideas germinated in
scienti?c management circles were taken over by the
reforming groups of the 1930s. They were intro-
duced into the plans for economic reform with the
10
The theoretical framework used as a basis here was initially
developed to propose an interpretation of changes in business
management methods in France from the post-May 1968 years.
In May 1968, France underwent a major period of social unrest,
marked by student demonstrations with suspension of lectures,
occupation of the Sorbonne university and barricades in Paris’
Latin quarter, and also by largescale workers’ strikes all over
France. These events led to the famous Grenelle agreements
between employers and unions, under the auspices of the State,
intended to end the insurrectional situation. In fact, the social
unrest continued throughout the following decade, albeit to a
lesser degree, centred on a critique of consumer society, with
demands for greater liberty – including sexual liberty – experi-
ments in worker autonomy with workers taking control of certain
factories, and the beginnings of the ecological movement. The
1970s also saw a revival of the Marxist critique of exploitation
and mass production, with particular interest in the Maoist and
Yugoslav variations on ‘‘real socialism”. This social agitation and
its underlying themes were in fact shared by most developed
countries over the period, although the most intense moments did
not always coincide in time. May 1968 is the French landmark for
what can be analysed as a global crisis of governability in western
countries.
34 N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57
purpose of organizing the economy to avoid ever
experiencing another 1930s-style crisis.
A two-way takeover of ideas is thus going on: (1)
takeover by the social reformers of the ‘‘budgetary
control” tool attracting the attention of business
managers, in order to promote their way of organiz-
ing the economy – budgetary control as a Trojan
horse for social reform; and (2) takeover by the pro-
moters of budgetary control of the social reformers’
ideas and the bright future they want to build, in
order to bring in the tool they recommend, which
?nds itself being attributed virtues not only of e?-
ciency but also of moral values – social reformism
as an aid in constructing the legitimacy and ideolog-
ical desirability of the budgetary control tool.
Sources, corpus and working methods
The history of budgetary control in France, the
UK and the US has attracted substantially less
attention than the history of cost calculation. It
has often been hypothesised that Europe followed
the example of US businesses, and that the develop-
ment of budgetary control essentially dated from
the end of the Second World War (see for example
Ashton, Hopper, & Scapens, 1995 for the UK, Cos-
su, 1986 for France). But more searching studies
have shown that the situation in Europe was in fact
fairly similar to the situation in the US.
11
Research
by Berland and Boyns (2002), Boyns (1998), Miller
and O’Leary (1987), Parker (2002), Solomons
(1952), Quail (1996), and Walsh and Stewart
(1993), for instance, have shown that budgetary
control dated from at least the 1930s in both
countries.
For France, three historic phases can be identi-
?ed in the development of budgetary control. The
?rst more or less covers the decade of the 1930s,
starting with the International Budgetary Control
Conference held in Geneva by the Institut Interna-
tional d’Organisation Scienti?que du Travail
(IIOST)
12
in 1930. The conference’s view of budget-
ary control was tinged with the rationalist thinking
of the Taylorian engineers promoting it, with the
accent above all on planning and technical di?cul-
ties. The second phase takes us to the end of the
1950s. In this phase, budgetary control was develop-
ing in an environment of postwar reform and the
construction of the Fordist compromise (Aglietta,
1976; Boyer & Mistral, 1978). Although it had not
lost its rationalist nature, budgetary control was
now being attributed other characteristics, such as
humanising the economy and encouraging decen-
tralisation within enterprises. The third phase covers
all of the 1960s, and sees the arrival in force of dis-
cussions on motivation in the workplace. The
emphasis is during this last period on use of the
budget as a target to be achieved, and budgetary
control as a means of motivation and performance
evaluation
13
(Mc Arthur & Scott, 1970; Taboulet,
Meyer, & Sallan, 1966).
This article covers the ?rst two phases only. Most
of the documents referred to for the second phase
date from the 1950s, a much more homogeneous
period in terms of history and ideology, when the
uncertainties of wartime had disappeared and the
postwar ideological battles had led to a new way
of understanding and governing the economy (Kui-
sel, 1981). In any case, the wartime period was a
‘‘slack period” for introduction of budgetary con-
trol systems in businesses.
For the purposes of the various analyses, we
studied both the history of budgetary control and
the economic (Carre´, Dubois, & Malinvaud, 1972),
social and political context (Boltanski, 1982; Kuisel,
1981) surrounding that history. Whereas primary
sources (archives and contemporary documents)
were used to describe the history of budgetary con-
trol (Berland, 1998, 1999a; Berland & Boyns, 2002),
a simple review of the existing literature was the
basis for our examination of the reforming ideas
with which we shall attempt to demonstrate budget-
ary control is linked. We thus based our work on
research by historians and sociologists who have
preceded us in the ?eld (Amoyal, 1974; Boltanski,
1982; Braudel & Labrousse, 1979; Cotta, 1984; Kui-
sel, 1981; Moutet, 1997), and highlighted the ideo-
logical continuity between the thinking of certain
pioneering groups in the 1930s and what was to
11
For the history of budgetary control in the US, see Chandler
(1962, 1977), Chandler and Deams (1979), Johnson and Kaplan
(1987), Kaplan (1984) and also research by Fleischman (2000),
Fleischman and Tyson (2007) and Tyson (1992).
12
A direct translation would be ‘‘International Institute for
Scienti?c Management”, but the English name for the organisa-
tion was the International Management Institute (IMI). At the
time of the conference, the director was Lyndall Urwick.
13
The seminal research by Argyris (1952) pre?gures this third
period, which in the academic world gave rise in the 1960s to a
broad stream of academic literature on motivation, human
behaviour and budgeting.
N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57 35
become the predominant new ideology concerning
the economy in the postwar period.
These studies show a parallel between the
increasing adoption of budgetary control and the
popularity of the ideas put forward by the 1930s
reformers. However, we also need to demonstrate
that this is more than mere coincidence, and that
the promotion of budgetary control used the newly
emerging economic ideology as a support (Lemarc-
hand & Le Roy, 2000). This requires sources that
could indicate a link between the major social and
economic issues of a period and budgetary control:
we use public writings of budgetary control promot-
ers. We show that they tend to adopt as their own
some of the criticisms expressed in by social reform-
ers. In the case of budgetary control, the promoters
drew their arguments from the e?ervescence of ideas
thrown up by seekers of alternatives to the market-
led order in the 1930s (Kuisel, 1981). Two corpuses
of around 30 texts were gathered, one concerning
the 1930s and the other the 1950s (see Appendix).
They consist of public writings that accompanied
the development of budgetary control (textbooks,
articles, conference papers, etc) (see Table 2). From
these documents we selected extracts taking a more
general look at the development of budgetary con-
trol, with reference to the main political and social
issues debated in the relevant period.
The texts selected are by authors who are central
to each of the two periods (recurring authors who
are highly active promoters of budgetary control,
or often cited) and signi?cant in terms of size (writ-
ings longer than one page). The importance of the
chosen extracts calls for two remarks. First, in terms
of volume, the set of extracts containing program-
matic elements is small compared to the total sum
of purely technical extracts, which are longer and
more detailed: the social and political commentaries
are often found in forewords, prefaces, introduc-
tions and conclusions of articles and books with
the body of texts being mainly technical. In terms
of social signi?cance, however, the selected texts
are important, all the more so as an underlying
political rationale common to all can be identi?ed.
Table 3 contains some ?gures indicating the extent
to which the corpus source texts are representative.
It shows that our corpus is far from marginal, being
an extract from a body of publications representing
between 37% and 41% of the references we were able
to access, and between 16% and 27% of all refer-
ences traced for the 2 periods.
These two corpuses were treated as follows: our
main objective was to highlight the economic and
social problems identi?ed by the authors in discuss-
ing budgetary control, and the speci?c or more gen-
eral solutions recommended to connect those ideas
to the period’s reforming currents. The quotations
in this article are taken from this thematic reading.
As is still the case today, the discourse on e?ciency
and the technical rationale is rarely the only dis-
Table 2
Main sources of evidence
Aspects studied Main sources
Economic context Braudel and Labrousse (1979), Carre´ et al. (1972) and Kuisel (1981)
History of reforming ideas Amoyal (1974), Boltanski (1982), Cotta (1984), Dard (1999), Kuisel
(1981) and Moutet (1997)
;
The double enrolment (reforming ideas adopted by budgetary
control promoters and the budgetary control tool adopted by
social reformers)
Two corpuses of texts speci?cally collected for the article consisting
of articles, conferences, lectures, and extracts from textbooks
"
History of budgetary control. The evolution of practices in
companies
Company archives studied in former research Berland (1998,
1999a) and Berland and Boyns (2002)
Table 3
Representativeness of the corpus
1930–1939 1949–1959
Total number of public texts on budgetary control identi?ed for
the decade concerned
200 128
Number of texts found in French libraries 87 85
Number of references in the corpuses: 33 (7 books and 26
articles)
35 (16 books or reports and 19 articles or
communications)
36 N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57
course to be found in texts promoting new manage-
ment practices. It is generally inserted into a history
reconstructed for rhetorical purposes, explaining
that the world has changed and that the new issues
faced by businesses require new practices or the
implementation of a new instrument (Boltanski &
Chiapello, 2005).
This explains why the reader may encounter gran-
diose ?ights of lyricism talking of the wellbeing of
humanity. One example comes from the lecture
given at the Sorbonne in 1958 by Jean Benoit, the
then managing executive of Pechiney, orchestrator
of the implementation of budgetary control within
the company and a tireless campaigner for the tool
(see below). He ended his address to students in
the following words: ‘‘You are all familiar with a for-
eign poet’s re?ection that we need a sort of ‘‘redemp-
tion of utilitarian man by artistic man”. I sincerely
believe that this expression is out of date, I believe
the time has come to unite all men of good will in this
country, whatever their origins, whatever their train-
ing, in order, as one of our workmen currently study-
ing to become a foreman says: ‘‘to build together a
common work with a view to constructing a better
world”. We hypothesise in this article that this non-
technical type of argument put forward by promot-
ers of budgetary control can be explained by the
links between the authors of these texts and the con-
?gurations of ideas conveyed more broadly by
reforming movements.
Budgetary control as part of the social debates in the
period 1930–1950
We ?rst present the people, networks and chan-
nels that spread budgetary control (Section ‘Promot-
ers of budgetary control and their relationships with
the reforming networks’). We shall see that several
promoters of budgetary control are also involved
in the work of reforming think-tanks and can thus
be considered as much reformers as promoters of
budgetary control. This is ?rst-level evidence in sup-
port of our double enrolment hypothesis.
We then (Section ‘The economic and social prob-
lems evoked by social reformers and promoters of
budgetary control’) describe the social and political
problems the authors of our corpus deemed relevant
to mention in writings on budgetary control. This
can be considered a ?rst, and fairly common, level
of enrolment. In these extracts, the authors attribute
historical importance to budgetary control by pre-
senting it as a solution to contemporary issues.
There is no indication as yet that they have more
broadly adopted the ideas of the reforming move-
ments of their time: admittedly, they identify the
same problems, but do they have the same general
solutions? Section ‘Reforming currents’ sets out to
answer this question. With reference to historians
of ideas, we describe the reforming currents of the
time known to have been at the source of socio-eco-
nomic solutions implemented during the ‘‘30 glori-
ous years”. We then show that these solutions are
also present in the texts of our corpus. This is a
much deeper level of enrolment, since certain pro-
moters of budgetary control in our corpus make
explicit reference to the reforming ideas of their
time.
Finally (Section 2.4), we show how the de?nition
of budgetary control evolved over the period in
coherence with the spirit of capitalism, which itself
interacted with the programmatic aims of the
reforming movements, as it is impossible to separate
the technical from the social, the former being
totally impregnated with the latter.
Promoters of budgetary control and their
relationships with the reforming networks
Four types of channel enabled the promoters of
budgetary control to develop their ideas: journals,
congresses, books and professional associations.
These channels can be monitored individually
through the 1930s. After 1945, there are too many
for individual consideration, but we attempt to pro-
vide a brief description in contrast to the previous
period.
Journals, congresses and books
Some journals were very active on the question of
budgetary control: up to 1940, Mon Bureau pub-
lished 22 articles on the subject, Organisation 29,
Me´ thodes 14, Le Commerce 9, L’Usine 8 and La
Comptabilite´ 5. A large number of other journals
also covered the issue occasionally (Berland,
1998). After 1945, there was some continuity in pub-
lications with writings by authors who were already
active before the war, published in the same jour-
nals, sometimes after name changes and mergers.
14
14
Gaston Commesnil, for instance, an author of the 1930s,
continued his work to keep accountants informed with the
publication of one article in 1955 and two in 1956 in the journal
Orga-Comptabilite´ .
N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57 37
Congresses were also a forum for discussion: the
?rst and the most important of these was held in
1930 in Geneva by the IIOST (Institut International
d’Organisation Scienti?que du Travail)
15
and was
entirely devoted to budgetary control. Almost all
the main actors for development of budgetary con-
trol in the 1930s took part in this congress. At least
six other congresses contained presentations on
budgetary control (Berland, 1998). After 1945,
many meetings and events were organised, well
illustrated by those attended by Jean Benoit (see
Appendix), an executive at Pechiney (see below for
a short biography).
Three books particularly merit attention for the
1930s. The ?rst signi?cant publication was by Dr
Ludwig in 1930. As far as we know this is the ?rst
book in French on budgetary control. The second
landmark book is by Satet (1936). This work is
unique for two reasons: the personality of its author
(see below for a short biography) and its content.
Satet describes many true-life cases, and his bibliog-
raphy lists most publications on budgetary control
released in a large number of countries. No subse-
quent work ever equalled this level of documenta-
tion. The third remarkable work of the 1930s must
be the book published by Mareuse (1938), who
takes a more conceptual approach with less empha-
sis on convincing his readership, which no doubt
explains the lack of any concrete examples.
In the postwar period, Paul Loeb of Alsthom
published a two-volume book on budgetary control
in 1956, presenting his own experience in educa-
tional form. Some new works marked this period.
Jean Parenteau (1945) began a long series of publi-
cations that were landmarks in the development of
the discipline. The proportion of books by teachers
began to grow; the tone began to change. Examples
and descriptions of pioneers’ experiences became
rarer, while a more general, more conceptual dis-
course on budgetary control practices gained
ground.
Professional associations
Various professional groups played an acknowl-
edged role in the spread of budgetary control. What
is particularly interesting about them for our pur-
poses is that they were also identi?ed by the histori-
ans of their time as hubs of activity for the
reforming imagination, as the place where each per-
iod’s great reformers were meeting and exchanging
ideas (Boltanski, 1982; Kuisel, 1981). Some authors
in our corpus belong to these associations or think
tanks, and some of the writings we study were pub-
lished by those groups.
One such group was the CNOF, Comite´ National
de l’Organisation Franc ßaise, created by the merger
between the Fayolian Centre d’Etudes Administra-
tives formed in 1919 and the Taylorian Confe´ rence
de l’Organisation Franc ßaise launched in late 1920
(Dard, 1999, p. 28). There were major tensions in
the CNOF during the 1930s as a result of the crisis;
its members argued ?ercely over the line to take:
whether to extend the organisation’s activities to
broad questions of society, or to restrict attention
to the organisation of labour. Due to this very argu-
ment, the CNOF was a highly fertile breeding
ground for ideas. Many authors in our corpus
belonged to the CNOF, and published articles on
budgetary control in its journal, the Bulletin du
CNOF. T. de Saint-Pulgent for example, Manager
of Printemps department stores, where he intro-
duced budgetary control, was a member. So was
Jean Benoit, mentioned earlier, and Jean Coutrot,
who dominated the whole prewar period, as he
was active in most clubs and associations of the time
and ideas circulated between them through him
(Dard, 1999). After 1945, the CNOF continued to
publish the bulletin launched in the 1930s for distri-
bution to businesses and managers. All in all, the
CNOF published no less than 39 documents on
budgetary control between 1930 and 1963. It was
also a training centre: by 1950, 20,000 engineers
and foremen had followed evening classes organised
by the CNOF (Boltanski, 1982, p. 189).
15
Present among the experts was McKinsey, the author of a
1922 book entitled Budgetary Control which became an impor-
tant reference. The other speakers all came to share their practical
experiences in budgetary matters, making the conference a
meeting of practitioners. 258 persons registered for the confer-
ence: 44 were Swiss, 39 German, 35 French, 33 British and 23 of
other nationalities. However, in the event only 197 were able to
attend, including 31 Frenchmen. The attendees were given
extensive documentation, including Anglo-American works but
also several French documents. The Frenchmen included P. de
Berc (Cie des Forges de Chatillon, Commentry et Neuves-
Maisons), G. Delmas (member of the board of the printing ?rm
Delmas, Chapon et Gounouilhon), H. Fayol (Fayol’s son and a
member of the board for Organisation e´ conomique moderne), M.
Lacoin (general secretary of Citroe¨n), P. Levy (management
attache´ for French national railways), A. Antoine (general
manager of Strasbourg electricity), J. Milhaud (Head of Indus-
trial organisation at the employers’ federation CGPF), T. de
Saint-Pulgent (general manager of Grands Magasins du Prin-
temps), R. Satet (Head of the Industrial organisation department
at the sectorial employers’ federation UIMM), J. de Vilmorin
(manager of Vilmorin-Andrieux et Cie, grain merchants).
38 N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57
Another active group was the CEGOS (Commis-
sion Ge´ ne´ rale d’Organisation Scienti?que du travail),
which became a well-known management consult-
ing ?rm after the war and was led by Octave Geli-
nier (propagator in the 1960s of Management by
Objectives, a complement to previous budgetary
control practices). Originally, the CEGOS was
formed in 1926 by the business employers’ organisa-
tion CGPF (Confe´ de´ ration Ge´ ne´ rale de la Produc-
tion Franc ßaise) (Dard, 1999, p. 105). It was
through the CEGOS that the future French full cost
method (of homogeneous sections) developed by
Emile Rimailho (published in 1928), who is also
one of the authors of our corpus, came into being
(Lemarchand, 1998). In the 1930s, the CEGOS
organised several managers’ meetings, many on
the theme of budgetary control. After the war, the
CEGOS continued its e?orts to spread budgetary
control through information meetings, but also
branched out into training (Boltanski, 1982, p.
189). It set up the Hommes et Techniques journal
and publishers, providing an opportunity for new
actors to express opinions in what was already an
old organisation. Among the published authors
were Jean Parenteau (1949), who wrote a ?rst article
on budgetary control, and Claude Charmont (1952)
who discovered ‘‘a new man in the company: the
management controller”. The CEGOS also contin-
ued its work through seminars. The most important,
‘‘Budgetary control: 6 French cases” (CEGOS, 1953)
took place from May 5th–7th 1952 and was
attended by many of the authors included in our
corpus. The CEGOS published a total of no less
than 91 documents on budgetary control between
1930 and 1964.
The very powerful employers’ organisation Union
des Industries Me´ tallurgiques et Minie` res (UIMM)
must also be mentioned. The head of its industrial
organisation departments was no other than R.
Satet, a pillar of the CNOF and also author of over
20 publications on budgetary control. In the early
part of his career, Satet himself introduced budget-
ary control to the printing ?rm Imprimeries Delmas.
A total of 15 UIMM publications were dedicated to
budgetary control between 1930 and 1962.
After the war, as part of the reconstruction e?ort,
speci?c measures were taken to improve productiv-
ity in French companies and make up for France’s
‘‘backward” situation. The General Planning Com-
mission (Commissariat Ge´ ne´ ral au Plan) became an
important venue for meetings and debates. A work-
ing party on productivity was formed there in 1948,
chaired by Jean Fourastie´ under the General Plan-
ning Commission. Subsequently a provisional pro-
ductivity committee (Comite´ provisoire de la
productivite´ ) was set up in 1949, then the AFAP
(Association Franc ßaise pour l’Accroissement de la
Productivite´ – French association for increased pro-
ductivity) in 1950. To help the French ‘‘bring things
up to standard”, the Americans on the Marshall
Plan Mission in France proposed that missions of
company heads and unionists should visit the
USA. One of the AFAP’s main functions was to
organise these missions, of which 450 took place
(between 1950 and 1953) involving more than
4000 members, company managers, engineers, cad-
res (approximately 45%), union representatives
(approximately 25%), top-ranking civil servants,
economists, psychologists and sociologists (approx-
imately 30%) (Boltanski, 1982, p. 157?; Kuisel,
1981, p. 262?). The actual audience reached by these
productivity missions is still a subject of debate
between historians of this period. At least ten mis-
sion reports discussed the issue of budgetary
control.
The central role of certain authors
In consulting the large number of publication
sources mentioned above, it is impossible not to
be struck by the central importance of some
authors, who are encountered in various capacities.
One example is Jean Benoit, already mentioned
several times, who can be considered one of the
most important sources on budgetary control in
the postwar years. He was an industrialist who
had quite a signi?cant lecturing activity. A gradu-
ate of the Ecole des Mines in Saint-Etienne, he
joined AFC (one of the companies making up
Pechiney) at the age of 26 (Cailluet, 1995). Four
years later, he was the director of the Argentie`re
plant, where he had been remarked in 1932 for
his good performance in terms of production costs.
A member of the French national management
committee CNOF in the 1930s, he worked with
Clark to establish budgetary control at Pechiney.
From 1939, he managed the industrial organisation
department in charge of reorganising the company.
At the time of his sudden death in 1962, he was the
company’s general secretary. In parallel to his
brilliant career at Pechiney, he had an important
public life, teaching at the Ecole Nationale
d’Administration, the Ecole de Guerre and the
INSEAD. He was a founder member of the man-
agement control institute ICG – Institut de controˆle
N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57 39
de gestion, and the research centre for company
managers CRC (Centre de recherche et d’e´ tudes
des chefs d’entreprise) at Jouy en Josas. He also
represented Pechiney at the French national
employers’ association CNPF, and was a member
of the accounting standards board CNC (Conseil
National de la Comptabilite´ ). He was the author
of many publications and without a doubt one of
the founding fathers of budgetary control in
France.
Robert Satet is another central character, whose
focus on budgetary control dates from the 1930
Geneva congress. In 1927, he was a member of the
Taylor Society, and in the same period he was
involved in the creation and leadership of the
CNOF. From 1930, he was the Head of the Scien-
ti?c Management department at the UIMM, a pow-
erful branch of the employers’ organisation CGPF.
According to the October 1936 issue of the Bulletin
du CNOF, Satet was Head of the legal department
of the Eastern France Foundry and Mines commit-
tee (Comite´ des Forges et Mines de fer de l’est de la
France). He was also a lecturer at the EOST (Ecole
d’Organisation Scienti?que du Travail), a school
in?uenced by the CNOF (Boltanski, 1982, p. 189;
Collective, 1965), at Louvain University in Belgium,
and at France’s Ecole Nationale Supe´ rieure des PTT.
He presented case studies on budgetary control to
the business administration training centre CPA
(Centre de Perfectionnement a` l’Administration des
a?aires), and released at least one publication
through the CEGOS in 1942. Finally, these skills
were directly placed at the service of companies
through consulting activities. He was very open to
international views and travelled, probably several
times, to America where he visited local ?rms and
examined their management system (Satet, 1942).
He turned all these contacts and experiences to the
collective bene?t, with no less than 57 publications
over the period 1926–1958. Many of these publica-
tions concern budgetary control. His major work
is his book of 1936, which concerns precisely that
technique.
Paul Loeb of Alsthom provides a further exam-
ple of these avant-garde managers, acting as a liais-
ing agent or intermediary between the di?erent
worlds: the world of in-?rm management practices
and techniques, and the worlds of socio-political
ideals and social reform in reforming groups. Loeb,
a graduate of France’s prestigious higher education
establishment, the Ecole Polytechnique, brought
budgetary control to Alsthom (one of the pioneer-
ing ?rms) in the 1930s, in conjunction with Auguste
Detoeuf.
16
He was involved in the work of the
CEGOS and the CNOF, and in 1956 published a
dense two-volume review whose preface sets out
the author’s social ideals.
The central role in the spread of budgetary con-
trol played by professional associations participat-
ing in thought on reform during the 1930s (which
would give rise to ideas implemented after the
war), and by the avant-garde managers who came
into contact with the ideas debated there, is an ini-
tial re?ection of what we have called the ‘‘double
enrolment” of budgetary control and social reform.
It is very di?cult in certain authors’ work to sepa-
rate what relates to their professional interest in a
management practice they wish to promote from
what relates to their hopes of building a better
world through that practice.
After this general overview of the places and peo-
ple central to the spread of budgetary control, we
can legitimately focus our discussion on a limited
number of writings mainly derived from those
sources (Table 4).
We now analyse the content of the writings
collected, beginning our exploration by addressing
the socio-political challenges mentioned by our
authors in texts that are all designed to promote
budgetary control. This is a ?rst level of magni?-
cation of their issues and enrolment, as major eco-
nomic and social problems, nothing less, are what
budgetary control is supposed to be able to help
solve.
The economic and social problems evoked by social
reformers and promoters of budgetary control
The people who developed budgetary control in
France thought it could provide the answer to sev-
eral problems under debate during the period. Three
types of problem were discussed in reforming cir-
16
A fellow graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique which he entered
in 1902, Detoeuf was the ?rst president of Alsthom from 1928 to
1940. He was very open to modernist currents and in 1936 gave a
famous speech to the X-Crise group (which was central to the
reforming ideas of the period) entitled ‘The end of the free
market’ (La ?n du Libe´ ralisme). He was also one of the founders
of the journal Les Nouveaux Cahiers formed to campaign for a
single, compulsory union bringing together employees and
employers under corporatist ideas. But Detoeuf is no doubt best
known for his collection of aphorisms written at the end of the
1930s, Propos d’O.L. Barenton, con?seur(The words of O.L.
Barenton, confectioner). (Kuisel, 1981).
40 N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57
cles. (1) First, economic problems. The depression
and the resulting social problems lay at the core of
thinking in the 1930s, and still preyed on people’s
minds after the war. In addition to these issues,
the post-1945 period had to face the problems of
rebuilding a country worn out by war. (2) Second,
there are moral problems, both before the war
because the economic system is considered inhu-
mane, and after the war due to the Fascistic drift
of the Vichy government, and collaboration with
Nazi power by certain factions of the French elite.
(3) Finally, the threatening presence of the Soviet
Union and an active workers’ movement spurred
on the search for a third way between the free-mar-
ket economy, accused of having caused the crisis
and the associated tragic social and political conse-
quences, and State socialism.
We now look more closely at these issues that
preoccupied the reformers of the period, and show
that the literature on budgetary control echoed
those concerns. To ‘‘sell” budgetary control, the
authors in our corpus go further than simply listing
its advantages in terms of economic e?ciency at
individual ?rm level; they also present it as a more
general solution to the problems encountered by
the French economy on condition it is relatively
widespread, thereby re-shaping capitalism and
enabling it to endure through self-regeneration, in
keeping with the ‘‘third way” plan. Budgetary con-
trol thus appears as the central management tool,
actualizing in practice the second spirit of capital-
ism, which was to emerge from the period’s histori-
cal turmoil.
Reforming the economy to avoid ever experiencing
another such crisis
The major source of preoccupation in the 1930s
was of course the economic depression, which came
late to France but nevertheless had a lasting impact
on the country (Braudel & Labrousse, 1979). This
situation opened the way for strong criticism of
the free market economy,
17
which was accused of
sowing disorder and creating an uncontrollable,
unpredictable situation. In continuation of this
diagnosis, the social reformers took economic
reform as their primary objective. The industrialists’
instinctive reaction was to form cartels which
destroyed almost all competition. Some considered
this a temporary development until market mecha-
nisms could come back into operation, while others
saw it as a new way of organising the economy so as
to make it controllable. Rationalisation, careful, sci-
enti?c study of production, and development of
plans, particularly at industry sector level, were also
seen as means of taming the market’s destructive
mechanisms.
The desire to reform the economy so that no such
crisis could ever happen again is clear in the output
of the budgetary control promoters of the 1930s.
Pulvermann (1930) resituated budgetary control in
this e?ort to control capitalism: ‘‘the budget should
be de?ned as a search to plan and take measures to
use all the serious data obtainable. In this way, we
can distinguish and limit the speculative aspects of
capitalism”. Schmidt (1930) also thought that bud-
getary control would be a guard against future cri-
ses. ‘‘The development of the budget concept,
particularly the long-term investment budget cover-
ing whole decades, is a response by the capitalist
economy to the reproach ?rst expressed long ago
by representatives of the socialist economy, that it
lacks foresight in the event of crises, which can only
be avoided by such a method”.
Table 4
Central sources of budgetary control promotion
Books Congresses and events Journals Organisations and professional associations
Satet (1936) Geneva, IIOST (1930) Mon bureau CNOF
Rimailho (1936) Bulletin du CNOF CEGOS
Loeb (1956) Jean Benoit’s Lectures Hommes et Techniques Commissariat au Plan
CEGOS (1953) (1950s) (CEGOS) (General Planning Commission),
Parenteau (1959) AFAP- (Productivity Missions)
17
Self-adjusting economic mechanisms appeared to have gone
o? the rails, and many observers, including Detoeuf, could not
accept mass employment as the cost of modern economic
adjustment. J. Coutrot, for example, complained: ‘‘There is a
kind of deep-seated ferocity among these economic anarchists. . .
typical of the recluse who washes his hands of human su?ering and
accepts and even applauds the operation of impersonal mechanisms
that crush others” (quoted by Kuisel, 1981, p. 106).
N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57 41
National reconstruction
Present from the 1930s onwards, the desire to
establish a renewed economic system was mingled
after the war with the imperative of national recon-
struction. In the late summer of 1944, France found
itself in a critical situation, much more di?cult in
fact than in 1919. An intensive investment policy
was decreed, partly to the detriment of consump-
tion. Low-cost production in massive quantities
was also necessary to meet the needs for basic prod-
ucts rapidly. The French economy was on course for
industrialisation by forced march.
A Keynesian-style growth-based economic policy
was adopted. In contrast to the prewar Malthusian
policies, it was founded on productivity gains
achieved through Taylorism, and fairly shared
between employers and employees, a mode of
expansion considered Fordist by the regulation the-
orists (Aglietta, 1976; Boyer & Mistral, 1978). US
aid to European countries contributed to this recon-
struction, but came with a certain number of struc-
tural reform demands attached. For the US,
securing capitalism was important in this Europe
where the Soviet grip had suddenly tightened. This
external aid also required organisation to distribute
it as best appropriate to current and future needs.
To oversee the whole operation, a major planning
e?ort began, involving French businesses. They sent
representatives to talks with ministers for joint prep-
aration of ?ve-year plans. Planning thus became a
language shared by business and the State.
18
The
productivity missions were part of this great project.
There was an intensive propaganda campaign to
support the productivity drive and the American
example.
The ?rst chapter of the accountants’ mission
report (OECCA, 1951) goes into great detail on
the characteristics of the modern US enterprise,
and the other chapters are devoted to various
aspects of US ?rms’ organisation and accounting
techniques, particularly budgetary control. This ?rst
chapter strikes up the Fordist creed of the time:
‘‘High salaries”, ‘‘mass production” and ‘‘production
lines” are presented as early as page 8 as the pillars
of the new economic organisation. The report stres-
ses that ‘‘American employers consider that if they
are to survive in a free economy, it is their responsibil-
ity to develop productivity while at the same time
increasing total wages paid to blue-collar workers
and guaranteeing job security. These general ideas
are commonly expressed in the industrial and com-
mercial communities, as well as in the universities,
where the professors cooperate in the development
of a modern philosophy of the industrial world.”
Recovery from the moral disorder
In the post-war world, the desire to reform the
economic system was accompanied by another pri-
ority: to recover from the ‘‘moral disorder” of the
Third Republic and the Vichy government. As early
as 1944, ‘‘the psychological climate in which eco-
nomic reform occured was one of struggle. What
began as an international war against Nazism
increasingly became a civil war against Vichy and
its supporters. The internal enemy, in economic terms,
which was held heavily responsible for the defeat of
1940 and accused of being the mainstay of collabora-
tion, was capitalism in general and the trusts in par-
ticular.” (Kuisel, 1981, p. 188). There was a need
to ‘‘build a better, or more moral, institutional life”.
This would involve a break from the IIIrd Republic,
but also the Vichy government, considered ‘‘stained
with national disgrace”. What was required was
‘‘transcending liberalism, which had brought egotism,
disorder, and backwardness under the republic, and
destroying corporatism, which had ended in subjuga-
tion under Petain. Alongside the ‘‘hardline” republic
would be an organised, yet free, economy dedicated
to human dignity, economic equality, growth and
the national interest” (Kuisel, 1981, p. 188).
The question of the moral rebuilding of society
even found its way into texts on budgetary control:
what budgetary control would foster was not only a
better economic system, but also a more moral,
humane system. In his book published in 1956, for
instance, Loeb stated that: ‘‘It is not an exaggeration
to claim that a genuine budgetary humanism has been
born. (. . .) Man wants to control the forces which for
so long have enslaved him. Through budgeting, he
intends henceforth to direct the economy, put all the
resources of nature at his service”. Loeb again,
speaking to CEGOS (1953) declared that budgetary
control ‘‘is inseparable from the profound social
18
In contrast to a bureaucratic approach where needs are
decided ‘‘at the top”, in Jean Monnet’s mind the aim was to
associate the interested parties in order to acquire persuasive
force. To identify the country’s needs, a new national statistics
o?ce (INSEE) was set up to replace the former Statistique
Ge´ ne´ rale de France (SGF) (Desrosie`res, 1998; Volle, 1977). The
construction of national accounting is part of the same move-
ment. The story has been told by the actors involved, in Fourquet
(1980). Their experiences give a fairly good idea of the desire for
reform at the time, and its tentative trial-and-error progress.
42 N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57
preoccupations, since production is made for men, not
men for production: the enterprise must endeavour to
guarantee stability of employment for its personnel,
to free them from the constant worries of employees,
their fear of having no work, to avoid periods when
they are overburdened with overtime being followed
by short-time rationing of work.”
Jean Benoit (1954), at a conference, raised several
themes related to this new economic humanism,
with explicit reference to budgetary control: ‘‘the
aim is not only to provide economic subsistence and
fairness in form, but to foster the ful?lment of individ-
ual initiatives;” ‘‘man does not live on bread and
wages alone, but on aspirations and ideals;” ‘‘The
company manager must not only be a constructor of
products, but also and perhaps above all a constructor
of men.”
The search for a ‘‘third way” and a new form of
cooperation between employers and employees
As early as the 1930s, social reformers began to
search for a ‘‘third way” between economic liberal-
ism and state socialism. The main concern in the
1930s for employers, whether progressives or not,
was to ?nd a solution to the failure of capitalism
and the development of socialism, which was seen
as ideologically unacceptable. The arrival in power
in 1936 of the Front Populaire and its nationalisa-
tion programme only made the need for an alterna-
tive solution all the more glaring. The period of
crisis was also a time when the con?ict of interests
between employers and employees, theorised by
Marxism, became more obvious and more worry-
ing. This intensi?ed the search for new forms of
cooperation between employers and employees. Of
course that preoccupation was nothing new (it is
found for example in the writings of F.W. Taylor
and more generally in the Fayolian and Taylorian
movements), but budgetary control was seen as able
to make a contribution. Its promoters reformulated
Taylor’s idea that ‘‘rational study” could bring
about progress in employer–employee collaboration
and a move towards fairer division of the value
created.
Emile Rimailho (1936) explained how budgetary
control is connected with scienti?c management in
this intended collaboration: ‘‘the study and elemen-
tary preparation of work was where supervisors
learned about working in collaboration; budgetary
control is where managers learn about working in col-
laboration”. Edmond Landauer (1930) explained at
considerable length that analysis of variances from
budget was ‘‘the only rational form of employee
pro?t sharing”, because ‘‘budgetary control of costs
provides every participant in production with an exact
budget for the part of the task that is his. Going over
budget or staying within budget depends only on him,
his e?orts and his intelligence”. (. . .) Therefore, with
no fear of ever making an error, everyone can be
attributed a percentage of the saving. (. . .) Many
industrialists know that high salaries increase the pur-
chasing power of the masses, and are useful for indus-
try prosperity. However, they are afraid to grant
them, for fear of increasing costs. The system of
granting bonuses for savings on budgeted allowances
removes this fear, since wage increases are inexorably
associated with falling costs (. . .). In giving concrete
expression to the interests of job providers and job
takers, budgetary control is thus not only an instru-
ment for economic prosperity, but also (maybe ?rst
and foremost!) a means of ensuring peaceful indus-
trial relations.” Furthermore, ‘‘Based on scienti?-
cally established standards [budgetary control] can
reward each person’s e?orts according to merit, and
provides a fair, practical solution to the controversial
problem of access to a fair share in the company’s
pro?ts”.
19
After the war, the new Fordist economic regime
was seen as an acceptable solution by the people
who before the war had been seeking a third way.
The old problematics had also taken on new rele-
vance because of the power of the communist move-
ment, which had emerged strengthened from the
war years, and the violence of contemporary politi-
cal and union contestation, which some feared
would result in communist rule. It was urgent to
provide guarantees of the intention to share the ben-
e?ts of future growth, and to ?nd a new equilibrium
for employer–employee relations within the
organisation.
In accordance with this preoccupation, the writ-
ings on budgetary control were careful to explain
how budgetary control is capable of resolving
the class con?ict, and often professed their belief
in the Fordist solution, which dominated most
19
Penglaou (1935) can also be quoted for the 1930s. ‘‘In this new
technique, the forecast, based on highly detailed programmes and
budgets, gives rise to a sort of work charter, which will be the ?rm’s
law for the period concerned. . . Budgetary control becomes a
management method that entails interdependence of all the ?rm’s
component bodies, bringing about coordination, and harmony
between resources.”
N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57 43
discourses at the time. We can quote again the
report issued by the 1951 OECCA mission: ‘‘It
appears that the USA is seeing the blossoming of a
new manager class (. . .) which, fully conscious of its
responsibilities and prerogatives, does its best to inte-
grate and harmonise its e?orts with those of the work-
ing class, with the general goal of greater productivity
and promoting well-being”.
Jean Milhaud, in a lecture on budgetary control
in 1952 (CEGOS, 1953), explained we are in: ‘‘a
time when constructive e?orts are being made at all
levels of the company to underline the eminent place
of man in production and make him an enlightened
partner in management’s action (. . .) We also know
that only those enterprises with a budget system that
branches out to its extreme can calculate the immedi-
ate repercussions of simpli?cations proposed at the
level of a particular department or workstation, and
thus distribute some of the expected savings to the
originators of the suggestions, according to their pol-
icy. In such a case, ?nancial and human management
techniques are interdependent.”
Thus, the writings in our corpuses point up the
economic and social problems which were under
debate during the period. We now show that our
authors did not simply consider budgetary control
as a potential solution to the problems discussed.
On a deeper level, the evidence suggests some of
them supported the models of society recommended
by the various reforming currents. This calls for a
more detailed examination of those currents.
Reforming currents
Three main con?gurations of reforming ideas
have been identi?ed from the work of the historians
and sociologists. These ideas seek to supply
responses to the various challenges described above.
All three are intricately interrelated, borrowing
themes from each other while remaining individu-
ally distinct. As Boltanski (1982) and Kuisel
(1981) point out, these three currents are more in
continuum than in opposition. The ideas are in fact
closely related, but expressed di?erently. The ?rst
(corporatism) disappeared with the war, but the sec-
ond (planisme, then technocracy) adapted and suc-
cessfully lasted beyond 1945. The third, which is
di?cult to classify – we shall call it ‘‘economic
humanism” – sprang up in reaction to war, and also
doubtless in response to American in?uence. Often
dominated by a minority elite, these new philoso-
phies sought new foundations for economic growth,
and grew in importance with the rise of new social
groups such as the middle classes. This was a genu-
ine ‘‘work of ideological rede?nition”, mainly con-
cerning the bourgeoisie who were looking for a
‘‘third way”.
Corporatism
Corporatist doctrine places the collective interest
at the centre of society; it is thus in direct opposi-
tion to free market capitalism. Already deeply
rooted in European culture (Cotta, 1984), this
movement must be seen in the light of the rise of
fascism, which took place at the same period in
Germany and Italy. Corporatism’s big idea was
the recreation of corporations, similar to the former
guilds (me´ tiers), professional bodies made up of
individual practitioners of the same craft, regardless
of class, i.e. workers and employers together.
‘‘These bodies would assume the task of arbitrating
industrial disputes, ?xing work conditions, controlling
prices, and determining the quality and even the quan-
tity of the output. And in a corporatist state a system
of professional representation elected an economic
assembly that bypassed party politics and strengh-
tened the republic’s competence in economic a?airs”
(Kuisel, 1981, p. 103). Nevertheless, for corporat-
ists, the state was not supposed to direct the econ-
omy, as only corporatist organisations were
considered competent to do so.
Corporatism, which stems from Catholic social
doctrine and the Christian critique of materialism
and individualism, can be seen as a reaction to other
concepts of society that were put forward at that
period, namely the free market economy, accused
of generating chaos, sel?shness and materialistic
attitudes, and Marxism, criticised for stirring up
class hatred and destroying social solidarity. Trades
unionism was not considered any more acceptable,
since it expressed the same class struggle. Corporat-
ism advocated replacing the working class revolu-
tion by a spiritual revolution in which the di?erent
social classes, once organised, should work together.
Turning its back on the impersonal nature of large-
scale capital, the corporatist society would be based
on the small businessman and his patriarchal vir-
tues: personal responsibility would be directly
invested into the job to be done, the capital and
the jobs would be in the same hand, and employ-
ment relations would be magically transformed by
paternalism (Boltanski, 1982). The aim was thus
to restore social order and harmony within business
organisations. ‘‘They were social conservatives who
44 N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57
wanted to revive such cherished values as hierarchy,
family, discipline, class conciliation, religion and
work” (Kuisel, 1981, p. 102).
One of corporatism’s most noticeable impacts
during the 1930s lay in the support it provided to
restrictive practices and cartels between producers.
Rather than being governed by market forces, the
economy could be managed collectively in an opti-
mal manner. Cartels were not a new phenomenon
under corporatism, but corporatism provided them
with justi?cation. This ideological current reached
its zenith under the Vichy regime, which ‘‘o?cialised
as State ideology, and in its institutions gave concrete
form to, most of the themes dear to the catholic engi-
neers of the nineteen thirties” (Boltanski, 1982, pp.
132). After the war, some of these ideas persisted,
but with profound transformations.
References to the corporatist ideas turn up regu-
larly in the texts examined, for example in Musil
(1930): ‘‘The use of its methods [i.e. the methods of
budgetary control] and the acceptance of its princi-
ples engender the right mental attitude for better
cooperation and better coordination of individual
e?orts.” Similarly, Bourquin (1937) believed that
budgetary control could help structure the French
industrial scene in a purely corporatist logic: ‘‘These
standard prices (. . .) can be compared with informa-
tion supplied by competitors, thus providing a solid
basis for negotiation when an agreement is introduced
between producers. Practical experience shows that
the ?rst measure to be taken is to develop standard
prices, which will be useful for all members of a cor-
poration, enabling them to see the situation as it is
and talk the same language”. Pulvermann (1930),
after a long discussion of the di?culty of establish-
ing forecasts, related this e?ort to cartelisation: ‘‘In
this matter, it is down to science to supply at least a
few fundamental rules, and it falls to the unionsand
the cartels, working together on an international level,
to consolidate the situation by practical means”.
The IIOST congress of 1930 shows that for the
reformers (represented here by Serruys, a member
of the Economic Committee of the Society of
Nations (SDN)), the link between the corporatist
approach and the budget is clear; he explains that
‘‘there are collective methods which should be fol-
lowed, there are e?orts to be made by the unions
and professional bodies. Budgetary control must leave
the purely individual domain of one factory’s experi-
ence and become the concern of a whole profession,
or a whole sector of industry.” (Serruys, 1930). At
the same congress, meanwhile, Satet proposed set-
ting up ‘‘national groups for budgetary control”, say-
ing that the CNOF could take charge of this for
France. The di?erent countries’ national committees
would then be federated into ‘‘international budget-
ary control groups organised by industry”.
Planisme and technocracy
While corporatism sought to overcome” the
anarchy of individualism” by, as Kuisel (1981, p.
102) puts it, ‘‘reconstituting the natural cells of social
organism”, the planners were looking for a way ‘‘to
manage the economy”. They wanted to preserve the
free market system by adapting it and reducing the
social tensions it generated. They believed that sys-
tem needed structural reform to combat the violent
economic disorder created by market capitalism.
The main tool of this new order was economic plan-
ning. Kuisel (1981) distinguishes two major trends
in planisme: neo-liberalist planners and syndicalist-
socialist planners.
20
These trends form the basis
for the interventionism that took place after 1945.
Technocracy is another expression of planisme;
the term only appeared after 1945. It refers to a cer-
tain concept of decision-making (Kuisel, 1981),
according to which there is only one right solution,
that can be found by experts. This is shown primar-
ily in the desire expressed by certain intellectuals to
introduce a ‘‘planned” sector, which would contrib-
ute to e?cient regulation of the economy. Manage-
ment of this sector would be entrusted to a ‘‘body of
men governing the pace of the economy without hav-
ing any personal interest in any of the enterprises, but
guided only by team spirit as regards the people under
them” (Coutrot, 1936). For its advocates, this plan-
ning would make it possible to establish ‘‘fair
prices”, make accurately e?cient use of production
resources and achieve ‘‘the distribution of prosper-
ity” (Coutrot, 1936).
The development of technocracy and planisme in
the 1930s continued after the war with French-style
planning and the Keynes-inspired policies that were
in operation at the time. But in contrast to the
‘‘back to the land” policies of the Vichy regime,
20
‘‘While the ?rst embraced planning to perfect capitalism, the
second did so to build socialism” (p. 105). These two currents had
several points in common: reason, controls, and planning were to
replace the natural mechanisms of the market. Neo-liberal
planisme attracted managers, engineers and high-ranking civil
servants, people who valued forecasting, controls, self-discipline
and cooperative networks. Socialist trades unionist planners, on
the other hand, were in favour of nationalisations, rigorous
interventionism and trades unions.
N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57 45
the postwar reformers chose a ‘‘forced march”
industrialisation approach to ?rst rebuild the coun-
try, then catch up with other industrial nations. The
ideas were quite similar to pre-war thinking, except
that technocracy was now totally converted to Key-
nesianism,
21
and there was massive importation of
American concepts of management.
The planners’ ideas, meanwhile, are visible, to
take one example, in Coes (1930): ‘‘in adopting the
budget procedure, we are thus recognising the impor-
tance of looking far ahead, and showing that we
believe in the possibility of forecasting, and the prac-
tical usefulness of forging ahead in the light of what
has been planned”. Serruys (1930), as already seen
for corporatism, appears to have combined it with
planisme: ‘‘In short, a budget clashes with the initia-
tive of the organized collective operations. (. . .) And
this is how a budget that is controlled, studied
together (. . .) cannot only be a part of bene?cial, con-
certed private initiatives, but must also contribute to
recti?cation, one could almost say guidance, of the
nations’ economic policies”. In the opening pages
of his book, Ludwig (1930) writes ‘‘the introduction
of the budget in an industrial operation (. . .) requires
the innovation of a new economic guiding principle, a
principle that assimilates the advances of economic
science, and is opposed to the laxity of old commer-
cial tradition”. Reitell and Lugrin (1936) also
explain that thanks to budgetary control we move
‘‘from anarchic freedom to a freedom directed, sup-
ported and controlled by bodies with the necessary
capacities and technical equipment”.
In fact, regarding ?rms’ internal organisation the
planners’ ideas are so close to those held by the pro-
moters of budgetary control that it is hard not to see
this as a result of the double enrolment we seek to
describe. The central importance attributed to the
governmental technologies of budget and budgetary
control by the planners, and the hopes of regulating
capitalism held by promoters of budgetary control,
appear to be superimposable discourses. Develop-
ment of budgetary control bene?ted to the full from
the passion for planning that a?ected all French
reformers of the time, whether neo-liberal, corporat-
ist or socialist. All appeared to agree on at least this
point. Implementation of State planning under the
Vichy government, then, in a di?erent way, by the
Keynesian postwar state, can be seen as part of this
major trend. It is di?cult not to see this craze as an
e?ect of competition from ‘real socialism’ countries,
whose planning projects are adopted to abolish cap-
italism, not to control it.
22
Economic humanism
The most obvious American contributions to
French business concern the methods for social con-
trol and settlement of con?ict within the enterprise.
This is re?ected in the importation of human
resource technologies inspired by the Human Rela-
tions movement, which recommended increased
decentralisation of decision-making within the orga-
nisation as a means of increasing managers’ respon-
sibility and motivation. Perhaps a better term would
be ‘‘economic humanism”, a phrase coined by Cou-
trot (1936), as the ideas developed after the war
were not totally new, and it is not always easy to dis-
tinguish between theories brought in from America
and those taken up from the 1930s. The standard
example of economic humanism in action in the
1930s is the case of the shoe manufacturer Bata,
often analysed and referred to in reforming circles
before the war, but without attracting great interest
in the business world. It was introduced by Hyacin-
the Dubreuil
23
in a book published in 1936, and was
21
1945 saw the establishment of the ENA, Ecole Nationale
d’Administration, designed to replace the Ecole Libre des
Sciences Politiques as supplier of high-ranking civil servants.
Meanwhile in economic teaching, Keynesian ideas were taking
over from the doctrinary free market ethic (Kuisel, 1981, p. 215).
22
Penglaou (1931), for instance, thought it necessary to explain
that budgets are not the ?rst stage towards socialisation of
production resources typical of a planned economy such as the
USSR. Pulvermann (1930) also discusses the theme that making
forecasts was long considered a suspect activity, because it was
seen as socialism.
23
Hyacinthe Dubreuil is one of the period’s most interesting
characters. A bluecollar worker and former CGT union member,
he began travelling in 1927 and was engaged as a mechanic at
Ford in the US (in Detroit). This experience was the basis for his
bestselling book Standards, which placed him at the centre of
debates on scienti?c management. Dubreuil appears to have had
a dual-faceted personality: on one hand, he was a popular
investigator into workers’ conditions, and on the other a
marginal but persistent campaigner for a new organisation of
workshops that could achieve ‘‘workers’ liberation” (Ribeill,
2003). He argued for the creation of economically and ?nancially
‘‘autonomous workshops”, where the worker could learn about
work management and receive ‘‘the means of ful?lling his
existence on all three levels, economic, intellectual and moral,
for otherwise hopes of achieving social peace will always be in
vain”. From 1930 to 1938, Dubreuil held o?ce at the Interna-
tional Labor Organisation. His numerous writings left a mark on
the entire period.
46 N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57
taken up by certain other authors (e.g. Landauer,
Coutrot, and others). The fact that it was taken
up by promoters of budgetary control is a sign of
the in-depth knowledge some of them had of con-
temporary reforming ideas. Thomas Bata’s major
contribution lies above all in his management of
personnel. His ‘‘key idea was to work on the working
class mentality so as to take it from an employee men-
tality to an entrepreneur mentality” (Landauer,
1933). He introduced a supervisor for each work-
shop, who worked for the company but formed an
autonomous team with his workmen. The various
workshops were linked by a system of internal
transfer prices. The aim was to make employees as
autonomous as possible, putting them ‘‘in the boss’s
shoes”, using the method successfully developed in
France by Lucien Rosengart and known as the
‘‘small businessmen method (me´ thode des petits
patrons)”. Bata’s principles consisted of giving more
responsibility to actors in the business. Rimailho
(1936) and Satet and Voraz (1947) noted the impor-
tance of these autonomous groups in the healthy sit-
uation at Bata. This example was almost forgotten
after the war even though the issues it raised became
much more widespread, and formed the new man-
agement ideology.
The notion of responsibility centres, largely
absent from business practices in the 1930s, devel-
oped in the 1950s as organisations’ desire for greater
decentralisation grew, and is one consequence of the
emergence of these ideas. All the thought systems of
the traditional employer class were challenged. The
?nal objective, however, remained the same: to suc-
ceed in increasing cooperation between employers
and employees. In the words of Boltanski (1982),
the goal was to ‘‘achieve what corporatism had failed
to do, but by other means” (p. 160).
The big new idea of the postwar period, decen-
tralisation, is present in the texts we studied. As J.
Benoit remarked (1956, author’s capitals): ‘‘the most
e?cient management method once a business reaches
a certain scale is THE METHOD WHICH SEEKS
AND INVOLVES APPROVAL AND PARTICI-
PATION BY THE LARGEST POSSIBLE NUM-
BER OF ALL INTERMEDIATE LEVEL
EMPLOYEES, the method in decentralised form.”
(p. 9). He tirelessly repeats this theme in his lectures,
for example in 1958 at the Sorbonne: ‘‘We also need
an organisation based on decentralisation and trust.
(. . .) We need to organise matters so that the hum-
blest employee still retains a certain feeling of free-
dom, initiative, responsibility and dignity.” (p. 6).
Similarly, for Guillaume (1958), ‘‘budgetary control
can also be used as a canvas for general application
of the principles of human relationships and public
relations” because it is based on delegations of
power and authority, and can establish bottom-up
and top-down communication along the hierarchy.
It should not be forgotten that the Fordist creed
and pro-American management propaganda were
widely put forward by our corpus authors in the
1950s, often on returning from productivity
missions.
Thus the ideas and solutions proposed by the
reform currents are also expressed in the texts writ-
ten by the promoters of budgetary control in each of
the two periods. Evidence of this is found whatever
the level used for analysis of double enrolment,
whether it be certain authors’ direct membership
of reforming circles (Section ’Promoters of budget-
ary control and their relationships with the reform-
ing networks’), presentation of budgetary control as
a solution to the major issues addressed by the
reformers (Section ‘The economic and social prob-
lems evoked by social reformers and promoters of
budgetary control’), or the degree to which the bud-
getary control promotional discourse is embedded
in discursive worlds even more strongly marked by
the reforming currents (the prewar corporatist or
planners’ idiom or the postwar Fordist creed at
macro-economic level, presented in the form of eco-
nomic humanism in micro-economic practices) (Sec-
tion ‘Reforming Currents’).
The political rationalities that budgetary control
is likely to serve evolve with time, but it is also strik-
ing that as the subjects of concern to reformers and
promoters of budgetary control changed over time,
their conception of budgetary control also altered.
We now show the malleability of the de?nition of
a governmental technology as it is penetrated by
changing political rationalities.
Budgetary control: a concept that evolves in
association with reforming ideas
It is impossible to separate the socio-political
from the technical. Programmatic aspects are incor-
porated and rei?ed in what is subsequently pre-
sented initially as purely technical. Budgetary
control is gradually transformed according to the
programmes it is intended to serve, while as a tech-
nical object retaining a certain independence of the
N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57 47
discourse, and also putting up some resistance to its
enrolment. The work of adjusting its characteristics
and uses to new political rationalities is a social
work in its own right, requiring new investment in
form (The´venot, 1984) likely to bring about change
in the form and ?x it for a while. When this remod-
elling occurs, the interpenetration of the political
and the technical is clear, for example from our
selected texts. Next, the form may circulate while
apparently devoid of any ideology. Once the black
box is closed, the traces of the various enrolments
that transformed it are obliterated (Latour, 1987).
This phenomenon, in our opinion, explains why
for management tools, most discourses remain in
the technical register: cruising speed is reached for
a tool that can now circulate in a form that needs
no further explanation, defence or justi?cation. Peo-
ple simply need to be taught how to use the tool,
without needing to understand the underlying rules
and to adhere to the underlying values. At least two
meanings of budgetary control existed successively
over the period studied.
A rationalization tool
The 1930s de?nition of budgetary control
stressed its usefulness as a rationalisation tool. This
rationalisation was coherent with both the planners
and the corporatist approach. It was the corner-
stone of the third way sought by reformers, and in
keeping with the Taylorian schema, it was hoped
it would take society beyond the class struggle.
Rationalisation of industry was to be achieved by
the planning e?ort demanded by budgetary control
and coordination at national level. It was generally
considered that when problems are considered in a
rational way, it is possible to solve them. This desire
to create rational order is found in most of the texts
from the 1930s. Satet (1936), for example, supplies
the following de?nition: ‘‘budgetary control based
on an accurate examination of everything that can
be expressed in ?gures in a ?rm, whatever its nature,
form or importance, consists of strict analysis of past
events and forecasts of probable events, in order to
establish a rational plan of action.” Behind this view
of budgetary control, there is a very mechanical
dimension: it is the tool used to rationalise manage-
ment’s tasks, just as time and motion studies had
resulted in rationalisation of workers’ tasks. Some
went as far as to consider budgetary control as a
way of introducing a kind of Esperanto for all com-
pany members. For example, Commesnil, in the
CNOF review, expressed his hope for the emergence
of a new common language and standard values.
Classi?cation of accounts on the same basis within
the company, he argued, should make it possible
to make compare its various departments. The
internal coordination made possible by budgetary
control could be extended to coordination external
to the company.
A motivation tool
After the Second World War, budgetary control
began to play a broader role. No longer con?ned
to a merely technical dimension, it also took on a
‘‘human resources” dimension. It was now a man-
agement tool that would foster personal ful?lment
in the workplace by granting greater freedom to
the individual. However, its original dimensions
remained: budgetary control was still seen as a tool
for forward planning, coordination and optimisa-
tion. Now, though, it was seen more frequently than
before as a means of motivation for managers. The
major source of this motivation was the decentralisa-
tion of authority structures, which developed in par-
allel with budgetary control. The as yet unknown
idea of raising motivation through ?xing objectives,
and the debates about the right level of objective-?x-
ing needed to motivate senior employees were only
to be added to this picture in the 1960s.
De?nitions of budgetary control also became ful-
ler. In 1951, the report produced by the accoun-
tants’ productivity mission stated that budgetary
control was ‘‘a set of coordinated forecasts for a lim-
ited period of time, generally the year, established so
as to allow early identi?cation of operating conditions
and Pro?t and Loss account items, dividing these
forecasts up in such a way that it is possible to appoint
a person responsible for each one, systematic reconcil-
iation at ?xed periods, generally monthly, of the
actual results in the various management areas with
the forecast results, speedy communication of the
related information not only to Management, but to
the persons responsible, down to fairly low levels in
the hierarchy” (OECCA, 1951). In the list of the
‘‘aims” of budgetary control given by the authors
of the same report, the foreground was no longer
occupied by the issue of rationalizing the economy.
The following aims were listed ‘‘in order of impor-
tance”: ‘‘(1) For Management, it is a convenient
way of decentralising responsibility without forfeiting
48 N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57
control; (2) It is the simplest way of practising man-
agement by exception at all levels of the hierarchy
and for all management factors; (3) It is a means of
showing everyone the road Management intends to
follow in directing the company. (. . .) It is the means
of indicating in detail to each co-worker what is
expected of him, and thus making the necessity of per-
sonal e?ort an accessible notion; (4) It is a very reli-
able way of detecting certain errors in organisation,
particularly duality of responsibilities.” (p. 36)
We have just seen that the history of budgetary
control is closely related to the incorporation into
economic practices of ideas that originally germi-
nated in reforming circles. The number of such cir-
cles was on the increase in the 1930s in response to
what was analysed as a deep-seated crisis of capital-
ism. The renewal of budgetary control was possible
after the war through in-depth reforms and a shift in
state policies. In business, a new style of manage-
ment developed, which altogether gave rise to what
Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) identify as the sec-
ond spirit of capitalism. Their work is devoted to
the transition from the second to the third spirit
of capitalism, and the picture it paints of this second
spirit based on a corpus of management texts dating
from the 1960s corresponds to a fairly late period,
with Management By Objectives appearing as the
central device, while it had not yet been mentioned
in the 1950s texts studied for this article. And yet
it is well known that MBO were added to budgetary
control practices. Budgetary control is not an innoc-
uous tool in the history of 20th century capitalism.
It occupies the position of one of the central man-
agement tools that can be used to perform the sec-
ond spirit of capitalism. This partly explains why
it developed in parallel to the growing success of
reforming ideas of the 1930s. The materials col-
lected for this article also provide an exceptional
opportunity to further understanding of the gradual
transition from the ?rst to the second spirit of
capitalism.
Gradual transformation of the spirit of capitalism as
seen through the budgetary control tool
The spirit of capitalism of a period, Boltanski
and Chiapello (2005) have suggested, should always
promise three things: security, stimulation and fair-
ness. Below, through the texts of our corpus, we
examine how these three promises were a?ected
over the period studied, generating a signi?cant
change in the spirit of capitalism.
The promise of security
In the ‘?rst’
24
spirit of capitalism, security was to
be guaranteed by the very form of the economic fab-
ric, woven from small family run businesses building
on local networks and trust of the kind found in
family relationships. Security was to be achieved
through protection of personal relationships within
the family in its broadest sense (if the employee-
employer relationship is taken into account). In big-
ger enterprises, active paternalism by the company
director was to provide the workers with a form
of protection.
But this form of security, speci?c to the ‘‘?rst”
spirit of capitalism, was shattered in the inter-war
period, which saw the development of ?nancial cap-
italism and large companies that turned their backs
on the family business capitalism, and also the eco-
nomic crisis of the 1930s, resulting in a signi?cant
fall in paternalistic protection. The reformers did
not all have the same solutions to recommend in this
situation. Corporatism was more interested in the
old form of the promise of security, and its propos-
als were along the lines of abolition of international,
impersonal ?nancial capitalism in order to go back
to capitalism founded on small-businesses and per-
sonal relationships. In contrast, the planners and
Taylorian economists thought it was possible to
build a new form of security through rational orga-
nisation of labour and planning. In general, discus-
sions of budgetary control, even when the authors
were totally in agreement with the corporatist idea
of coordination by profession, tended to give prior-
ity to the new form of security.
The speakers at the 1930 conference frequently
underlined the promise of security conveyed by bud-
24
This article talks of the ‘‘?rst”, ‘‘second”, and ‘‘third” spirits
of capitalism with reference to Table 1, which only concerns late
capitalism. Under no circumstances is it suggested that the ?rst
spirit referred to in this way is the spirit of the original capitalism,
the only one of interest to M. Weber. Although Boltanski and
Chiapello (2005) follow Weberian tradition in placing the
ideologies underlying capitalism at the heart of their analyses,
their use of the concept of the spirit of capitalism departs slightly
from the standard approach. For Weber, the concept of spirit is
part of an analysis of the ‘‘types of practical rational behaviours”,
and ‘‘practical incentives to action”, which because they make up
a new ethos, have made it possible to break with traditional
practices, develop calculative mentalities, remove moral condem-
nation of pro?t and start the process of unlimited accumulation.
Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) do not aim to explain how
capitalism came about, but to understand how in various periods
it has succeeded in attracting the actors needed to generate pro?t.
N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57 49
getary control. One example is Jadot (1931), who
noted: ‘‘I think that if budgetary control had been
used everywhere in worldwide industry, we would
not have seen the irrational excesses of production
observed in most industries, and consequently the cur-
rent crisis would not have been so catastrophically
intense as it is”. Coes (1930), meanwhile, explained
that ‘‘from one essential standpoint, the main aim of
budgetary control is to provide a means of control,
to restrain and stabilise ?uctuations in business vol-
umes, which would otherwise be irregular.” Serruys
also remarked (1930): ‘‘Once we have shown public
opinion (. . .) that it is necessary to make forecasts,
and adjust the activity to those forecasts, perhaps
we will prevent these wide ?uctuations.”
These hopes in the construction of a new form of
security through planning took concrete form in the
postwar period. The Keynesian state adopted the
philosophy of planning, and the advocates of bud-
getary control were thus recommending a tool that
was perfectly suited to the ideas of the public
reformers. The spectre of the mass unemployment
experienced in the 1930s was still haunting all
e?orts to construct a new form of security in the
1950s. For example, Loeb (in CEGOS, 1953) dis-
cussed his desire to avoid unemployment for as
many as possible. Budgetary control would provide
a solution, since better rationalisation of production
resources would mean that the labour force could
be used in a more regular manner: ‘‘and in this
way, we will be able to eliminate, or at least reduce
the number of, those notices posted outside the
employment o?ces advertising for workers to enter
the labour market, and which most unfortunately
bring to mind their counterparts, the notices in shops
showing the items they want to sell o? on their
buyer’s market. It will be a long-term e?ort, and
the company must be able to pursue this strategy
using its own resources, without ignoring the e?orts
made by the government.”
For the National Productivity Committee
(Comite´ National de la Productivite´ ), budgetary con-
trol was more than just a technical end for compa-
nies. It was a political, micro-economic arm in the
struggle against the inactivity forced on employees
(unemployment) that was generated by a lack of
rationalisation. Their pamphlet ‘‘The Budget, Your
Best Tool” (1952) stressed the regular production
levels attained thanks to budgets and forecasting.
The idea is to replace adjustments, which take place
to the detriment of employees, by greater rational-
ity. Coordination and regular ?ows should make it
possible to avoid occasional periods of unemploy-
ment, and also costly overtime. If the worker
can work in peace and con?dence, in the knowledge
that full employment is guaranteed, then he partici-
pates more actively and contributes to improved
productivity.
Jean Parenteau (with the help of the CEGOS, of
which he was a member) published one of the most
important postwar books on budgetary control. In
his introduction to the third edition in 1959, he jus-
ti?ed the use of new control techniques: ‘‘The collec-
tive enterprise represents, more than a pool of capital,
a set of social interests: for a certain number of people
and families, living conditions are linked to those of
the company, and if it fails, employment and the pov-
erty it causes are the immediate consequences. The
company manager has a duty to maintain the level
of activity in his workshops, and he can only achieve
this by very close supervision of his enterprise.
Accounting is the most e?cient way for him to exer-
cise such supervision.”
The promise of stimulation
The ‘‘?rst” spirit of capitalism declared its faith
in technical progress, and promised ful?lment for
the entrepreneur. This promise appears to have
remained unchanged in the 1930s, even though, as
we have seen, the spirit of capitalism had already
begun a transformation in its proposals concerning
security.
Taylorian engineers continued in the tradition of
the Saint-Simonians, referring to previous experi-
ments in French-style management.
25
The enthusi-
asm of the 1930s was generated by the ever greater
progress being achieved by mankind in controlling
the world through reason, science and technical
knowledge. From this point of view, budgetary con-
trol in the 1930s carried a promise of stimulation
totally in keeping with the ?rst spirit of capitalism.
For example, Coes (1930) explained that: ‘‘When a
man has accepted the idea that the adoption of a bud-
get is not there to restrict or con?ne him, but that it is
in fact a way of making him master of his own task
instead of being dominated by that task, then we have
removed one of the major points of resistance to the
budget”.
25
See, for example, the case of Rimailho mentioned by
Lemarchand (1998), or the case of Coutrot described by Dard
(1999).
50 N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57
This ambition to control the world through sci-
ence, including management science, was much less
marked in the years following Second World War:
the horrors of Nazism and the atomic bomb had
disillusioned the champions of technical knowledge
and the liberation of mankind through science. The
promise of stimulation thus had to be renewed and
altered in the 1950s. During that period, the prom-
ised momentum was expected to come from decen-
tralisation of responsibilities and personal
ful?lment in the workplace. The seeds of this new
promise of stimulation were already present in the
1930s, through the example of the Czech company
Bata. Whereas it had not interested a very wide
audience in the thirties, the situation was di?erent
after the Second World War. The productivity mis-
sions provided one opportunity to develop this new
promise of stimulation, through importation of
American human resource technology and France’s
discovery of Fordism. Returning from a mission to
the US (OECCA, 1951), the French accountants
were highly enthusiastic about American business:
‘‘There is no con?ict between social welfare and the
company’s interest in survival. Both coexist in har-
mony, both obeying the same rational rule, both are
measured at the same time and by the same stan-
dard.” Another example can be found in J. Benoit’s
often-quoted speeches: for him, the accountants and
controllers were to be at the heart of economic
renewal, and its use to serve humanity.
The promise of fairness
A dual form of fairness underpinned the ?rst
spirit of capitalism. First, emphasis was placed on
a market type of fairness (Boltanski & The´venot,
2006), a type of social Darwinism where the most
competitive survives. This form of fairness is coher-
ent with the free market ethic prevalent in late 19th
century/early 20th century France. The market was
believed to be self-regulating, and underperformers
were eliminated. This form of fairness cohabited
with a highly contrasting ‘‘domestic” fairness (Bol-
tanski & The´venot, 2006), which emphasised ?delity
to tradition and respect of the father ?gure. People
were treated according to their position in the
domestic hierarchy and their respect of bourgeois
precedence. The dutiful son inherited his father’s
place because he was the heir, not because he was
competent, as an ‘‘industrial” fairness might
require, nor because he was the most competitive,
which would be in keeping with market type
fairness.
This curious alliance contained in the promise of
fairness of the ?rst spirit of capitalism was greatly
a?ected by the growing criticism of the free market
economy in the 1930s, a great motivation for seekers
of the ‘‘third way”. Domestic fairness, meanwhile,
was never really challenged – although that was to
change signi?cantly in the 1950s.
Over the whole period, a new promise of ‘‘indus-
trial” fairness – characteristic of the second spirit of
capitalism – was gathering force. This was built on a
hierarchy of competence, selection and promotion
of the best performers, an ideal social order capable
of legitimising the new social group formed by pro-
fessionals and managers (cadres), which by de?ni-
tion, could not claim legitimacy by ownership as
grounds for its authority.
The seeds of this new promise were visible in cer-
tain texts of the 1930s. Musil (1930), for instance, in
an article titled ‘‘Cooperation, manager training,
wellbeing of the Nation”, declared that: ‘‘Budgetary
control methods have a point of excellence: they pro-
vide criteria that can be used to assess merit, and
therefore enable the manager to appreciate to what
extent the individual assumes his responsibilities suc-
cessfully and continuously.” Landauer (1930) was
also sensitive to the new form of fairness which
should result from budgetary control: ‘‘Based on sci-
enti?cally established standards, it [the budget]
makes it possible to reward everyone’s e?orts accord-
ing to merit, and provides a fair, practical solution to
the highly controversial problem of fair distribution of
corporate pro?t.”
The period following the second world war
extended this promise (the great advantage of bud-
getary control was, according to J. Benoit, that it
‘‘replaced human judgment, which is always awkward
and delicate, with judgement by ?gures”), but added
to it the a?rmation of a more important place for
Man in the production process, and a promise of
fairer distribution of the fruits of growth, which
budgetary control was believed to facilitate.
Analysing the shift from the ?rst spirit of capital-
ism to the second, based on the texts on budgetary
control, we see that the transformation did not hap-
pen at the same pace for the three promises of secu-
rity, fairness and stimulation. The ?rst spirit appears
to have reached a crisis when its promise of security
turned out to be incapable of standing up the depres-
sion of the 1930s, and market type fairness was chal-
lenged by the failures of the free market system
N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57 51
revealed by the same crisis. The solutions for each of
these dimensions placed priority on rationalisation
systems, whether in the form of Taylorism or plan-
ning. These new systems were seen in the 1930s as
capable of calming the newly emerging anxieties
concerning security and fairness, while being a natu-
ral extension/continuation of the ?rst spirit in their
enthusiasm for scienti?c knowledge and con?dence
in technical progress. Security by forward planning,
and fairness by calculation were contemplated, but
these proposals were only e?ectively implemented
after the war. It was also only after the war that
the promise of stimulation was reconstructed around
the central concept of personal ful?lment in the
workplace through decentralisation of responsibili-
ties, and the break from the ?rst spirit of capitalism
was thus ?nalised. The transformations in the con-
cept of budgetary control during the 1960s, not cov-
ered in this article, continue the de?nition of this
stimulation dimension with the MBO system and
the quality of the new meritocracy.
Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) suggest that the
shift from the second spirit of capitalism to the
third also took place at di?ering paces for the var-
ious promises. However, this time, the stimulation
promises has been the most signi?cant, the ?rst to
enter the crisis and the ?rst to remould its propos-
als, while the new promises of fairness and secu-
rity are taking their time to settle into practical
form.
Conclusion
This article has tested a certain number of
hypotheses on the relationships between the dissem-
ination of a management technique and the reform-
ing ideologies of a period, in continuation of the
work by Miller and O’Leary (1987, 1989, 1994),
Miller and Rose (1990), Miller (1990), Rose and
Miller (1992) who discuss the relationships between
political rationalities and governmental technologies.
These relationships are placed here in a dialectic
schema of transformation of the ideologies that
accompany capitalism (Boltanski & Chiapello,
2005), which attributes an important role to the crit-
ical discourses on capitalism and the work of social
reformers to change it. The framework for change in
society is based on the sequence: (1) crisis, (2) criti-
cism of capitalism-reform proposals, (3) incorpora-
tion of those proposals and transformation of
capitalism. In the case under examination, budget-
ary control was promoted as a solution, which –
generalised to all companies and associated with
suitable national economic policies – would be able
to discipline capitalism and bring about both secu-
rity for workers and a merit-based form of fairness
in the workplace. This formula, which lies at the
core of justi?cations speci?c to the second spirit of
capitalism (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005) gained
resonance in people’s minds as the models of society
recommended by 1930s reforming think-tanks
were increasingly accepted, and practices evolved
accordingly (intensive training in management tech-
nologies imported from the US after 1945, dissemi-
nation of budgetary control practices, reform of
structures at State level, etc).
This consubstantiality of budgetary control and
the mentality typical of the second spirit of capital-
ism also explains why it was so easy to observe the
double enrolment process: the tool was adopted by
reforming currents as a solution to the problems of
their time, and the reforming discourses were used
for its promotion.
We were able to describe this enrolment at dif-
ferent levels: ?rst, we saw that certain major think
tanks had taken the lead in publications on bud-
getary control, and that the principal promoters
of budgetary control were themselves members
of these reforming groups. We also showed that
not only did the writings promoting this manage-
ment technique tend to present budgetary control
as a solution to the economic, social and moral
troubles under debate in reforming circles, but
often there was a rhetorical background consisting
of the models of society or organisations recom-
mended by the main reforming currents (at least,
by those that historians have taught us to con-
sider as pioneering arenas in the search out for
a third way between economic liberalism and
State socialism, and where the policies imple-
mented ?rst by Vichy, then by the Keynesian
postwar state, were devised).
As the material we have worked on for this study
consists mainly of public discourses, we have been
unable to demonstrate directly the in?uence of these
discourses on the practices and mentality of anony-
mous practitioners; at best, we can hypothesize. The
?rst change in practice is the increasingly wide-
spread adoption of budgetary control by ?rms over
the period, which we know from other work was a
real observed phenomenon. This spread took place
in a context of high mobilisation for reforming pro-
jects, although we have no way of knowing whether
the technique would in fact have spread without this
52 N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57
mobilisation, by dint of its own e?ciency or other
factors, such as power struggles. Nevertheless, the
theoretical analysis frameworks we use tend to take
discursive activity seriously, and consider that it
plays at least a cognitive role (in?uencing actors’
modes of interpretation) and a political role (legiti-
mising certain forms of order to the detriment of
others). For this reason we can also hypothesize that
the practice of budgetary control itself changed with
the shift in its de?nition from a rationalization tool
to a motivation tool. Longitudinal case studies on
budgetary control practices and devices and their
evolution in various ?rms could provide informa-
tion on the way political discourses are translated
(or not translated) into the particular human/non-
human arrangements studied (Latour, 1987). We
hypothesize that beyond the singularity of the situ-
ations studied, it would be possible to ?nd similari-
ties between the arrangements of a given period as
long as the situations studied belong to the same
institutional con?guration, i.e. are fairly closely
linked by devices and networks that produce and
reproduce it and which are inextricably technical,
political, cognitive and moral.
This study asks the question of the uneven
importance of various tools, according to the insti-
tutional features of capitalism at a given time and
in a given place. Some tools, such as budgetary con-
trol, appear to ‘‘sign” the mentality of a period bet-
ter than others. This remark is akin to the work of
Bryer (2000a, 2000b) highlighting the existence of
an accounting signature that evolves with certain
states of the economic system, and also the work
by Lordon (2000) on the eminent role currently
played by ‘‘shareholder value” and its various mea-
surement instruments in today’s regulation of capi-
talism. According to our own analysis framework,
certain management instruments are more impor-
tant than others, because they equip the trials a soci-
ety deems central at a given moment (Boltanski &
Chiapello, 2005; Bourguignon & Chiapello, 2005).
The way they organise these trials is a sign of the
preoccupations that engendered the tool, and of
speci?c points of interest in the criticism, which
tends to focus on certain problems that vary with
the period, as well as a set of particular values and
representations – in other words, a mentality. It
can be hypothesised that the more central a manage-
ment tool is, the more its establishment has involved
intense discursive activity and an enrolment of
socio-political rhetoric going beyond arguments of
economic e?ectiveness alone, and the more it has
taken place under the in?uence of a systemic trans-
formation of the economic system.
These considerations also make it possible to
understand the close interdependence between
the concept of a practice (or the de?nition of a
management tool) and the most predominant
social and economic political rationalities of a
period. In the case of budgetary control, we have
seen how it was loaded with changing program-
matic aspirations, gradually becoming a tool for
increasing responsibility and motivation, having
started as a project marked by a desire to ration-
alise.
Various frameworks now exist to analyse the
varying forms of capitalisms existing in di?erent
countries at a given time, or at di?erent times in
the same country (see for example Boyer, 2002;
Crouch & Streeck, 1996; Hall & Soskice, 2001).
On the whole, however, these analyses tend to
ignore both the world of ideas (although they
study and compare the institutions, they tend to
neglect ideologies as social institutions) and the
role of governmental technologies. Some account-
ing research is itself inspired by these frameworks,
e.g. Puxty, Willmott, Cooper, and Lowe (1987),
but not much has examined the institutional role
of accounting devices in speci?c economic con?g-
urations. This article has attempted to show that
it is possible to extend analyses of di?erent types
of capitalism into analyses concerning the move-
ment of political ideas, and that accounting prac-
tices could also ?nd a place in such a research
programme.
Acknowledgements
Previous versions of this article have been pre-
sented at the seventh Interdisciplinary Perspectives
on Accounting Conference in Madrid (2003), the re-
search seminar of the sociology department of the
Universita` degli studi di Milano-Bicocca (2003),
the research seminar of the doctoral School in Man-
agement of the University of Paris XII-Cre´teil
(2005) and a seminar organized at the Institut fu¨ r
Sozialforshung in Frankfurt (2006) where we at-
tracted a certain amount of pertinent criticism from
attendees. We have had opportunity to discuss all or
parts of this article with Thomas N. Tyson (our dis-
cussant in Madrid 2003), Trevor Boyns, Yannick
Lemarchand, Ge´rard Koenig and Patrick Friden-
son. The comments of two anonymous reviewers
were also very valuable and made us improve a lot
N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57 53
the paper. Our thanks are extended to all. We are
also indebted to Ann Gallon for her much appreci-
ated editorial help.
Appendix: Corpuses of reference texts
A brief description of the corpus referred to is
given below, but for reasons of space bibliographi-
cal references are only provided for the texts cited
in the article.
1930s
The starting point for budgetary control in
France and Europe is certainly the international
conference held in Geneva from July 10th–12th
1930 on the theme of budgetary control organised
by the IIOST. There are two sources for consulting
the speakers’ presentations made to the Geneva
conference:
– IIOST (1930), Confe´ rence internationale du con-
troˆle budge´ taire, Gene`ve, rapports de la confe´-
rence, 2 volumes available for consultation at
the French Bibliothe` que Nationale.
– Special issues summarising the conference was
also published in the business journal Mon
Bureau in August and September 1930, quoting
the following:
Coes (1930), Di?culte´s et re´sistances fre´quem-
ment rencontre´es dans l’instauration de la
proce´dure budge´taire, Mon bureau, Septem-
bre, pp. 389–392.
Jadot (1931), Le controˆ le et la gestion des
entreprises a` l’aide du budget, Mon bureau,
May, pp. 291–293.
Landauer E. (1930), Les bases d’un budget des
de´penses, Mon bureau, August, pp. 349–350.
Musil M.F. (1930), Principes et me´thodes du
controˆ le budge´taire – Ses aspects ge´ne´raux,
Mon Bureau, Septembre, pp. 398–399.
Pulvermann H. (1930), Les organismes cent-
raux de l’administration industrielle et le con-
troˆ le budge´taire, Mon Bureau, Septembre, pp.
400–401.
Schmidt M. (1930), Le budget d’investisse-
ment, les a?ectations de capital et le syste`me
budge´taire, Mon bureau, August, pp. 351–352.
Serruys D. (1930), Le syste`me budge´taire et
l’organisation e´conomique nationale et inter-
nationale, Mon Bureau, September, pp. 395–
397.
Other sources for the 1930s
Ludwig H. (1930), Le controˆle budge´ taire dans les
entreprises industrielles, Librairie franc ßaise de docu-
mentation G. Claisse, Paris.
Satet R. (1930), La Confe´ rence Internationale du
controˆle budge´ taire, IUMM, Gene`ve.
Penglaou C. (1931), ‘‘Le budget conside´re´ comme
base de la de´termination et du controˆ le des cre´dits
accorde´s par les banques”, Mon Bureau, Octobre
et novembre, p. 621 and 716.
Saint-Pulgent (de) T. (1934), ‘‘Le controˆ le budge´-
taire aux grands magasins du Printemps”, Ce´gos,
Document OA7, 8 p.
Penglaou C. (1935), ‘‘Le controˆ le budge´taire –
Son introduction dans les entreprises”, L’Organisa-
tion, Feb, 65–68.
Satet R. (1936), Le controˆle budge´ taire, Dunod,
Paris.
Reitell C. et Lugrin J.P. (1936), ‘‘Le controˆ le des
frais d’exploitation par la me´thode des taux stan-
dards et du budget variable”, Bulletin du Comite´
National Belge de l’Organisation Scienti?que, Oct,
265–275.
Bourquin M. (1937), Me´ thodes modernes de
re´ partition et de controˆle des frais ge´ ne´ raux dans
l’industrie, Dunod, Paris.
Mareuse M. (1938), Le controˆle de gestion dans
les entreprises, Dunod, Paris.
About the case of the Czech shoe manufacturer
Bat’a (or Bata), we quoted:
Coutrot J. (1936), L’humanisme e´ conomique – Les
lec ßons de juin 1936, Editions du centre polytech-
nicien d’e´tudes e´conomiques, Paris.
Dubreuil H. (1936), L’exemple de Bat’a. La libe´ -
ration des initiatives individuelles dans une entre-
prise ge´ ante. Paris, B. Grasset
Landauer E. (1933), L’oeuvre de Thomas Bat’a,
Bulletin du CNOF, june, 177–185.
Rimailho E. (1936), L’organisation a` la franc ßaise,
Paris.
1950s
We quote the following report produced by the
productivity missions:
OECCA (1951), La comptabilite´ au service de la
productivite´ aux Etats-Unis – Rapport pre´liminaire
de la mission franc ßaise des experts comptables,
AFAP-OECCA, Paris.
Among all the works of Jean Benoit, we quote:
54 N. Berland, E. Chiapello / Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009) 28–57
Benoit J. (1954), Controˆ le a` l’usage de la direc-
tion, Xe International congress on scienti?c man-
agement (Congre` s international de l’organisation
scienti?que), Bulletin du CNOF, May, 22–25.
Benoit J. (1956), La pre´vision de le controˆ le
budge´taire, Workshop, January 20th–21th,
Rennes, 29 p. (in Pechiney archives 001–7-30994).
Benoit J. (1958), La gestion des entreprises et son
e´volution, A lecture given at La Sorbonne Uni-
versity, (in Pechiney archives 001–7-30994).
Many others conferences are stored in the Pechi-
ney archives 001–7-30994., the ‘‘Jean Benoit Lec-
tures”, for instance:
1951. La productivite´ , expe´ rience dans l’industrie,
A lecture given at the Institut des Hautes Etudes
de De´fense Nationale.
1952. Le controˆle budge´ taire franc ßais en 6 expe´ ri-
ences. CEGOS workshop of May 5th–7th 1952.
Benoit gave three talks, on ‘‘Budgetary control
in the United States”, ‘‘The management indica-
tors used by general managers in the US” and
‘‘The role of the management controller” 1953.
Internal memo from Pechiney.
1955. A general manager’s tableau de bord,
Speech given by Raoul Vitry, CEO of Pechiney,
but written by Jean Benoit.
1958. Re?ection on the organisation, A lecture
given to the Naval Warfare College (Ecole de
guerre navale). This lecture was given several
years in succession until Benoit’s death in 1962.
1960. A large ?rm’s experience in organisation
and methods. Army organisation committee
(Comite´ d’organisation de l’arme´ e de terre).
1961. Lecture to the Regional productivity com-
mittee, Lyon.
Other sources for the 1950s
Comite´ National de la Productivite´ (1952), Votre
meilleur outil, le budget – Le budget par la comptab-
ilite´ pour la productivite´ , Socie´te´ auxilliaire pour la
di?usion des e´ditions de productivite´, Paris.
Charmont C. (1952), Un homme nouveau dans
l’entreprise, le controˆleur de gestion, Hommes et
Techniques, May, 23–26.
CEGOS (1953), Le controˆle budge´ taire, 6 expe´ ri-
ences franc ßaises. Paris,Hommes et Techniques.
Loeb P. (1956), Le budget de l’entreprise, Paris,
PUF.
Guillaume M. (1958), La gestion budge´ taire des
entreprises, Anvers, Editions Nauwelaerts.
Parenteau J. (1959), Controˆle de gestion par me´ th-
ode budge´ taire, Paris,Hommes et Techniques.
Quotations from historical material for periods not
included in the 2 corpuses.
Satet R. (1942), Le controˆle budge´ taire – Cours de
l’Ecole d’Organisation Scienti?que du Travail, Ecole
d’Organisation Scienti?que du Travail, Paris.
Parenteau, J. (1945), Calcul des prix de revient et
comptabilite´ industrielle, Paris: Cegos.
Parenteau J. (1949), La comptabilite´, le controˆ le
budge´taire et les prix standards, Hommes et Tech-
niques, 53 Mai, 27–29.
Collective (1965), EOST, l’Ecole d’Organisation
Scienti?que du Travail, Bulletin du CNOF, special
issue, CNOF, Aouˆ t-septembre.
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