User:Jeleveque/Armand Hatchuel

Armand Hatchuel, (born 1952), is a researcher and professor of management science and design theory at the Centre for Management Science, Ecole des Mines de Paris. A pioneer in the study of the cognitive and organizational dynamics at play in innovative enterprises, he is behind the development of several theories aimed at re-establishing management science as a fundamental science of collective action.

In particular, along with Benoit Weil, he invented C-K theory, a design theory that models creative reasoning and which has been behind multiple scientific and industrial breakthroughs.Armand Hatchuel also developed a theory of prescribing relationships to explain collective learning processes and the crises that they encounter in markets and organizations. He unified his work on rationality and the formation of collectives in his axiomatic theory of collective action. This theory clarified the concept of a "management rule" as an emancipating combination of rationality and responsibility, the history and ancient origins of which the author explored in depth. The results led to a new theory of the enterprise (developed with Blanche Segrestin), which contributed to the enactment of a French law on the enterprise (the Pacte Law of 2019) and, in particular, the establishment of the French société à mission (profit-with-purpose corporation) status.

A chapter of the Palgrave Handbook of Organizational Change Thinkers , as well as a chapter of "Les Grands Auteurs en Management de l'innovation et de la créativité" are dedicated to his work.

Academic Career
Armand Hatchuel holds an engineering degree (graduated in 1973) and a PhD in management science from MinesParisTech (École des Mines de Paris). His academic career has taken place primarily at MinesParisTech/Paris Sciences et Lettres University, first as an assistant lecturer (1974-1985), then as a 2nd class professor (1984-1994), a 1st class professor (1995), and finally an exceptional class professor(2007). From 1998 to 2010, he was also the deputy director of the Centre for Management Science (today, the team of UMI 9217).

In 1995 he created the design engineering programme at MinesParisTech, which he directed up until 2009. In 2009, along with Benoit Weil, he founded and coordinated the Chair of Design Theory and Methods for Innovation. In 2014, he contributed to creating the Chair of Enterprise Theory, Forms of Governance, and Collective Creation, directed by Blanche Segrestin and Kevin Levillain.

From 1998 to 2006, Armand Hatchuel was a permanent guest professor at Chalmers University in Gothenburg and at the Stockholm School of Economics, where he participated in the FENIX Programme (business and knowledge creation).

Positions held

 * Member of the French National Committee for Scientific Research of the CNRS (Section 37) from 1991 to 1995.
 * Member of the board of directors of MinesParisTech (2006-2012)
 * French representative to the board of the European Academy of Management (2005-2009).
 * Member of the board of the International Product Development Conference (IPDMC) since 2002, the doctoral workshop of which he co-chaired from 2008 to 2019.
 * From 2009 to 2014, he created and supervised the Design Society’ s Special Group on Design Theory, with Prof. Yoram Reich.
 * He is vice-president of the association of Friends of the Centre culturel de Cerisy-la-Salle.

Knowledge dynamics in collective action
Based on his studies (mathematical models of optimization and planning) on innovative industries and organizations (1976-1986), Armand Hatchuel distanced himself from the organizational theories of the 1980s (the functionalist, bureaucratic, strategic, economic, and political schools) because they were incapable of describing technical or social innovation dynamics. He posited that this inability was a result of the fundamental models common to all of these approaches:


 * 1) decision rationality (choices, games, power relations), which cannot describe processes of invention and discovery;
 * 2) the inadequate representation of knowledge (whether scientific, technical, or social), its division into disciplines, and the collective conditions for creating it and legitimizing it;
 * 3) and a static and ahistorical repertoire of actors and rights.

In his opinion, these postulates explain the scarcity of studies on design activities (research, engineering, expertise, etc.), despite the fact that throughout the 20th century these activities underwent unprecedented growth and transformation. He moreover maintains that these activities are the basis of the accelerations and industrial crises of the 1990s-2000s. In 1992, his work L’expert et le système (Experts in Organizations), co-authored with Benoit Weil, filled this void. It confirms the importance of the cognitive dynamics at work, revealing the crises that they trigger both for design actors, who have to face an intensification in the renewal of knowledge, and for companies themselves, because the efficiency and productivity of design activities are impossible to address with current accounting, economics, and financial theories, which have been designed for production activities.

C-K design theory: a model of creative rationality
These results led Armand Hatchuel to look for an alternative to classic decisional rationality capable of shining light on the logic of collective innovation processes. In 1996, this project resulted in C-K design theory, co-created with Benoit Weil, which would later be further developed with Pascal Le Masson.

C-K theory refutes one of the main principles of the decisional school, and specifically the assumption that a set of known alternatives exists and that the only problem resides in the reasoning behind which one of them to choose. This model is excessively restrictive, because when none of the known alternatives are satisfactory, it actually becomes rational to introduce "imaginary alternatives" that are partially unknown, and which actors can attempt to "design" by assigning the attributes that make them more desirable than known alternatives. These imaginary alternatives are the “concepts” or “C” in C-K theory. They are unknown and desirable objects relative to a state of available knowledge, “K”. They will exist only potentially, following the completion of a design process, the conditions and operations of which C-K theory describes. This leads to the managerial and organizational principles necessary for any innovative group.

C-K theory had a significant impact on industry, helping it to revise the notion of R&D and laying the foundations for engineering and governance, specifically for innovation. In 2014, the magazine "Industries et technologies" ranked Armand Hatchuel among its top twelve contributors to technology.

From a scientific viewpoint, C-K theory allows one to rigorously describe both old and contemporary innovation regimes. It formally establishes the relationship between design and scientific discovery, and contributes to a contemporary epistemology. It has also opened up new possibilities for the study of the psycho-cognition of creativity.

Theory of prescribing relationships, rational myths, and the shaping of collective learning processes
The creative rationality characteristic of innovative groups goes hand-in-hand with a demanding intensification of communication that is incompatible with relationships of domination or a rigid division of work. Power relations and functional roles are reshaped or mutually adjusted by the actors. The idea is to share knowledge as well as the concepts (desirable unknowns) to be made to exist in the future. Armand Hatchuel argues that these desirable unknowns are paradoxically "rational myths" because they are an enigmatic combination of imagination and reasoning. The former philosophical and political status of this concept needed to be clarified in relation to the concepts of a utopia, an ideal, or a fiction. This clarification sheds light on the interrelated collective learning processes necessary for collective action. These processes require relationships of "reciprocal prescription". Such relationships are created through progressive mutual acknowledgement and through management devices that organize appropriate solidarities. In their simplest forms, prescription relationships are commonplace. They emerge whenever "an actor"’s (the prescriber’s) capacity for expertise and advising is recognised by "an other" in a way that reduces a concerning lack of knowledge or pacifies a conflict, through means other than violence. Prescribing relationships are neither hierarchical relationships nor market relationships. Yet they play a major and often unrecognised role in business transactions. Armand Hatchuel proposed a theory of prescribers’ markets compellingly confirmed by the arrival of e-commerce. More generally, transformations and crises of prescribing relationships (crises of authority or crises of truth) reveal a fundamental feature of collective action, namely the inseparability of knowledge and relationships. Concretely, this abstract principle can be formulated as the inseparability of rationality and responsibility in collective action.

The history of collective action and management rules
Armand Hatchuel combines the development of theories with historical research. The development of new theories reveals past dynamics that were unable to be perceived or researched without a new conceptual lens. This is what allowed him to provide a new interpretation of the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henri Fayol, and what allowed design theory to revisit the history of design departments and research laboratories. These genealogical explorations clarify the concept of " management rules ", which consist not in maximizing individual benefit but in constructing an action that is both efficient and responsible with respect to others. A management rule is not a constraint to limit collective action but an instrument or device making this action possible because rules protect and pacify the relationships or knowledge induced by collective action. This management rules approach intersects with Michel Foucault’s theory of knowledge/power devices and his theses on governmentality .However, Armand Hatchuel sees management rules as being more universal because they affect all prescribing relationships and not only those of power or governance. Recently, along with Benoit Weil, he started work on Ancient Rome. In this respect, Moira Crété has shown that the concept of "bene gesta" or "good management" was developed by Cicero to describe effective "and" responsible management of action to cope with the multiples crises of the Roman Republic. The principle of "bene gesta" prevailed across the Roman Empire for three centuries. Therefore, the history of management rules is a significant marker of the transformations and conflicts that shape the joint construction of societies and knowledge.

Re-founding the enterprise, sociétés à mission, and environmental threats
Since the turn of the twentieth century, enterprises have constituted one of the major dynamic forces of civilization. Far more than mere amalgamations of capital and work, thanks to management rules they have been powerful devices of collective creation that have transformed lifestyles, social roles, science, and techniques. Until the 1970s and the recent globalization, enterprises contributed to collective prosperity, workers’ rights were constantly improving, and their impact on nature appeared to be limited. Starting in the 1990s, globalization, "the industrialization of the shareholder base", and corporate governance codes imposed a shareholder-oriented vision of the enterprise which led to the unwinding of the management rules of the 1970s, with consequences for life at work. As a result of its extension to banks, the shareholder doctrine contributed to the 2008 financial crisis. At the Collège des Bernardins, Armand Hatchuel and Blanche Segrestin put this "great deformation" of the enterprise into perspective, drawing on previous theoretical corpuses. They showed how corporate law had allowed the dogma of shareholder value to prevail, and that voluntary CSR commitments had been unable to prevent the Rana Plaza scandal. Hatchuel and Segrestin advocated for the re-establishment of corporate law on a different basis and, in particular, the creation of "société à mission" (i.e. profit-with-purpose corporation) status. This research contributed to the French Pacte Law (Articles 169 and 173 ) enacted in May 2019. Armand Hatchuel argues that, faced with the major threats constituted by climate change, government intervention will be essential but not enough; the engagement of enterprises, now written into the law, will also be necessary.

Management science, fundamental science: a post-Hegelian world
The axiomatic theory of collective action leads to a revision of some of the philosophical positions underpinning political and liberal modernity. It is common to think that government is the only entity with the legitimacy to define the general interest and to embody universal ethics, as Hegel maintained. From this point of view, any civil society intermediary group (a company, an association) is relegated to individual interests and deemed to be incapable of contributing to common ethics. This doctrine fails to acknowledge the fact that any creative collective action can generate a regulatory system of ethics expressed both in the knowledge and in the relationships that it produces and propagates. Moreover, this local ethics may produce management rules that spread throughout society; for example, it was not government that produced the scientific spirit or the rules for piloting a plane. The axiomatic theory of collective action therefore leads to a reconsideration of the role of government and groups in a post-Hegelian world, in other words, in a world where each individual is able to participate in defining joint responsibilities. In such a world, Armand Hatchuel advocates the idea that management science should become a fundamental science, because it is both a science of the means and a " science of the ends" of collective action.

Main publications

 * 1992 : L’expert et le système,(with Benoit Weil) Economica (English translation 1995, Experts in Organizations, de Gruyter)
 * 2001 : Les nouvelles fondations des sciences de Gestion (with Albert David and Romain Laufer), Vuibert Fnege (2001, 2e édition. 2008) et 3e edition en 2013, Presses des mines.
 * 2002 : Les nouvelles raisons du savoir, (with Thierry Gaudin), Colloque de Cerisy, La Tour d'Aigues, Ed. de l'Aube, Coll. "essais".
 * 2003 : Le libéralisme, l’innovation et la question des limites (with R. Laufer), L’harmattan.
 * 2006 : Gouvernement, organisation et Gestion : l’héritage de Michel Foucault, (with Ken Starkey, Eric Pezet and Olivier Lenay) Presses de l’université Laval.
 * 2006 : Les processus d’innovation (with Pascal Le Masson and Benoit weil), Hermés Lavoisier.
 * 2007 : Les nouveaux régimes de la conception. Langages, théories, métiers. (with Benoit Weil), Colloque de Cerisy, (Vuibert 2007, 2nd édition, 2014, Editions Hermann)
 * 2010 : Strategic management of innovation and Design, (with Pascal Le Masson et Benoit Weil) Cambridge University Press.
 * 2012 : Refonder l’entreprise, (with Blanche Segrestin), Seuil, La République des idées.
 * 2013 : The new foundations of management science (with Albert David and Romain Laufer), Presses des Mines.
 * 2013 : L’activité Marchande sans le marché? (avec Franck Aggeri and Olivier Favereau ), Colloque de Cerisy, Presses des Mines.
 * 2014 : Théorie, méthodes et organisation de la Conception, (with Pascal Le Masson and Benoit Weil) Presses des Mines.
 * 2017 : Design Theory, (with Pascal Le Masson and Benoit Weil), Springer.

Awards

 * Economist of the Year Prize - 1996 (category: Organization and Management)
 * Medal of l’École des Arts et Métiers
 * Member of the French Academy of Technologies
 * Fellow of the international Design society
 * Fellow de la Creativity and innovation Management Community.
 * Commander of the Ordre des Palmes académiques
 * Chevalier of the Legion of Honour
 * Member of the Economic, Social, and Environmental Council of Morocco (category: expert).

Media
Armand Hatchuel has been a columnist for the french daily newspaper Le Monde since 2004 for the management and business life sections. He publishes about one column per month.