User:Jeleveque/sandbox/Armand Hatchuel

Armand Hatchuel (born 1952), is a researcher and professor of management science and design theory. Most of his research has been carried out with other researchers at the Centre for Management Science, MinesParisTech.

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 (for Concept-Knowledge design 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 a civil engineering degree (P70, 1973) and a PhD in management science from Mines ParisTech (École des Mines de Paris). His academic career has taken place primarily at MinesParisTech/PSL Université, 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 UMR 9217).

In 1995 he created the design engineering programme at Mines ParisTech, 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 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-directed 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: i) decision rationality (choices, games, power relations), which cannot describe processes of invention and discovery; ii) the inadequate representation of knowledge (whether scientific, technical, or social), its division into disciplines, and the collective conditions for creating it and legitimizing it; and iii) 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.[iii] 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.

[iii] Special issue E&H, editorial + papiers