Nowadays, lots of corporations are facing problems to change their way of conducting their strategy. How will management sciences face this new challenge and succeed to produce a scientific knowledge independent from organizations leaders and changes which are implemented? Moreover, in order to follow one of the initial projects of this academic discipline, will this knowledge be able to have an efficient action on actual management processes? These questions are not new, but they have been reopened because of the crisis context and the growing critics against “lootish managers” or emerging management practices (stock-options, burden of finance on corporate strategies, plant relocations).
Frequently, one way of answering these issues in management science is to go back to history and to develop the idea that management is as old as humanity’s birth because human beings have always needed to organize their collective action. Nevertheless, from an historical and anthropological point of view, there is no evidence that collective logics used in these past and non western societies could fit with the ones used since the late 19th century by modern and western managers. This paper will analyze through an historical survey starting in the Industrial revolution period how early some management practices, doctrines or scientific concepts have emerged. It will also analyze how the complex relationship between academic people and managers involved in day to day business evolved in France.