PROF. DR. EVE CHIAPELLO (Paris)

Understanding the History of Public Policies – Management Tools & Governmental Knowledge

The governmental knowledge to be covered in the talk concerns all the policies rooted in organizational spaces (business companies, public organizations, NGOs etc.) that aim at influencing the actions and behaviors of people who are accompanied, guided, prepared, controlled, supervised... It includes both the actions of organizing, directing, controlling the actions of organizations' employees, and the actions aiming at obtaining something from people outside the organizations but in interaction with them (customers, suppliers, users, citizens, ...). These governmental knowledges are therefore both managerial knowledges and public action knowledges. The talk draws upon the economics of conventions and the sociology of science and technology to decrypt the types of governmental knowledges from the analysis of the tools and techniques used. I argue that it is possible to define moments of capitalism through the identification of the most legitimate tools and management principles at a given period of time. I also show that it is difficult to distinguish the principles that organize companies from those that guide public policies at a given moment. I will focus on the example of financialization to show that the tools and governmental knowledge that are specific to the current period of financialized capitalism are also implemented in the making of public policies.