Martin Giraudeau : Soutenance d'Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches in Sociology

HABILITATION À DIRIGER DES RECHERCHES EN SOCIOLOGIE

Martin GIRAUDEAU, Centre de sociologie des organisations Sciences Po :

SCRIPTED ENTERPRISE The Textual Foundation of the DuPont Corporation.

Le 21 avril 2022 à 14h45

Sciences Po, amphithéâtre Claude Érignac

13, rue de l’Université, 75 007 Paris

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JURY

M. Patrick CASTEL,Directeur de recherche de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, Centre de sociologie des organisations, Sciences Po

M. Jonathan LEVY, James Westfall Thompson Professor of US History, Fundamentals, Social Thought, and the College, University of Chicago (rapporteur)

Mme Andrea MENNICKEN, Associate Professor, Department of Accounting, London School of Economics and Political Science (rapporteur)

M. Alain POTTAGE, Professeur des universités, École de droit, Sciences Po (garant et rapporteur)

Mme Susan ZIEGER, Professor of English, University of California, Riverside (présidente)

RÉSUMÉ

This memoir is the draft manuscript of a book on the founding of the DuPont corporation in the first years of the nineteenth century. It is the monograph of a venture, which carefully follows the entrepreneurs, Pierre Samuel and Irénée Dupont de Nemours, from the inception of their idea to emigrate from France to the United States in 1797, to the start of operations of the gunpowder manufactory they eventually founded – an early industrial concern in America, established near Wilmington, Delaware, in 1804. As such, the book is a contribution to the history of business and capitalism, but it is also a contribution to the theory of entrepreneurship, and more broadly of action in society. Challenging the traditionally individual, cognitive, and creative accounts of enterprise, it argues that the entrepreneur is first and foremost a bureaucrat: forming the new firms is formalizing it by producing scripts, starting with the business plan. While previous scholarship has repeatedly insisted on the informality of enterprise, Scripted Enterprise empirically demonstrates that, for the entrepreneur, the form is the norm. Further, the book shows that the scripts of enterprise are themselves scripted: they are generic documents, which comply with certain templates and models. Even, and perhaps even more so, in contexts of so-called “freedom of enterprise,” enterprise is thus a regular, normalized, and collective activity, rather than the creative act of an imaginative individual.

The first analytic emphasis of the book is on enterprise as process. It is a study of the progressive drift of the project, from an agricultural to a commercial and, in the end, to an industrial undertaking. While Pierre Samuel Dupont initially planned, from Paris, the establishment of a rural colony, destined to eventually become a new city, perhaps even a new State in the Union, he revised his plan upon arrival in the US in January 1800, to pursue instead a project in transatlantic commerce. His youngest son Irénée finally proposed to rather establish a gunpowder manufactory, which eventually turned into the DuPont corporation that historians have analyzed the crucial role of in American capitalism over the two following centuries. This foundational drift resulted from the difficulties encountered by the Duponts in raising funds for their initial projects, and gives us insights into the entrepreneurial context of the time – that is, into the thinking of both entrepreneurs and investors, regarding which projects were most worthy of attention, and investment. In a period of intense land speculation and diplomatic tensions across the Atlantic, industrial undertakings, however novel and uncertain, could appear as safer bets.

The second analytic emphasis of the book is on enterprise as bureaucracy. It argues that the two Duponts engaged in “entrepreneurial work,” which was essentially paperwork. The drifting of enterprise went along with its drafting: the entrepreneurs prepared a long series of scripts, akin to today’s “business plans,” thanks to which they reflected on their respective projects, but also discussed and agreed with potential investors and other parties. A key issue was the credibility of these scripts, which the Duponts attempted to strengthen by gathering information in what I call “sidescripts,” from maps of the New World to published travel journals, from stories of prior, comparable ventures to accounts of competing companies. The two entrepreneurs however mobilized the information from these sidescripts in different ways. While Pierre Samuel used it to precisely locate his proposed colony, in a specific valley, and outline the concrete steps of its economic but also demographic, social, and political development over a decade, Irénée conducted accounting simulations on a profit and loss account to prove that the manufactory would be profitable, in a normal year of operations, whatever the price of gunpowder, of raw materials, etc. While the father put forth a destination for his venture, the younger Dupont abstracted his own so as to make its future appear knowable, as a set destiny. The differences between the two scripts are explained by the different credit positions of the two men, but also of the two projects. While Pierre Samuel was a well-known and connected figure proposing a familiar type of venture, Irénée was a young man without credit proposing an unusual industrial enterprise. He was therefore compelled to make stronger demonstrative efforts in his plans.

The third analytic emphasis of the book is on the generic forms of enterprise. At the time when the Duponts prepared their projects, a number of legal constraints on the formation of new companies had been abolished. The requirement to apply for a privilege, or patent, had disappeared, especially. Yet this did not mean that they were not subjected to any “service windows” that would allow the projects to go ahead. They needed to raise funds from investors. They also had to morally authorize themselves to carry out their ventures. Such project appraisals imposed a number of requirements on the plans: the scripts were themselves scripted. The book traces the different textual genres and argumentation techniques that the entrepreneurs drew on in textually designing their projects. Through a careful review of the two Duponts’ respective biographies, it shows that the father, who had previously owned a print shop and been a leading Physiocratic economist, borrowed from the genre of subscription prospectuses which was common in the printing industry, as well as on the rhetoric of contemporary political economy pamphlets, to make the case for his rural colony; while the son borrowed from the genre of engineering quotes, as well as from the emerging, quantified rhetoric of experimental reports, which he had become familiar with as the student of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier at the French State’s gunpowder works. Although they were writing side-byside, in the same moment, and for the same purpose of generating revenues for the family, the two men operated in different textual economies of credit.

Overall, the book is an effort towards the elaboration of a sociology of formalities. Drawing on the incredibly fine grain of the archival materials available on the Dupont case and on its economic, intellectual, social, and political contexts, it shows that most of the “thinking” of entrepreneurs can be explained empirically by their position at the intersection of wide variety of texts.

Contact : Martin Giraudeau