About HIMO
A history of management in crisis: built from archives, fieldwork, and theory.
HIMO (“History of Institutional Management & Organization”) studies how management practices and imaginaries take shape—especially in wartime and moments of existential disruption.
Started in 2017 as a research sabbatical project by François-Xavier de Vaujany.
Historical Materiality
What we study
HIMO focuses on the history of management and managerial capitalism in the United States (early 20th century to today), with special attention to war and other episodes of crisis—moments that reconfigure managerial practices, the organization of work, and American geopolitics.
Signature idea
Management becomes “digital” when it increasingly governs through representations.
From industrial mobilization to platform capitalism, we trace the institutions that shape this trajectory.
A visual research world
Alfred Palmer (American, 1906-1993), c. 1942.
How we work
Archives
Primary sources, institutional records, professional journals, and historical traces of managerial techniques.
Ethnography
Fieldwork and observation to understand how managerial imaginaries operate in practice.
Theory
Organization studies, cybernetics, philosophy, sociology, and political science—combined, not siloed.
Industrial Mobilization
Institutional actors
Who makes management “real”?
Using archival material and ethnographic research, we study how learned societies, business schools, leading industries, consulting corporations and foundations contribute to public policy—and to a geopolitics with and of management.
This genealogy is situated within a profoundly American history—mobilizing organization studies, history, philosophy, cybernetics, sociology and political science.
2017
Project launched (sabbatical initiative)
3
Core methods: archives, ethnography, theory
USA
A profoundly American genealogy of management
