The Rise of Digital Management: From Industrial Mobilization to Platform Capitalism

Résumé En

This chapter continues the historical exploration of the US industrial mobilization and its relationships with the rise of digital management with a more specific focus on New York. Several archives are used to embody the trends at stake in the macro-history of the mobilization. The industrial history (with a focus on the Brooklyn Navy Yard) and the institutional history of management and its American learned societies (the Academy of Management, the Society for the Advancement of Management and the American Management Association) are key focuses of this part of the book, which revolves around the Big Apple. This historical ethnography of New York shows that the need to equip management with more and more connected calculative and representational techniques was driven both by a new concern in accelerating quantitatively (speed) and qualitatively (innovation) productive processes and the emergence of an integrated communicative time-space at the scale of the world.