Introduction: Informing a Depthless World, the Great Consequence of our Digital Management

Résumé En

This introduction details the context and project of this book. Focused on the American industrial mobilization during World War II and its relationship with the renewal of management, The rise of digital management aims to describe how management as a set of practices and processes was renewed by the impetus of the war and its aftermath. In essence, before the war, the US and its future were just a radical uncertainty. Following the great depression, in the context of a creeping World War and a deep political crisis (which includes management), the future was no longer ‘made’. The industrial mobilization set up a new temporal machine, managerial processes which from that time keep revealing and unveiling what is going on and, more and more, what is to come. The encounter between management and digitality accelerated by the industrial mobilization gave rise to our digital management. Deeply rationalist, representationalist and in many ways, disembodied, this digital management endures in modern days. This introduction then describes the threefold historico-philosophical ethnography implemented in this book to explore the rise of digital management during and after the war. First, a focus on intimate, ordinary life followed by the larger description of the historical movement of the industrial mobilization (e.g., with an analysis of the archives or the Brooklyn Navy Yard and those of several learned societies devoted to management), before a more philosophical analysis of the American event from within.