1991
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Pascal Labazée, « Un terrain anthropologique à explorer : l'entreprise africaine. », Cahiers d'Études africaines, ID : 10.3406/cea.1991.1570
P. Labazee — An Anthropological Field for Exploration: The African Firm. A stratum of national businessmen has come into being in postcolonial African countries, but little is known about it. Bonds of submission and reciprocal dependence, through complex financial networks and Systems of human relations, link this stratum to the state. African firms have the means of adapting a model of the firm, either imported or defined by market conditions, to actors' conceptions of it. Once enacted, these conceptions recreate the firm at various levels. Entrepreneurs' biographies and company monographs shed light on one of the principles that shape and enable the internai reproduction of this business stratum, made up of "recycled" civil servants and big merchants. Each of these poles acts on its own strategies wherein economies and human relations are inseparably combined.