2006
Cairn
Odile Henry, « L'impossible professionnalisation du métier d'ingénieur-conseil (1880-1954) », Le Mouvement Social, ID : 10670/1.ab79d7...
French consultants’ impossible professionalization, 1880-1954. As a result of their desire to claim the symbolic power of expertise, consultants had an interest in organising themselves, as had members of other similar trades (architects, chartered accountants, careers advisers), on the pattern of liberal professions who developed their own uniform systems of regulation and control. Yet the numerous efforts to organize which punctuated the trade’s history between 1938 and 1954 proved abortive. As late as the interwar period resistance to creating an ordre des conseils en organisation (OCOS) was the long-term consequence of internecine struggles between two types of consultants : consulting engineers and management consultants. On the one hand, the deeply internalized prohibition of « making a trade out of science » hindered the definition of the profession based on incomes. On the other hand, as the number of management consultants grew, from the end of the thirties, the professional identity of the group developed by analogy with medicine and gave a decisive role to personal qualities that are particularly resistant to any form of codification (intuition, psychological sense, charisma).