The United States as the “Arsenal of Democracy”. The Flight of the Second World War

Résumé En

of chapter 6 With this 5th chapter, we move from an intimate, ordinary, at shoulders’ height description to a more general, macro and institutional account of the industrial mobilization and its relationship with digital management. The story of the first and second US industrial mobilization is summarized. The chapter details how it started, what was at stake and the different periods the mobilization went through. The role of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the federal administration are explained. With this larger movement, it appears that “scientific management” was largely questioned and delegitimized in the pre-war period. The industrial mobilization both reconfigured and re-legitimated managerial practices and managerial processes as part of a “digital management”. This renewal contributed to a new temporal engineering by managers: that of the future. Whereas the future was obviously ahead before the great depression, and clearly obscured after it, the industrial mobilization reopened and came up with new pathways to the future. Things could happen again thanks to the “arsenal of democracy”.