ABSTRACT
The industrial enterprise is an excellent place to view a great diversity of forms of control: control of finances and accounts, controls on the material operations of fabrication, of logistics, and control of people at every level. Managerial knowledge seeks very explicit control objectives and their study is thus particularly fruitful for one interested in the history of techniques and in the sociological aspects of control. These modes of control are often embodied in very complex plans and devices which exist, at one and the same time, as ideas (they have been conceived by humans, they are founded on certain bodies of knowledge), and in material form (written texts, numbers, graphs, measuring instruments, software applications, etc…).
