ABSTRACT
The invention of traditions and entrepreneurship: a critical perspective Tradition exists. We have all encountered it. Certainly, no action – individual or collective – can be invented afresh at each new occurrence. Were this the case, the actors would exhaust themselves weighing up the reasons for their choices, agreeing on a melodic line and making sure they sing the same tune, instead of acting. The end result would be powerlessness and cacophony. Even when action is innovative, it nonetheless brings into play widely tested and recognized repertoires as well as the experience of past action. There is a huge gamut of terms to denote the sediments of experience underlying present actions: norms, ethos, procedures, customs, habitus, habits, repertoires, behaviour, routines, culture, traditions, civilization, spirit, values, etc. Yet the contours of these notions are hazy. They attempt to apprehend a moving reality, at the limit of common sense and critical and scholarly undertakings. The different traditions, be they intellectual (philosophy, sociology, ethnology), national (American, German, French), or theoretical (from Montesquieu, Marx, Weber, Durkheim, etc.), all have their own preferences and viewpoints. This singularly complicates any rigorous attempt to address the cultural phenomenon. The myriad viewpoints impose on all alike the constant gymnastic of translating, transposing and clarifying, which I will not attempt in this chapter for want of space. In the 1960s, the first theories on the subject set tradition and modernity at odds as being mutually incompatible. Subsequently, the manifest resilience of traditions and cultural values in ‘modern’ environments threw into question those theories predicting that civilizations were to converge under the influence of Western modernization. An extensive survey carried out by IBM between 1966 and 1973 in 72 countries, and published by Bollinger and Hofstede (1987), was one of the first to combine cultural values and modernity. This has stood as a landmark for ‘cross-cultural management’ and the many strands of related research. At the time it was launched (1966), the survey was an innovation. Its theoretical and methodological framework was underpinned by social psychology and American cultural anthropology. Its perspective was macrosocial
inasmuch as it attempted to capture the average attitudes of IBM employees with respect to four factors, on the basis of country or nationality. With the 1970s, and even more so the 1980s, came an impressive diversification of theoretical perspectives, objects and methods. For instance, with respect to theoretical paradigms, d’Iribarne’s research (1989) into corporate management made the linkage between a macrosocial approach to national traditions and company monographs (at a more microsocial level) with strong reference to the work of Montesquieu. J.-F. Bayart (1994), on the other hand, was less concerned with corporate management than capital formation and modes of accumulation within ‘peripheral capitalism’ with reference to a historical sociology of Weberian inspiration. Monographic studies mushroomed. Large collective works like Ellis and Fauré’s essays (1995) on African enterprises proved somewhat eclectic in theoretical and methodological terms, reflecting the extraordinary diverseness of the social sciences at the end of the twentieth century. This was visible, for instance, in Janelli’s work (1993) on a Korean conglomerate, in the study of an Ivoirian firm by Bazin (1998), whose approach falls within the scope of ethnology, or in the L’Afrique des entreprises (1998), a collective work reflecting the concerns of management experts. In 2007, the landscape is extremely complex. Theories and analyses have been reformulated several times over. In 2000, enterprises were no longer operating in the same environment as in the 1960s. For the sake of simplicity, I shall be focusing on a single object (or, in other words, one single entry point into the subject), provided by the notion of tradition.1 Certainly, it seems high time to make a critical appreciation of what is meant by ‘tradition’ and to highlight what effect this may have on the analysis of the relationship between enterprises and traditions. Finally, to be perfectly clear, I shall be doing so in my capacity of ethnologist, with the intellectual and methodological biases of my profession, which is more inclined than others to show interest in what is local, over protracted periods of time.
