L'homme d'affaires en prédateur

Citation

Mesure, H. (2007), "L'homme d'affaires en prédateur", Society and Business Review, Vol. 2 No. 3, pp. 331-332. https://doi.org/10.1108/17465680710825523

Michel Vilette began his career as executive then as consultant before to become professor of sociology at ENSIA and lecture at EHESS. He wrote two previous books that had a real resound in French academicals and business circles. Michel Vilette can be attached to the “Ecole de Paris” a social academics network that try to study and to account management as it is really and how it really functions from a sociological or ethnological approaches. Catherine Vuillermot is a Professor of History at the University of Franche Comté.

Towards the businessmen, the authors do not want to celebrate, to imitate or to denounce them but to explain how some contemporary businessmen have proceeded to get rich within few years, to understand the logic of profitable activities from the point of view of those who are devoted to it. In complement of the literature, the authors also analyzed the biographies of 32 successful contemporary businessmen (such as Agnelli (Fiat), Bic (Bic), Kamprad (Ikea) or Walton (Wal‐Mart)), analyses that were completed by interviews.

The book is composed of three parts. In the first, “The businessman: an enigmatic character” the two authors precise that they prefer the word “businessman” to others such as entrepreneur or boss. They define a businessman as a person who is obsessed by the greatest accumulation of capital as possible as the quickest time as possible thanks to a direct action on the firms he controls or try to control. The first chapter is a review of the corpus; the second chapter is centered on the interest of biographies of businessmen for understanding this “figures” of capitalism and on the measurement of success in business. The Chapter 3 opens the second part (how to do “good deal”). This chapter explain how someone become a successful (that is to say a very rich) businessman. Most of those businessmen grew up in entrepreneurial families, were initiated youth to business, did not vast their time to study (too long) and were help at their beginning by a “mentor.” The fourth chapter is dedicated to “the good transaction” that is to say the one that is at the origin of the fortune of such or such businessmen (the equivalent of the “first time” in love affairs). According the authors, at this stage of his development, the businessmen acts as a “predator” that takes advantage of the opacity of the market and asymmetries. Without this original predation he should not have got rich. The third part (what about the moral?) is open by the Chapter 5 that describes the political behavior of the businessmen. To succeed the businessmen use seduction, promises or threats according circumstances. The Chapter 6 focuses on “the virtue of businessman.” When they have succeeded, businessmen pay more attention to the others, are gentler and try to get a kind of redemption through societal engagements. It is the period of the quest of honorability.

The book is very readable and very interesting since it rubbers a lot myths about the businessmen as innovator or as entrepreneur. It suggests that the enrichments is certainly a matter of “asymmetry” and may be a matter of unfairness. It is very representative of Ecole de Paris approach that tries to show how thing really function.