Research Note: Asterix in Disneyland. Management Scholars from France on the World Stage

Organization Studies, Winter, 1998 by Lars Engwall

Abstract

In the light of the growing expansion in international scientific publication, three questions are posed here. First, to what extent do French-based authors contribute to international management journals? Second, what are the geographical home bases of French authorships? Third, what is the orientation of French authorships? These questions are analyzed with the help of data from fifteen top journals in the management area during the period 1981-1992. This analysis reveals that authors based in France, like their colleagues in other non-US countries, account for a rather limited proportion of the articles in the top journals, namely less than 1 percent. It also appears that about 50 percent of the French-based authors are on the faculty of INSEAD, and that most of them have Ph.D.'s from prestigious U.S. universities and are not French nationals. Of the 'genuine' French, most come from the Paris area, or Grenoble or Lyon. Finally, the orientation of French-based authors tends particularly towards strategic ma nagement and operations research. Publications in accounting, on the other hand, are rare. Most references are to North American works.

Descriptors: Americanization, management research, France, citations, publications

Introduction

All French people, be they young or old, are well acquainted with 'le petit gaulois Asterix', the hero of a small village which manages to resist the attacks of the Romans. He and his friend Obelix, who considers himself 'not fat but having a fine figure', are known for their adventures with various peoples: Britons, Normans, Belgians, etc. (Goscinny and Uderzo, 1966, 1967, 1979). A few years ago, Asterix and his friends even had an amusement park named after them, and founded in their spirit, outside Paris. However, American competitors appeared on the scene and established a Disneyland -- following a pattern that is not unique to these two Paris amusement parks. It can even be said to constitute part of a general Americanization of the world, which seems to apply particularly to the area of business. The predominance of the Americans is considerable. The Harvard economic historian Alfred Chandler has pointed out that as early as 1913 more than a third of world production came from the United States, while G ermany, the United Kingdom and France represented 16 percent, 14 percent and 6 percent, respectively (Chandler 1990: 4). Sixty years later (1973) more than half (201 of 401) the world's largest enterprises, those with more than 200,000 employees, were North American, while the shares of the other industrial countries were much less: the United Kingdom 12 percent, Germany 7 percent, Japan 7 percent and France 6 percent (ibid.: 19).

However, the predominance of the United States has not been limited to economic activity in the world. It also applies to academic business studies. The diffusion of business schools and business research has clearly been a particularly strong force in the United States, even leading to the transfer of the concept to other continents such as Europe, with the special support of the Ford foundation (Gemelli 1996). For the French, this meant that FNEGE (Fondation Nationale pour l'Enseignement de la Gestion) arranged for a number of young Frenchmen to be sent to the United States in the 1960s and 1970s to join Ph.D. programmes at prestigious universities. According to Claude Riveline, the reason behind this project was simply to follow Asterix's custom and take a gulp at the magic drink (Colasse and Pave 1995: 27). As a result, a number of Frenchmen, who were young and promising then, are now established professors in the French educational system. This was, in fact, in the old tradition of the nineteenth-century exchanges between French and Anglo-American engineering approaches.

There is reason to believe that this consumption of the magic American drink, whose mystique has recently been challenged by the American economic historian Robert Locke (1996), has had a certain impact on French business studies. This effect may even have been reinforced in recent years, as the evaluation of academic institutions has become more common and the importance of publishing internationally has been stressed. At the same time, it is also well known that the political ambition to protect French culture from Americanization or Anglification is high. The former Minister of Education, Jacques Toubon, even succeeded in passing a law forbidding French government institutions to use English words wherever a French alternative had been given by a State Commission. More recently, rules have been issued regarding the maximum quota of foreign music that may be played on French radio stations. In international publishing, however, such measures are ineffective. English has gained a very dominating position as a working language among scientists. Furthermore, the United States has become a model for scientific publishing. It is therefore no exaggeration to call this whole field a Disneyland. This is true not only of France, but of many other countries as well.