Abstract

This book covers the US industrial mobilization and its extensions with the cold war and present time. It shows that scientific management experienced crisis before the war, and was reconfigured and re-legitimated as a digital management during the 40s and 50s. Today, this digital management has three main features: it is representationalist (its cognition and narration aim at unveiling the ‘real’ world through visualization, computation and digital semiosis at large), focused on the maintenance of processes (the continuity and interconnectivity of its activities and processes of novelty is key) and praising apocalyptic rhythms (both accelerations and suspensions through innovative projects). The US industrial mobilization and its extensions with the cold war paved the way to this threefold management which makes the usual distinction between ‘administration’ and ‘management’ irrelevant. In the synchronous world of digital semiosis, there are no remote or far places, up and down of a company. Distributed operational and executive processes all share the same integrated global time-space. Likewise, our digital and post-digital words have all made the ‘long’ versus ‘short’ term distinctions (also grounding the opposition between management and administration) obsolete. This conclusion is then extended with a discussion about the problem of the past in the American Event: resonances for management and digitality and a call to confront our digital management into conversation with its Roman and Greek origins.