Le management a-t-il un langage professionnel ?

Does management have a professional language? Based on Beckmann's General Technology (1806) and Volume 3 of General Electric's Blue Books on The Work of a Professional Manager (1954), this article analyzes terms, particularly action verbs, and compares the two corpora. We conclude (1) that general management does indeed have the properties of a general technology in Beckmann's sense. ; (2) that the work of the professional manager as presented by General Electric does indeed take the form of a nomenclature with main entries and subdivisions, like Beckmann's general technology, but that, unlike Beckmann's nomenclature, a number of sub-activities are found in several of the four major management activities, and that the verbs used remain at a high level of generality; (3) that the terms used are indeed unambiguous, as in specialized and professional languages; (4) that there is a structure that broadly resembles hypernym/hyponym relationships, but this is only partial; (5) that General Electric's management language in 1954 contains no neologisms, adaptations or distortions of specific terms; and (6) that the General Electric corpus contains no labels, very few metaphors and platitudes, and virtually no jargon. General management therefore has a professional language, but in 1954, this language used only words from everyday language and reflected the technical nature of management as a general technology for collective action in a context of seeking efficiency and accountability.