'French like the others': Colonial Migrants in Wartime France, 1939-1947

The management scholar Henry Mintzberg has situated company strategies on a continuum that ranges from those that are the result of deliberate internal decisions, on one extreme, to those that emerge largely as a response to external forces, on the other. This framework is applied to the strategies of the Canadian aluminum producer Alcan, in Europe, from its origins as a spin-off from Alcoa, in 1928, until its acquisition by Rio Tinto, in 2007. Throughout this period, the company gradually moved from emergent to more deliberate strategies, although external forces continued to influence its decisions. The increasing centralization of Alcan's organizational structure paralleled its shift toward reliance on deliberate strategies.

Mintzberg's Emergent and Deliberate Strategies: Tracking Alcan's Activities in Europe, 1928–2007

The history of aluminum illustrates how the concept of symbolic meanings can help connect culture with business history. Aluminum's symbolic meanings played a crucial role in its industrial history, largely through the enthusiasm that greeted the introduction and diffusion of the metal. Symbolic meanings influence technological innovation through their role in shaping expectations, a role understood by the historical actors who engage in struggles over the meanings of competing innovations. For aluminum, this struggle centered on the conflict between the material's two major meanings: aluminum as modern and aluminum as ersatz. This debate over meanings has played out differently in aviation, electric wiring, and automobiles.

Symbolic Culture and Technological Change: The Cultural History of Aluminum as an Industrial Material

Following aluminum as part of a material culture of speed and lightness, this article examines how assemblages of energy and metals connect built environments, ways of life, and ideologies of acceleration. Aluminum can be theorized as a circulatory matrix that forms an energy culture. Through a discussion of speed and social justice, the history of aluminium-based socioecologies reveals how the materiality of energy forms assemblages of objects, infrastructures, and practices. The article then traces the aluminum industry’s involvement in the production and distribution of energy itself both at the national scale of power grids and in the emergence of transnational transfers of energy, such as hydropowered smelters in Iceland. Finally, this analysis of deeply embedded energy cultures calls for a transnational approach to the accelerated socioecologies of aluminum production and consumption; and for energy transition theories to pay closer attention to the figured worlds and figuring work of the military-i...

Global Energy Cultures of Speed and Lightness: Materials, Mobilities and Transnational Power

The study of cartels is important to economists as well as business historians, but, on the whole, there has been little cross cultivation between the two academic fields. This article examines cartel theory developed by economists in the context of the historical case of international aluminum cartels in existence before 1940. By analyzing three basic theoretical questions—when cartels appear, when they break down, and when they are successful—in light of the empirical evidence of the aluminum industry, the article argues that economics and history, although they have very different approaches, can profit from using each other's methods when studying cartels.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0007680514000385

Jean-Pierre Rodier

Papers

L'aluminium français : l'invention d'un marché 1911-1983