Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the 3rd International Congress on Business History in France, which will take place at Université Paris Dauphine from 23 to 26 June 2026. This congress aims to explore the boundaries of the firm from both a historical and interdisciplinary perspective.

Key dates:

• 15 September 2025: Call for papers opens

• 15 December 2025: Submission deadline (papers, sessions, posters)

• 2 March 2026: Notification of acceptance

• 5 June 2026: Submission of extended abstracts

• 23 June 2026: Opening of the congress with the doctoral school and inaugural lecture

We warmly invite you to save the dates!

AT THE MARGINS OF BUSINESS AND COMPANIES: 

EDGES, WASTE LANDS, BORDERS, THIRD PLACES, INNOVATION

Business historians have mainly focused on the origins, evolution, key players, and functioning of major companies, with fewer focusing on a set of objects, rationales, or players on the margins. What qualifies for being considered as marginal? One example is subcontractors (in value chains), often SMEs, which are impacted by the strategies of their clients. But we can also mention areas of cooperation or competition, fields of monitoring or foresight, the place of individuals or groups considered, in various ways, to be marginal, and more generally third places, middlegrounds, edges, and border objects of all kinds. 

Recently, the proliferation of industrial and service platforms has greatly reinforced the monopolistic nature of large companies while outsourcing, or even marginalizing, a large proportion of the players who contribute to their prosperity, sometimes to subcontractors, sometimes to certain “gray” areas of the economy. From the perspective of employment and economic activity, it is understandable why, over the past ten years, 60% of employees and 80% of businesses (mainly sole proprietorships) worldwide have been operating in the informal economy (ILO Report, March 2023).

This encompasses three components: 1) the informal sector, 2) informal activities within the formal sector, and 3) within households. The main criteria for informality are as follows: (i) the absence of business registration, accounting, tax payments, and social security contributions; (ii) undeclared jobs without social security coverage and other “precarious jobs” (Charmes, J. Ed., 2012).  These three examples show that the issue of the “margins” of business is essential to understanding the real dynamics of capitalism in France, in the French-speaking world, in Europe, and around the world. 

Marginality is not understood here as a fixed and static property of individual or collective actors in businesses or places. On the contrary, the “marginal” nature of a group of individuals or a specific space, within or outside the company, cannot be identified in a univocal or ahistorical way. This conference aims to analyze the question of margins and the process of marginalization in a dynamic and historical way. We plan to develop our thinking along four lines.

1- Preserving and analyzing “margins”: concepts, sources, and methodologies for the history of companies in France or in the French-speaking world:

First, it is important to examine the concept of boundaries and margins in the history of business thought (black box, firm point, agency theory, legal personality, entrepreneurial enterprise, managerial enterprise, value chain, stakeholders, etc.). In this regard, the question of sources for understanding these margins must be examined. 

2-    Actors at the frontiers and margins of French or foreign companies: 

Attempting to assess the importance and weight of actors located at the frontiers or margins of French and/or foreign companies involves answering a few fundamental questions: Who are the individual or collective actors that can be considered to be on the margins? Under what circumstances did they emerge or were they pushed to the margins or frontiers? Is it possible to establish a typology? What relationships do they have with the actors, processes, or institutions “at the center”? Do they have a positive or negative impact on the overall dynamics of the company, region, or country? Can we therefore identify a specifically French or French-speaking model of organization and management? 

This requires identifying certain actors on the margins, both internal actors (e.g., temporary workers, short-term contracts, etc.) and external actors (subcontractors, networks, etc.). It is important to consider systemic marginalization linked to certain criteria, such as gender or ethnicity, and its effects on company dynamics.

3-    Places and third zones (brownfields, etc.):

Defining and discussing margins includes the issue of “marginal” physical locations or spaces, which are sometimes created deliberately or are the result of a series of more or less controlled actions or processes. This covers internal spaces within the company (design, production, management); integration into the value chain (factory, inventory, sales, finance, etc.); but also external spaces such as integration into urban or natural spaces (including the issue of brownfield sites) and the issue of subcontractors. Some companies have implemented strategies to control the surrounding area, for example in the 19th century to control the labor market around steel mills, or more recently to keep local residents away and thus avoid complaints about pollution and environmental damage. The issue of what has been called “industrial spillover,” which blurs the boundary between the interior of companies and their environment, may be addressed.

4-    Processes of marginalization and disruption (economics, management, innovation, etc.):

The actors, places, ways of thinking, and ways of doing things presented above are the result of practices of representation or rules constructed step by step throughout history, more or less consciously, by actors who conceive of them individually or collectively. Decisions, rules, and standards are developed to ensure their success. Institutions are put in place to guarantee their sustainability. What are the contexts that allow these processes to emerge? How do they develop? What are the constraints that limit their emergence? 

In turn, what are the impacts of these processes on companies, their organization, or their strategies? In this regard, it is necessary to take into account the specificities of the functioning of the labor market and social relations, the weight of associative and cooperative organizations in the economic dynamic, entrepreneurial and managerial issues (risks versus innovations), accounting, financial, and marketing practices, personnel management, integration into global capitalism, the role of state regulations, etc.