Multinationals' Obligations
Hervé l'Huillier
Total FinaElf, France
Multinationals and their records, a social science research project
The company as a legal entity
This is the starting point of every historical approach, which consists of painting the company's picture as a specific legal entity studied from the dynamic vantage of the events which have structured and individualized it over the years. Its history, a facet of its identity, is divided into many themes treated in the same spirit: history of the executives, history of the plants, history of the products, the inventions, the trademarks. A demand for that exists, in the company and in the public.
The company as an organization
Beyond that approach, which is necessary because unless events are ordered there can be no understanding of the past, lies the dissection approach. The company as a living being under the scalpel of the sociologist, the philosopher, the scientist will reveal its rules of operation and afford a reply to the question how and why it has or has not worked. That approach produces a feedback of experience, of assumptions to be checked, perhaps scientific discoveries some day.
The company as witness to its environment
A company, particularly a multinational, cannot be isolated from its environmental influences. It is a player, often a star, in complex, dynamic systems: the market, the economic sector, the territory, the network of investors and alliances, the extended company, the logistic system, technological fields, government relations, the economic and social policies of all of the countries in which it does business. The historian, and researchers in other disciplines, then become interested in the "clockwork".
The company as a competitor
Finally, a company is not an institution like others. Short and long term profit objectives are assigned to it. No equitable account can be taken of its actions or operations if the competition, i.e. comparative analysis, is ignored. That approach is particularly rewarding if the company operates on many markets, as it may in the current globalization phase. The history of a company's growth bears the same relation to economics as military history to political expansion. Oddly enough, that is of interest to few people these days.
The difficulties of an "enlightened" record-keeping policy
The technical difficulties:
Four sets of factors can be highlighted:
- the increasing complexity of records due to differentiated levels of decision and action which are not always easy to identify and may make it hard to assemble the final versions of the documents used, especially in the case of a multinational in which heavy back-and-forth documentary traffic between the home office and the field is often the rule;
- the ever-expanding volumes - if only because of that increasingly perceptible complexity - on which computerization has little remedial effect;
- the ever greater frequency of virtual documents not physically present in the files or, if present, betokening progress of the business the genuine significance of which is difficult to gauge;
- the extreme variability and volatility of the carriers, with the entailed problems of critical analysis of the information, data stability, physical preservation and access, in turn complicated by technological advances differing in scope from country to country.
The internal-organizational difficulties
Internal difficulties are legion in an international group. The principal ones can be summed up as follows:
- Each subsidiary is integrated into a system of laws and customs which is far from uniform. The relationship with the past, the rules of evidence, the methods of handling and resolving disputes, the government's weight in the economy are all components of cultures which differ from country to country and may entail rules and behaviours which vary from subsidiary to subsidiary.
- Similarly, the subsidiaries are not all identically endowed with human and other resources.
- Account must also be taken of the fact that the nearer we approach the field - the industrial and commercial side - the closer we come to dispersion and to operations-obsessed staff, whence difficulty in building a reliable and durable organization especially since the topflight management which quality record-keeping requires is sometimes lacking.
The organic difficulties
Those difficulties are compounded by the problems stemming from the international company's "evolution", directly attendant on:
- its internal growth, featuring organization chart changes, staff changes, override of less efficient by more powerful systems, advent of international factors (languages, practices, tools), and
- its external growth: discard of whole divisions, incessant sales and acquisitions, massive mergers.
Both factors have adverse, if not devastating, effects on record-keeping policy.
The external difficulties
Record-keeping policy, although its benefits are sometimes recognized internally, is limited by weak external demand:
- there is little demand from the information media, which readily make do with rough approximations or unverified statements, and prize the sensational over scientific rigor;
- neither is there significant qualitative or quantitative demand from the faculty (historians, sociologists).
Suggested solutions
Focus on limited objectives
Reasoning comparable to Pareto's Law is not incompatible with practical record-keeping. An approach, akin to the quality approach, of defining record categories apt to be responsive to the expectations of the customers (historians, sociologists, internal demand, etc.) is no less productive. A combination of those approaches yields selected objectives.
Condensation
Access to raw documents springing directly from the business has its dangers in our era. Because of the complexity discussed above, a raw document may be incomprehensible. We have to imagine and define the scientific nature of modern forms of digests.
Involvement in the social sciences
Participation in scientific research without overstepping the record-keeper's role may be the way specific to our function of "reaching the customer".
Reliance on others
Finally, industrial and commercial activity is inherently transactional. It involves outsiders: suppliers, customers, advisers, governments and public agencies, partners, trade associations and labour unions. Even though those players connect differently in different countries, only those ever-changing networks can underpin the durable recording of memory.
Bibliography
Field: Archives and documentation
- Quelles archives pour quelle histoire ? conference at the Society for European Business History, Cambridge 2000 (forthcoming).
- La Métamorphose de l’unité documentaire, Paris 1995.
- Author of several articles and contributor at symposiums in the field of petroleum history.
- Numerous articles and books on the history of mathematics in the Middle Ages (on Nicolas Chuquet, barrel measurement, calculating B , square root and cube root extraction, setting mathematical vocabulary, mathematics in the Lyons area in the 15th century, etc.); collaborating in collective works including the Lexique de la langue scientifique (Université de Paris, 1997) and the Companion Encyclopedia of History and Philosophy of Mathematical Sciences, by E. GRATTAN-GUINNESS, London, 1992.
Hervé L’Huillier
- Born in 1951.
- Palaeographic archivist.
- Specialized in the history of mathematics in the Middle Ages.
- Curator at the Archives nationales until 1982.
- In charge of archives, then documentation and archives at TOTAL, later TOTALFINA, later TOTAL FINAELF.
- President of the Ecole des bibliothécaires documentalistes at the Institut catholique de Paris.