John Kenneth Galbraith et l’évolution des structures économiques du capitalisme : d’une théorie de l’entrepreneur à une théorie de la grande entreprise ?

In this article, the concept of technostructure produced by John K. Galbraith in The New Industrial State is revisited, by being replaced in the context of the passage from entrepreneurial capitalism to the planning system. Distinguishing the figure of the entrepreneur from his functions allows to show that the individual entrepreneur has certainly disappeared, but not his fonctions, which are now performed by the members of the technostructure. Then, to confront Galbraith’s point of view with other theories of the entrepreneur and managerial theories of the firm leads one to highlight the specificity of his analysis. In fact, Galbraith proposes a theory of big corporation directly derived from his managerial conception of the entrepreunarial functions.