Abstract

A book by Pascal Croset, a consultant and researcher, devoted to the Office Chérifien des Phosphates serves as the starting point for thinking about how to write about management and, more broadly, about the relations between the world of ideas and the arena of actions. What impact does the written word have on the art of leadership? Who writes? What stand do they adopt? For what purpose? How are matters disclosed? To whom? Where to place the boundary between public relations, communication and managerial literature? Drawing on examples from the latter, the effort is made, without claiming to exhaust the topic, to show that writing about management is a complicated exercise with stakes that, far from academic, have to do with the power of ideas in a global economy.