Raymond-Alain Thietart

Raymond-Alain Thietart is distinguished professor of management at ESSEC Business School (Paris-Singapore) since 2007 and a Fellow of the Academy of Management. In the past, he has been a professor of management at the universities of Caen Normandie (1979–1981), Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense (1981–1984, 1985–1988) and Paris Dauphine (1988–2007). He has also been a visiting professor at the Sloan School of Management at MIT (1984–1985), and an affiliate professor at the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management (1978–1982).

In the field of dissemination of knowledge, he actively participates in the editorial boards of journals :Organization Science (where he was senior editor from 1994 to 1998), the Strategic Management Journal (where he has been involved in since its creation in 1980) and the Revue Française de Gestion (where he was part of the editorial board till 2015). In addition, he has been sitting on the boards of Entreprises et Histoire, Long Range Planning, the Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences, Strategic Organization, Journal of Strategy and Management, Harvard-L’Expansion and M@n@gement. M@n@gement is the first open -access electronic journal in management research, founded by Bernard Forgues, V. Perret and Sandra Charreire. Professor Thietart helped developing the journal in 1997 (along with William H. Starbuck and Andrew Pettigrew who were part of the first "advisory board"). Finally, he also ran a book series for McGraw-Hill in the area of strategy and management.

In the area of knowledge organization, he has served in the Council of TIMS (The Institute of Management Science), from 1986 to 1988 (now INFORMS), one of the largest international associations in the field of Management Science. In 1993, he co-founded, with Michel Berry and Jean-Claude Thoenig, the Paris School of Management, a think tank organization, of which he was a vice president until 2000. In 2001, he was elected as the president of AIMS, an association of French-speaking researchers in strategy and management.

In 1971, while working on his PhD thesis at Columbia University, under the supervision of Martin K. Starr (for modeling), William H. Newman(for management) and Noel Tichy (for individual behavior), Professor Thietart proposed a ‘human model’ in the professional work context. His work extended that of the System Dynamics Group at MIT founded in the early sixties by Jay W. Forrester. His model was based on the general theory of systems and the simulation programs were written in DYNAMO (programming language). His model of human-system is made of five subsystems in interaction. The subsystems are 1 / the motivation subsystem, 2 / the satisfaction subsystem, 3 / the learning subsystem 4 / the decision subsystem and, 5 / the performance subsystem. Each of these sub-systems is composed of multiple loops of action and feedback. The simulation is performed in a work context in which man is subjected to various types of control. Although richer and more complex than previous representations of individual behavior, ‘the man’ of Thietart nevertheless remains a determined man, as recalled by Jacques Lesourne in the preface of the book “la dynamique de l’homme au travail” published in 1977. Though not followed extensively, the book has nevertheless been an important contribution to the scientific representation of man in a work context.

Raymond Thietart is a part of the generation of French research professors in Management trained in the US in the early 1970s through the funding support of FNEGE (Fondation Nationale pour l’Enseignement de la Gestion des Entreprises) and the Ford Foundation as part of its "European Doctoral Fellows in Management Education". On his return from the US, where he was a Ford Foundation Fellow and Fulbright Scholar, he devoted a large part of his academic activities to the training of young researchers in Management. He has supervised 35 dissertations and research qualification theses. He has also coordinated doctoral training in several educational institutions, including the one in "Marketing and Strategy" of Université Paris-Dauphine (1988–2007) and the PhD program of ESSEC (2007–2012). Furthermore, he has organized seminars and workshops on doctoral research in France at CEFAG (European Centre for Advanced Training in Management), which he ran from 2001 to 2004 and in Brussels, with Igor Ansoff, within the EIASM (European Institute of Advanced Studies in Management). Alongside his activities of training young scientists, his scientific activities bring together the organization, dissemination and creation of knowledge.

Raymond-Alain Thietart graduated in electrical engineering from Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon (1967) and is also an alumnus of Ecole Supérieure des Sciences Economiques et Commerciales (1969). He received his PhD from Columbia University in 1974.

Raymond-Alain Thietart (born 14 January 1944 in Nice, France) is a French business school professor. He is the author of eight books on strategy and management and over a hundred articles in the same field. His research and teaching focus on organization theory and strategic management.