International Journal on Criminology Volume 4, Number 2, Winter 2016 | Page 99

From Emergence to Institutionalization
using a field study carried out by questionnaire between May and September 2014 in
73 large French organizations. Our research is focused on the situation in France, but
this does not mean that security management abroad is of no interest. The situation in
some European countries and in the United States offers some similarities and certain
examples will be taken from these countries in support of our argument. However,
apart from the fact that field study is easier to access, the French situation seemed to
us to be of especial interest. We are in fact here studying a period of emergence. If we
touch upon the question of the English-speaking world in the following developments,
this is simply for reference purposes, because of the disparity in maturity with the
French situation.
The Emergence of Security
The question of security in large companies has been a matter of concern
for some time. In France, Fayol states that the protection of people, goods and the
company’s assets is one of the five major functions of a company (Fayol 1916).
Indeed, the first signs of internal departments responsible for safety appeared in the
nineteenth century in Europe and in particular in France in certain companies. In
1855, the department store Magasins du Louvre employed 60 inspectors responsible
for watching over the staff and customers and this model was copied by all the large
stores. At the end of the century, banks and large hotels had equipped themselves with
a department responsible for security. Since 1894 the State railway network company
had had a brigade of 52 armed guards to combat the theft of railway infrastructure
(Berlière and Levy 2013). However, outside of a few particular business sectors (banks,
hotels, railways), recognition of internal departments for security only became reality
much later, at least in Europe and in France in particular. There was no sign of internal
security departments in the organigrams of French companies in the middle of the
twentieth century. “Organizing one’s own safety” remained the overriding principle
of the discipline in industrial organizations. Moreover, these services had rather a bad
press since they were seen as favored assistants of the employer, loudly criticized by
the unions and communist militants (Kalifa 2000, 250).
In the United States, the situation was rather different at the beginning, and
even more so by the middle, of the twentieth century. Henry Ford is thus credited with
the first instance of “corporate” security management (Gill and Hart 1996; Lippert,
Walby, and Steckle 2013). This was despite their image being no better than in Europe
since, for example, Ford Service Department was largely comprised of individuals
with reputations for violence, who were meant to instill fear in the workforce to thwart
any attempt to disturb the manufacturing process in the hope of receiving salary
increases; nevertheless, the number of companies with departments responsible for
security was far from insignificant. In this capacity, internal departments responsible
for security and security providers were able to form an association, ASIS, in 1953
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