Volume 71

Spring 1997

This article describes the problems faced by reorganizers of distressed railroads in the late nineteenth century and how they were addressed by a combination of judicial intervention and financial innovations. In particular, the judicial innovations of supersenior financing, the equity receivership process, and the setting of upset values permitted firms to raise funds. The private financial innovations of deferred coupon debt, contingent charge securities, and voting trusts made subsequent default less likely. The private innovations can be interpreted as responses to both the distress of the railroads as well as the intervention by the courts that emasculated prior debt contracts. (Pages 1-40)

This article examines the attempts by the United States to export industrial and managerial techniques to Britain in the early post-war years. It analyses the types of technical assistance offered by the U.S., the mechanisms developed to deliver this assistance, and the response of both British industry and government. The conclusion offered is that whilst there were problems of "fit" between the techniquesadvocated by U.S. agencies and the conditions faced by British industry, overall the reluctance of the British to embrace American techniques did not reflect a rounded assessment of their applicability so much as a series of institutional blockages and hostile attitudes. (Pages 41-81)

During the Second World War leading belligerents such as Britain, the United States, and Germany, favored the use of fixed-price contracts for purchasing military aircraft. These contractswere believed to encourage economical and efficient production. Yet only Britain succeeded in developing contractual procedures based primarily upon the fixed price. This article examines the evolution of British contractual policy in the later 1930s, drawing upon both corporate and official records to explain why Britain succeeded where both America and Germany failed. Efforts to develop the fixed-price system in Britain were initially frustrated by the technological revolution which transformed aviation during the 1930s. Moreover, divided opinions within both the government and the aircraft industry helped prevent the emergence of a coherent contractual policy. By 1939, however, British aircraft manufacturers were unanimous in the support for fixed-price contracts. (Pages 82-111)

Summer 1997

Two decades have passed since the publication of The Visible Hand, Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.’s, magisterial account of the rise of the modern business enterprise in the United States. Although Chandler’s pathbreaking work has been widely hailed as a landmark in business history, only rarely has anyone considered systematically its influence on the large body of historical scholarship on related topics. This essay is intended to help fill this gap. It is divided into two sections. The first section reviews Chandler’s argument, touches on the relationship of Chandler’s oeuvre to his personal background, and locates The Visible Hand in the context of American historical writing. The second considers how three groups of historians have responded to Chandler’s ideas. These groups consist of champions who creatively elaborated on Chandler’s intellectual agenda; critics who probed anomalies between Chandler’s argument and their own research; and skeptics who rejected Chandler’s analysis outright. (Pages 151-200)

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While Britain never had a scientific management movement like that in America, historians have exaggerated the negative reaction of British engineers to the ideas of F. W. Taylor and other American proponents of business efficiency. A review of the leading British engineering journals in the early twentieth century reveals that Taylorism received a fair amount of attention, and much of it positive. By the beginning of the First World War, the majority of trade journals were echoing Taylor’s demands for a new type of management. The misapprehension on behalf of historians stems from a number of factors: an overemphasis on articles published during years of labor agitation, such as 1911 and 1912; and, a failure to appreciate the different way in which scientific management was perceived in Britain. This fuller understanding of British responses to Taylor and his ideas helps to elucidate a chapter in the broader history of British economic performance and managerial methods in the twentieth century. (Pages 207-229)

In the literature on British economic decline entrepreneurship is typically assessed by its outcome. By contrast, this paper argues that the soundness of entrepreneurship is best tested by viewing it ex ante. In other words, it is the process, and not the product, of entrepreneurship that is important in determining its quality. When this is accepted, competence, rather than infallibility, becomes the criterion by which entrepreneurship is best judged. In the latter half of the article, this approach is applied to the British paper industry’s search for a new source of cellulose in the second half of the nineteenth century. (Pages 230-259)

This work presents a controlled sampling of texts which might, through further research, provide the basis for a broad theoretical investigation of the cultural response of British managers, engineers and entrepreneurs to the so-called second industrial revolution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Also, the texts are organized by theme, as a preliminary effort to establish an empirical critique of prevailing historiographical interpretations of the content and influence of Britain’s business culture with respect to competitive pressures from abroad. (Pages 260-286)

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Autumn 1997

This article analyzes the investments in both manufacturing units and sales subsidiaries by German chemical companies in the United Kingdom prior to 1914. It extends the findings in the existing literature on the subject, as sales subsidiaries have not so far been investigated. In particular, the article focuses on the motives underlying these investments. By building sales subsidiaries, German companies hoped to improve their control over foreign distribution activities and to promote their own brand names. As for the creation of manufacturing outlets, the motives of the companies differed before and after the reform of the British patent law in 1907. Prior to patent law reform, branch plants were set up due to transport cost considerations, resource orientation, or the pursuit of monopoly. Further reasons included restrictions on the use of proprietary technology in the home country and capacity constraints in the home factory. It was only after 1907 that manufacturing units were established to safeguard the companies’ British patents. Consequently, the traditionally held notion that it was solely the patent law of 1907 which sparked off German FDI in the British chemical industry needs to be modified. (Pages 351-380)

Women substantially increased their presence in Washington, D.C.’s federal civil service during World War II. Accordingly, agency administrators struggled to define and address the "needs" of these new government women. This article analyzes the crucial role that gender played in the renegotiation of management strategies and policies during the 1940s. It examines the popularization of the human relations school of management in federal agencies and reveals how gendered concepts of authority impacted the employment prospects of female civil servants. The war provided an opportunity for some managers to promote a more "feminine" interpretation of human relations, but as this article demonstrates, that interpretation rested upon stressing the difference between male and female workers. In addition, postwar conservatism allowed for a reassertion of more hierarchical, "masculine" approaches to employment management in the civil service. (Pages 381-416)

Throughout the twentieth century, the role of workers in the management of business enterprise has been the subject of ongoing debate. Opponents of centralized, bureaucratic management have proposed a series of participatory alternatives—workers’ control, industrial democracy, employee stock ownership, and more recently, employee involvement—that have sought to democratize workplace governance. Much of the literature on such initiatives, be it historical or contemporary, has implied that workers favor exercising greater responsibility over shop-floor matters but have been deterred by employer resistance and cautious labor leadership. This literature often fails to capture the complexity of workers’ attitudes towards greater participation and the tensions felt by reform-minded business leaders seeking to share power and authority with their employees. It is in this context that the story of the Columbia Conserve Company, an Indianapolis-based producer of canned soups, assumes particular relevance as a pioneering attempt to implement workplace democracy. Between 1917 and 1943, Columbia Conserve’s owner, William P. Hapgood, established a system of workers’ ownership and management. However, workers at Columbia Conserve, while sympathetic to Hapgood’s experiment, were reluctant to accept full managerial responsibility. Instead, they embraced a more familial concept that met their psychological needs for fellowship and security. William Hapgood’s faith in worker self-management subsequently waned, revealing an authoritarian streak that undercut his democratic pretensions. The experience at Columbia Conserve illustrates the enduring problems involved in sustaining workplace democracy and illuminates the status of current efforts aimed at empowering workers on the job. (Pages 417-443)

Dennison Manufacturing Company let work out into private homes in surrounding communities and paid piece rates for it for many decades. This work, primarily attaching strings to tags, benefited both the company and the community but contained the potential for abusive child labor. Home work declined when machinery could be substituted for hand labor, but machinery capable of replacing all handwork was never developed. Social and political pressures to reduce or eliminate child labor increased the incentives to end home work; but not until the depression of the 1930s, when national efforts to put men back to work gained momentum, did home manufacture end in the tag and other industries. This article uses internal company documents spanning the period 1912 to 1935 to illuminate the company’s policy towards this work. It also relies on the recollections of many of those who performed the work when they were children. This research contributes to a substantial body of literature on home work by providing a case study on one company and enriching it with human testimony. (Pages 444-470)

Winter 1997

This article investigates the role of the private banking house of Thomas Branch & Sons of Petersburg, Virginia, in promoting entrepreneurship and economic development in the early United States. It argues that while Branch adopted many of the methods and practices of antebellum commercial banks in that he accepted and created deposits and followed a real-bills philosophy in his lending, he also differed from them by extending his services to a particular market niche. Many of his borrowers were young entrepreneurs who were just embarking upon their own commercial ventures. In addition, many of his customers had accumulated only limited wealth. If Branch’s actions, then, can be considered indicative of those of private bankers more generally, this article reveals the importance of small town private bankers in supplying monetary and intermediary services to local communities, and moreover, helps clarify their place in the history of antebellum banking. (Pages 513-542)

In the 1920s and 1930s, the rubber tire industry faced debilitating challenges, mostly brought about by changes in the industry’s retail structure and exacerbated by the Great Depression. Segments of the industry attempted to use the New Deal’s NRA codes to solve these new problems and stabilize the tire market, but the tire manufacturing and tire retailing codes were patent failures. Instead of leading to cartelization and higher prices, which is what most scholars assume the NRA codes did, the tire industry codes actually led to even more fragmentation and price-cutting. (Pages 543-568)

The Reichskuratorium (RKW) was founded in 1921 by Carl Friedrich von Siemens and his subalternate, Carl K–ttgen. The organization strove to implement measures of industrial and organizational efficiency in Germany in the interwar era following the American models of Frederick W. Taylor and Henry Ford. This study uses the organization as a vehicle to evaluate varieties of organized capitalism in German business and industrial history since the late nineteenth century. Most recent research has identified forms of organized capitalism that include significant input from organized labor along with state and industry as the most "modern" forms. While these efforts stagnated and eventually failed in Germany’s interwar Weimar Republic, they are still seen as the origin of a characteristic and successful postwar model of organized capitalism. Acknowledging that this view is accurate, this study draws attention to the alternate model of the RKW which strove to implement technical and organizational measures of industrial and economic efficiency using state funding but avoiding significant input from organized labor. This variation of German organized capitalism emerged from the more traditional, self-regulating patterns of the late nineteenth century. It persisted through the Weimar Republic, through World War II, and into the postwar era. Less fruitful for understanding the character of the RKW are models from the 1970s Cold War era which elaborated a strongly symbiotic version of organized capitalism between state and big business, which allegedly subordinated efforts of big business to state interests. (Pages 569-602)