Business History Review

Two major forces have been remaking the organizational setting of the United States in the recent past. The third industrial revolution and globalization are having a dramatic impact on the structure and process of American economic institutions and on the nation's political process. This third version of the organizational synthesis probes, with varying degrees of success, the vast literature that has accumulated around these two themes in the years since 1983, when the Business History Review published the second version of the paradigm. While much has changed in the nation's history and its historiography, bureaucratic institutions continue to dominate the society's organizational landscape. Pressed to change, to adapt to the need for greater efficiency and innovative capability, the surviving bureaucracies and the professionals who people them have experienced wrenching changes in recent years. To date, this "American solution" to global competition and technical transformation has been expensive in human terms but an overwhelming economic success for America.

From 1877 to 1929 the Bell System extended its quality-assurance capabilities, a step that was critical to the company's ability to certify the reliability of its equipment and apparatus and to provide economical service. Learning in this context involved the gradual development of an organizational structure for coordinating and controlling quality-assurance activities at both the staff and line levels and between the corporate elements of the Bell System. Over the course of the initiative, innovative methods of analysis emerged that provided useful new insights into the manufacturing process. The company's adaptation of probability theory, for example, enabled it to launch a comprehensive inspection regime, which became known as "statistical quality control" (SQC). Based on this new approach, Bell succeeded in broadening its manufacturing knowledge, quantifying definitions of quality, reducing costs and risk, thus assuming the more reliable operation of its vast telephone network. Eventually this upgrading of learning led to the formation of a new profession of quality engineering, which found adherents across many industries in the United States and abroad.

Rare materials recently released by the Zigong City Archives shed light on the accounting system that was created by salt-mining businesses in Zigong. The materials include forty-seven accounting books prepared by eight firms in the industry from 1908 to 1930. In this study, the materials are used to reveal how the Zigong salt-mining firms used the double-entry system. The study draws on the archival documents to reveal how the firms' innovative reporting methods enabled them to calculate profit and loss, and it explores the ways in which improved accounting information guided the decisions of Chinese proprietors who were operating in a business environment characterized by inadequate financing, considerable risk, and long intervals between investment and return.