Top Management: E. I. Du Pont de Nemours Powder Company

At the Du Pont Company, the transformation from horizontal com- bination to vertical integration and from a loose agglomeration of plants to a centralized functionally departmentalized structure came with speed and precision.02 Its creators gave careful thought to organizational design. These men were trained engineers who knew firsthand the most advanced administrative practices on

The Growing Supremacy of Managerial Enterprise

In 1917 few American industrial enterprises had as modern a manage- ment as Du Pont. Many of the mergers were, in the manner of United States Rubber, still slowly working out such administrative structures and procedures. A number of those enterprises that had grown by internal expansion rather than merger were still controlled by

The Modern Business Enterprise: Perfecting the Structure

The sharp recession following World War I had a shattering impact on many of the new industrial and marketing companies. The majority had been established after the depression of the 1890s. Most industrials that began before 1893, such as the meat packers and American Tobacco, were at the time of that depression still developing

The Modern Business Enterprise: The Professionalization of Management

The techniques of industrial management developed at General Electric, Du Pont, and General Motors spread rapidly. During the 1920s the new accounting, budgeting, and forecasting methods were becoming normal operating procedures. Once the strategy of diversification created or intensified the need for a multidivisional structure, that organizational form was speedily adopted. One reason for

Growth of Modern Business Enterprise Between the Wars

One reason for the continuing spread of the modern enterprise was that the new professional associations, journals, training courses, and con- sultants made possible a rapid diffusion of the new managerial and administrative procedures. More important, of course, were the advancing technologies and expanding markets that gave the multiunit firm a com- petitive advantage

Modern Business Enterprise Since 1941

In many sectors of the American economy, but above all in the central sectors of production and distribution, World War II put the capstone on the institutional developments of the interwar years and set the stage for the impressive growth of the modern business enterprise and of the econ- omy itself in the postwar

The Dominance of Modern Business Enterprise

In the years after World War II the large managerial enterprise became ever more powerful. It acquired control of an increasing share of the nation’s economic activities, as well as a growing part of the industrial production of Europe and the rest of the world. In 1947, the two hundred largest industrials in the

The Managerial Revolution in American Business: General Patterns of Institutional Growth

The significance of the coming of this new function and class for an understanding of American economic history can be pinpointed by briefly summarizing the general patterns of growth. Such a summary demon- strates how historical experience substantiates the general propositions outlined in the introduction to this study. It suggests areas of research for

The Managerial Revolution in American Business: The Ascendancy of the Manager

Historians as well as economists have failed to consider the implications of the rise of modern business enterprise. They have studied the entrepre- neurs who created modern business enterprise, but more in moral than in analytical terms. Their concern has been more whether they were exploiters (robber barons) or creators (industrial statesmen). Historians have

The United States: Seed-Bed of Managerial Capitalism

Modern business enterprise has appeared in all technologically advanced market economies. Comparable protests, even stronger ideological and political opposition, has not prevented its emergence and spread in western Europe and Japan. In recent years the same type of multiunit enterprises, using comparable administrative procedures and organizational structures, have come to dominate much the same

Foundations of Organization Design: Coordination in Fives

Recall that structure involves two fundamental requirements—the division of labor into distinct tasks, and the achievement of coordination among these tasks. In Ms. Raku’s Ceramico, the division of labor—wedging, form-ing, tooling, glazing, firing—was dictated largely by the job to be done and the technical system available to do it. Coordination, however, proved to be

Foundations of Organization Design: The Organization in Five Parts

Organizations are structured to capture and direct systems of flows and to define interrelationships among different parts. These flows and interre- lationships are hardly linear in form, with one element following neatly after another. Yet words must take such a linear form. Hence, it sometimes becomes very difficult to describe the structuring of organizations

Foundations of Organization Design: The Functioning of the Organization

Here then we have our representation of the organization in five parts. As noted, we can and shall use this diagram in various ways. One way is to overlay the diagram with various types of flows to depict how the organi- zation functions, at least as has been characterized in the literature of management.

Designing individual Positions: Job Specialization in Organization

Jobs can be specialized in two dimensions. The first is “breadth” or “scope”—how many different tasks are contained in each and how broad or narrow is each of these tasks. At one extreme, the worker is a jack-of-all- trades, forever jumping from one broad task to another; at the other ex- treme, he focuses

Designing individual Positions: Behavior Formalization in Organization

A second parameter of organizational design, related to individual posi- tions, has, in the opinion of David Hickson (1966-67), been a virtual obses- sion of organization theorists. In fact, Hickson’s list of who has focused on this parameter reads like a veritable Who’s Who of writers in manage- ment—Taylor, Fayol, McGregor, Argyris, Simon, Crozier,

Designing individual Positions: Training and Indoctrination in Organization

The third aspect of position design entails the specifications of the require- ments for holding a position in the first place. In particular, the organiza- tion can specify what knowledge and skills jobholders must have and what norms they must exhibit. It can then establish recruiting and selection procedures to screen applicants in terms

Relating the Position Design Parameters in Organization

It has been evident throughout our discussion that specialization, formal- ization, and training and indoctrination are not completely independent design parameters. In essence, we have been describing two fundamen- tally different kinds of positions. One we have called unskilled: because the work is highly rationalized, it involves extensive specialization in both the horizontal and

Designing the Superstructure: Unit Grouping in Organization

The grouping of positions and units is not simply a convenience for the sake of creating an organigram, a handy way of keeping track of who works in the organization. Rather, grouping is a fundamental means, to coordinate work in the organization. Grouping can have at least four important effects: Perhaps most important, grouping

Designing the Superstructure: Unit Size in Organization

The second basic issue in the design of the superstructure concerns how large each unit or work group should be. How many positions should be contained in the first-level grouping, and how many units in each suc- cessively higher-order unit? This question of unit size can be rephrased in two important ways: How many

Fleshing Out the Superstructure: Planning and Control Systems in Organization

The purpose of a plan is to specify a desired output—a standard—at some future time. And the purpose of control is to assess whether or not that standard has been achieved. Thus, planning and control go together like the proverbial horse and carriage: There can be no control without prior planning, and plans lose