Top Management: United States Rubber Company

General Electric adopted the centralized, functionally departmentalized operating structure even more readily than did American Cotton Oil and National Lead, not only because many senior executives were trained as engineers and its financiers were experienced students of railroad organization, but also because the merger was one of integrated firms that already had functional departments.

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