It May have been the ingrained pessimism of Bentham and McCulloch that provoked Carlyle to dub economics the dismal science. It surely must have been economists' concern over price theory, which they regarded and still regard as the central core of economics, that made the name stick. Studies of the role of prices in history are no less tedious and technical than price theory, and in hands no more skillful than mine they can be even more dreary. But this is not the worst of my worries. The evidence that I shall sketch supports the pessimistic hypothesis that during certain germinal periods price and wage behavior of the type that is now taking a distressing percentage of real income from all of us who live on our salaries has proved beneficial to society in the long run and that the type of price and wage behavior which would benefit most of us in the short run has had serious disadvantages. Yet I have the inner satisfaction of appearing to be objective in my thinking and fearless in airing my conclusions in a gathering of some of the worst aggrieved.

The sort of document which explicitly formulates policy is, in any field of history, rather hard to come by. That is especially true when we search for formulations of business policy and especially for medieval formulations of medieval business policy.

The task of discussing sociological changes in the field of European enterpreneurship is not an easy one, mainly because of the scarcity of historical data of the earliest period and the fact that there has been comparatively little individual biographical research relating to that period. These changes can perhaps best be illustrated by attempting to define the individual typifying the entrepreneur in each of the three economic periods that Sombart has designated as early, middle or mature, and late capitalism.

During the two decades prior to 1900, electrical manufacturing companies grew from small, single-plant firms, producing only a few items and employing several hundred workers, to large, multiplant organizations, with hundreds of products and thousands of employees. This change in the scale of operations required the invention and application of new organizational forms and new administrative procedures. The men who were responsible for these developments were among the first to recognize and solve the administrative problems of large industrial corporations. The work of these men is the subject of this paper.

The purpose of this paper is to describe briefly the administrative organization and planning system of the typical large Soviet steel plant, and then show how the plant director carries out one of his essential functions both with the help of and in spite of the institutional framework within which he has to operate. Our attention will be focused primarily at the level of the individual firm, but in order to appreciate the problems of firm management we must first see how the individual enterprise fits into the all-pervading Soviet industrial bureaucracy.

The aim of this discussion is to elucidate the evolution of the management concepts, organizational patterns, and policies of the Standard Oil Company (New Jersey). In point of fact, these topics are discussed primarily with reference to the origin and development of the Standard Oil combination under its various legal titles prior to 1911. The policies and practices, both sound and unsound, of the men who administered the Jersey Company in its early years were largely those of the men who created the combination.

The policies of the Standard Oil Company (New Jersey) are headline news. The fact that Standard's policies are not spoken of as “public” policies is little more than an accident of terminology; certainly they are public in their sweep and import, and certainly in their impact upon the public mind. The policies and actions of Standard (New Jersey) are not alone in these respects. Standard is a giant corporation; there are other giant corporations and there are more in the making.

I am going to begin by asking a theoretical question or, if this term appears too ambitious, I am going first to circumscribe by way of generalization the role of business administration in economic development. In the second instance the hypotheses so gained will be tested through application to the history of American banking administration between 1780 and 1914. However, before starting on this task we must agree about the terminology to be used, since the word “administration” may connote either a series of actions, namely, the practice of administering something, or the personnel which professionally administers, say, a business enterprise or a public agency or the like. The same holds true mutatis mutandis of the term “management” which in this paper will have a specific meaning. I am going to apply both connotations to the terms administration and management, but in such a way that no misunderstanding is possible.

One of the major centrifugal forces in American economic history is the industrial revolution which has been taking place for the past 150 years. Corollary to it are the agricultural revolution and the transportation revolution. Most of the investment capital and working capital for the expanding enterprises involved in these revolutions came from plowing back profits, but a sizable amount had to be borrowed or obtained from outside investors. Mobilizing this capital was a major undertaking, especially in a new nation in which capital was relatively scarce. Its successful accomplishment involved a financial revolution.