Lewis: Unexceptional Women

Unexceptional Women

Female Proprietors in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Albany, New York, 1830–1885

Susan Ingalls Lewis

Unexceptional Women: Female Proprietors in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Albany, New York, 1830–1885 by Susan Ingalls Lewis challenges our conceptions about mid-nineteenth-century American women, business, and labor, offering a detailed study of female proprietors in one industrializing American city. Analyzing the careers of more than two thousand women who owned or operated businesses between 1830 and 1885, Lewis argues that business provided a common, important, and varied occupation for nineteenth-century working women. Based on meticulous research in city directories, census records, and credit reports, this study provides both a demographic portrait of Albany’s female proprietors and an examination of the size, scope, longevity, financing, and creditworthiness of their ventures.

Although the growing city did produce several remarkable businesswomen in trades as diverse as hotel management, plumbing, and the marketing of pianos on the installment plan, Albany’s female proprietors were most often self-employed artisans, shopkeepers, petty manufacturers, and service providers. These women used business as a method of self-employment and survival, as a means of both individual and family mobility, and as a strategy for immigrant assimilation into an urban economy and middle-class lifestyle.

Intriguingly, among the ranks of Albany’s female proprietors Lewis discovered substantial evidence of such supposedly recent phenomena as self-employment, dual-income marriages, working motherhood, home-based business, and the juggling of domestic and professional priorities. The stories of these businesswomen make fascinating reading while simultaneously providing the basis for a theoretical discussion of how to define and understand enterprise for mid-nineteenth-century women.

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Feldenkirchen: Werner von Siemens

Werner von Siemens

Inventor and International Entrepreneur

Wilfried Feldenkirchen

Werner von Siemens (1816–92) is best known in the English-speaking world as an inventor and pioneering electrical engineer. While previous studies have concentrated on von Siemen's work as a scientist and technician, this biography focuses on his life as a businessman. Siemens was not only a successful inventor but also an entrepreneur with a broad and international business vision.

Siemens first achieved success in telegraphy. His firm, Siemens & Halske, built Germany's first important telegraph line and went on to build line elsewhere in Europe and Asia. Siemens then turned his hand to electric technology. He was instrumental in creating the conditions for the advancement of electrical technology from the experimental stage into the modern electrical industry.

Siemens combined his engineering brilliance with entrepreneurial skills to develop a business whose activities at an early stage nearly spanned the globe. Siemens held a multinational vision almost from the start. The Siemens firms were unique in that, rather than starting small then slowly growing and branching out, they were from their inception international organizations.

The story of Siemens is a vital part of the history of industrialization in Europe. It will make fascinating reading for scholars and students of German history, business history, and the history of technology.

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Blackford: The Lost Dream

The Lost Dream

Businessmen and City Planning on the Pacific Coast, 1890–1920

Mansel G. Blackford

Mansel Blackford’s The Lost Dream explores the history of city planning in five Pacific Coast cities—Seattle, Portland, Oakland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles—during the Progressive Era. Although city planning had diverse roots, Blackford shows that much of the early planning originated with businessmen who viewed it as a way to shape their urban environments both economically and socially.

During the opening years of the twentieth century, the business and political leaders in each of these cities began developing comprehensive city plans encompassing harbor improvements, new street and transportation facilities, civic centers, and parks and boulevards. As Blackford shows, businessmen worked through both established political channels and newly formed bodies outside of those channels to become leaders in the planning process. As the planning campaigns evolved, businessmen found themselves both joined and opposed by ever-changing coalitions of professionals, politicians, and workers.

The way that businessmen had previously interacted with these other parties greatly affected their success in obtaining their goals, but ultimately, Blackford claims, politics lay at the heart of planning. The proposed plans were accepted or rejected in heated citywide elections in which, to be successful, businessmen had to convince others to vote with them—a feat they achieved in only one city. Nevertheless, these plans were often later adopted in some piecemeal fashion, and Blackford concludes his study with an analysis of the legacy of Progressive Era city planning for later periods.

The Lost Dream makes significant contributions to our understanding of city planning in America and particularly in the American West.

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Thompson: The Passenger Train in the Motor Age

The Passenger Train in the Motor Age

California’s Rail and Bus Industries, 1910–1941

Gregory Lee Thompson

In his insightful study, Gregory Lee Thompson examines the demise of passenger trains and the rise of buses in California and demonstrates that railroad management's shortsighted response to the growing use of automobiles contributed to its own decline.

After peaking about 1910, the use of intercity passenger trains rapidly gave way to the onslaught of the automobile. For the next three decades, railroad managers tried, but failed, to adapt the passenger train to the new competition. Although previous studies have suggested that regulation and a conspiracy between rail and bus management played a significant role in the decline of the industry, Thompson reaches a different conclusion. Focusing on the California operations of two major railroads and the largest intercity bus company in the United States, he demonstrates that railroad management failed to accurately assess the demand for its service and the costs of providing it. According to Thompson, railroad management's faulty planning and its misleading accounting system eventually did the passenger train in, while the superior corporate planning within bus companies led to their success.

Based on previously unseen data, The Passenger Train in the Motor Age offers an illuminating portrait of a critical time in railroad history.

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Knerr: Eagle-Picher Industries

Eagle-Picher Industries

Strategies for Survival in the Industrial Marketplace, 1840–1980

Douglas Knerr

This comprehensive history traces the evolution of Eagle-Picher Industries, a manufacturing firm based in Cincinnati, Ohio, for almost 150 years. Focusing on events prior to the company's involvement in toxic tort litigation, which forced it to file bankruptcy, this work examines Eagle-Picher's development as a diversified industrial manufacturer.

From a closely held, regional producer of white lead and other paint pigments, Eagle-Picher became an important miner and processor of non-ferrous metals by investing in zinc-lead fields in Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma during the early twentieth century. Once ore reserves in these areas were depleted, the company turned to manufacturing industrial goods and pursued an aggressive and unique expansion and diversification program during the post-World War II ear. During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Eagle-Picher acquired over twenty-five firms, all manufacturers of industrial goods, and assembled a broadly based specialized productive capacity.

Eagle-Picher's history illustrates a number of important trends and concepts. First, its experiences in the late nineteenth century provide a valuable look at how smaller firms adapted to the forces of consolidation in the economy. Further, Eagle-Picher's experience as an industrial manufacturer demonstrates the ways in which mid-sized firms grew by focusing on market niches overlooked by larger firms. Finally, Eagle-Picher's approach to acquisition and diversification is unique in today's competitive marketplace. Eagle-Picher's commitment to limited diversification built around historical strengths, its acquisition of successful firms, and its efforts to establish strong lines of communication and effective controls between the central office and the divisions stand in stark contrast to the efforts of many acquisitive firms during recent mergers.

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Dintenfass: Managing Industrial Decline

Managing Industrial Decline

The British Coal Industry between the Wars

Michael Dintenfass

Managing Industrial Decline examines the dramatic decline of the British coal industry through the lens of comparative business history, challenging the prevailing belief that the industry's decline was due primarily to global economic factors and instead demonstrating that entrepreneurial failings of individual coal firms contributed significantly to the problem.

Through a comparative analysis of company histories, Dintenfass shows how the full range of business operations at British coal firms, including labor management policies, technological choices, and marketing practices, affected their performance. The histories of individual firms demonstrate that the managements could improve productivity, increase sale prices, and sustain profitability, even as the coal trade succumbed to cyclical depression and secular decline. According to Dintenfass, comparisons between the individual firms and the regional coal industries to which they belonged show that neighboring firms were slow to introduce the modest innovations that the successful firms pioneered. Since there were few barriers to the implementation of these strategies, it appears that Britain's coal masters miscalculated their costs and benefits, contributing to the problem by failing to adopt inexpensive and accessible second-best solutions to production and commercial problems.

Managing Industrial Decline breaks new ground in the field of business history and restores entrepreneurship to its proper place in the analysis of industrial decline.

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Nelson, ed: A Mental Revolution

A Mental Revolution

Scientific Management since Taylor

Edited by Daniel Nelson

A Mental Revolution includes eight original essays that analyze how the scientific management principles developed by legendary engineer Frederick W. Taylor have evolved and been applied since his death in 1915.

Taylor believed that a business or any other complex organization would operate more effectively if its practices were subjected to rigorous scientific study. His classic Principles of Scientific Management spread his ideas for organization, planning, and employee motivation throughout the industrialized world. But scientific management, because it required, in Taylor’s words, “a complete mental revolution,” was highly disruptive, and Taylor’s famous time-motion studies, especially when applied piecemeal by many employers who did not adopt the entire system, helped make the movement enormously unpopular with the organized labor movement. Though its direct influence diminished by the 1930s, Taylorism has remained a force in American business and industry up to the present time.

The essays in this volume discuss some of the important people and organizations involved with Taylorism throughout this century, including Richard Feiss and Mary Barnett Gilson at Joseph & Feiss, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, and Mary Van Kleeck, and explore the influence of scientific management at the Bedaux Company, the Link-Belt Company, and Du Pont. Chapters on the Taylor movement’s influence on university business education and on Peter Drucker’s theories round out the collection.

Written by some of the finest scholars of the scientific management movement, A Mental Revolution provides a balanced and comprehensive view of its principles, evolution, and influence on business, labor, management, and education.

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Castaneda: Regulated Enterprise

Regulated Enterprise

Natural Gas Pipelines and Northeastern Markets, 1938–1954

Christopher James Castaneda

Christopher Castaneda's study of the construction of the pipelines that transported southwestern gas to the Northeast traces the ways in which the federal regulatory process fostered competitive growth in the natural gas industry.

In 1938, the Natural Gas Act granted the Federal Power Commission jurisdiction over the interstate transmission and sale of natural gas. The FPC used its new powers to guide, shape, and manage an intensely competitive period in the industry. As Castaneda shows, aggressive and politically astute entrepreneurs based in the Southwest took advantage of economic opportunity and a regulatory environment conducive to industry growth. They financed and built the nation's longest gas pipelines to connect the massive southwestern reserves with the major northern energy markets. The coal industry, which supplied the raw product for manufactured gas, and the railroad industry, which transported the coal, adamantly but unsuccessfully opposed the action and attempted to halt the introduction of natural gas into their northeastern markets. First, during the war years, emergency regulatory agencies directed the expansion of the industry into Appalachia. Then, in the ensuing peacetime, market forces prompted entrepreneurs to compete vigorously for regulatory approval to build pipelines to sell natural gas in the Northeast.

While previous studies have examined the development of the natural gas industry after 1954, when the Supreme Court's Phillips decision established the FPC as a regulator of price control rather than as a manager of industrial growth, Castaneda's is the first to examine this earlier entrepreneurial era. Based on exhaustive research in corporate records and government documents, Regulated Enterprise offers a case study of government-business relations during a period of rapid industrial expansion and suggests a new way of looking at federal regulation and competitive growth.

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Friedricks: Henry E. Huntington and the Creation of Southern California

Henry E. Huntington and the Creation of Southern California

William B. Friedricks

Henry E. Huntington and the Creation of Southern California is the first business biography of the legendary entrepreneur who helped shape the Los Angeles basin. Based largely on archival sources, William Friedricks’s study presents a balanced view of the energetic Huntington, whose prodigious control of street railways, electric power, and real estate enabled him to leave a lasting imprint on southern California.

Greater Los Angeles attained its modern configuration during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Its development was influenced heavily by the creative energy and genius of a few entrepreneurs, and of this group, Henry Huntington played the major role. By rapidly pouring vast amounts of capital into his triad of interrelated businesses—all critical for regional growth—he achieved a virtual monopoly over the development of many parts of the Los Angeles basin. Operating at a time when local planning commissions had little regulatory power, he became the region’s de facto metropolitan planner, building trolley lines where and when he wanted and determining the spatial layout of the area. Then, as a large-scale subdivider, he further dictated the socioeconomic mix of many of the suburbs.

Huntington further encouraged development in southern California through his involvement in local agriculture and industry, the hotel business, and many leading social and civic organizations. As a philanthropist, he donated land for parks and schools and provided money to various youth organizations. To encourage and enrich the intellectual and cultural life of southern California, he lent his support to a number of regional institutions of higher education and founded the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

Huntington’s various enterprises also made him one of southern California’s largest employers. An outspoken proponent of the open shop, he worked hard to keep his companies free of unions, thus foiling organized labor’s attempt to gain a foothold in the Los Angeles basin.

William Friedricks’s biography of Henry Huntington is an important contribution to the fields of business and urban history, as well as to the history of California, and provides insight into the development of one of the nation’s most important metropolitan areas.

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Vrooman: Daniel Willard and Progressive Management on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad

Daniel Willard and Progressive Management on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad

David M. Vrooman

David Vrooman's ground-breaking study examines the personnel policies of Daniel Willard, one of the most progressive American business leaders of the first half of this century.

As president of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad from 1910 to 1941, Willard introduced management practices that were well ahead of their time. Working from the simple and unshakeable belief that the company, its employees, and its customers all shared essentially the same long-term interests, Willard fostered a corporate culture remarkable for its orientation toward the concerns of both its customers and its employees. Vrooman's study analyzes the basics of Willard's approach: low-level participative management combined with employment stabilization, cooperative relationships with unions, and a general philosophy of the company as family. As Vrooman demonstrates, Willard's progressive management policies were strikingly similar to what has become known as the Japanese management style.

Willard's management style progressed through three main phases, marked by three programmatic thrusts: welfare capitalism and other foundation measures, the union-management Cooperative Plan, and the Depression-induced Cooperative Traffic Program. Of these, the Cooperative Plan is the most significant—it was the most vigorous and long-lasting of a new number of cooperative management efforts begun in the United States during the 1920s and was the precursor of today's quality circles.

Vrooman concludes that managerial effectiveness comes not so much from technique as from character. The strength of the service-oriented corporate family that Willard created stemmed from his rigorous commitment to what he felt was right. Willard's modest demeanor and consistent actions, combined with his personal vision, were responsible for inspiring the loyalty and motivation that made his managerial programs successful.

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