Den andra industriella revolutionen i Chandlers Scale and Scope

Alfred Chandler (1918-2007) är nog den mest inflytelserike företagshistorikern någonsin. Hans mest kända bok är The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977) som analyserade storbolagens organisation och "the managerial revolution" i USA:s näringsliv där marknadens "osynliga hand" ersattes av chefernas "synliga hand". 1990 kom han ut med Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism. Så här sammanfattar David Teece argumentet i denna bok:

"Professor Chandler recounts the history of how managers in the United States, Britain, and Germany built the organizations and took the risks of investment necessary to capture the economies of scale and scope opened up by the technological innovations of the second industrial revolution. His thesis is not that markets shape business organization as is commonly supposed in economic theorizing; rather it is that business organizations shape markets. The implication of this tour de force is that much of what is in the textbooks in mainstream microeconomics, industrial organization, and possibly growth and development ought to be revised, in some cases relegated to the appendices, if economic analysis is to come to grips with the essence of productivity improvement and wealth generation in advanced industrial economies." (s 199)

Chandler studerar de 200 största industriföretagen i de tre länderna från 1870 till 1960-tal, baserat på årsrapporter och andra källor, framför allt sekundärkällor.

Det viktiga som hände under "den industriella revolutionen" beskriver Teece utifrån Chandler så här:

"During the last quarter of the 19th century, major innovations made in the processes of production created many new industries and transformed old ones. Technological advances during this period were scale dependent and capital dependent and organizationailn novations( as described by Chandler) were needed to exploit these scale-dependent advances (p. 21). Many older labor-intensive industries, including textiles, lumber, furniture, printing, and publishing were largely unaffected. Capturing the economies available in new industries was not an automatic process. It came by improvinga nd rearrangingin puts; by using new or greatly improved machinery, furnaces, stills, and other equipment; by reorienting the processes of production within the plant; by placing the several intermediary processes employed in making a final product within a single works; and by increasing the applications of energy (particularly that generated by fossil fuel). (p. 22)'
It required coordination and control, exercised through organizational structures and systems designed by management. Indeed, Chandler argues that it required new forms of industrial enterprise-organizational innovation-to take advantage of the opportunities which were afforded by new technologies. In Chandler's framework, investment in capital intensive production facilities of sufficient size to capture scale and scope economies and in supporting managerial systems was key to the creation of the modern industrial enterprise. The critical entrepreneurial act was not the invention- or even the commercialization-of a new or greatly improved product or process. Instead it was the construction of a plant of the optimal size required to exploit fully the economies of scale or those of scope, or both. (p. 26)
To Chandler, marketplace success involved three essential steps by top management: (1) the investment in production facilities large enough to achieve the cost advantages of scale and scope; (2) investment in product- specific marketing, distribution, and purchasing networks; (3) recruiting and organizing of the managers needed to supervise and coordinate functional activities and allocate resources for future production and distribution. The entrepreneurs first to perform these three critical steps "acquired powerful competitive advantages"- what Chandler defines as firstmover advantages associated with learning and incumbency effects." (s 201)

Chandler menar att utvecklingen till detta effektiva storföretag gick fortare i USA, och likt han redan utvecklat i The Visible Hand menar han att detta berodde på den stora inhemska marknaden som integrerats med telegraf och järnväg. (s 202) Teece menar att huvudargumentet i Scale and Scope är: "between the 1850s and the 1880s the transportation and communications networks established the technological and organizational base for the exploitation of economies of scale and scope in the processes of production and distribution." (202) Entreprenörerna reagerade och omorganiserade tidigare i distributionssektorn än i industrin.

ett Standard Oil-raffinaderi i Cleveland, 1897

ett US Steel-stålverk i Pittsburgh: foto från mitten av 1990-talet från ett stålverk som var världens största under ett par decennier i 1900-talets början

Mellan 1880-talet och 1940-talet gick stora vågor av företagsfusioner över den amerikanska industrin, och Chandler menar att detta var en viktig andel till den större effektiviteten där jämfört med i Europa. (s 203)  Standard Oil, ledande i oljesektorn innan det bröts upp 1911, är ett case. Stålsektorns Andrew Carnegie är ett annat.

"Carnegie, while not the first to install new technologies like the Bessemer converter, was the first to build a large, vertically integrated facility, the Edgar Thomson Works in Pittsburgh, which remained for decades the largest steel works in the world. The large investments made by Carnegie and Illinois Steel enabled unit costs and prices to fall dramatically. Carnegie also pursued an integration strategy, first backwardsi nto iron.o re and coke. He then threatened a forward integration strategy into fabricated products like wire, rail, tubes, and hoops. The investment banker J. Pierpont Morgan, who had extensive ties to the fabricators, including Federal Steel, who would be threatened by this move, offered to buy Carnegie Steel at Carnegie's price. In 1900 he merged Carnegie Steel and Federal Steel, the two leaders in the steel industry, and then in the following year negotiated to merge or acquire secondary producers, thereby establishing the world's largest industrial corporation, U.S. Steel." (s 204f)

Utifrån sin studie av USA attackerar Chandler vad han kallar "ortodox" ekonomisk teori som ser skeptiskt på hierarkier och karteller.

Angående Storbritanniens relativt svaga utveckling förklarar Chandler detta med misslyckade att investera i reklam (marketing), distribution och management. (s 206) De brittiska storföretagen -- Chandler använder godisbolaget Cadburys som exempel -- hade för mycket familjemedlemmar i styrelserna och för få professionella managers.

"Chandler attributes the smaller size, family ownership, and less professional management of British firms to the smaller size of the British economy, the greater importance of foreign trade to the British companies, and the historical fact that Britain had industrialized and urbanized before the coming of the transportation revolution. The smaller geographic size of the island nation and the relative excellence of its pre-railt ransportations ystem, meant that the railroad and telegraph were less watershed factors in Britain. The British railway companies were smaller and did not provide the same organizational challenges as the much larger American ones; accordingly, it is not surprising that they were not pioneers in modern management, accounting, and finance." (207)

Britterna lyckades dock i vissa sektorer:

"However, the British did have some success in branded packaged goods. The new production technologies for refining, distilling, milling, and processing food, drink, tobacco, and consumer chemicals were not complex, and product-specific distribution facilities or specialized marketing services were not required. By the turn of the century many producers of branded consumer goods-names like Cadbury, Huntley and; Palmers, and Peek Frean-were among Britain's largest and most successful industrial enterprises." (s 207)

Att britterna var bättre på lätt industri än på tung industri kan ju också jämföras med Broadberry och Burhops (2007) jämförelse av produktivitet i tysk och brittisk industri 1935-36, där de finner att Tyskland hade högre produktivitet i tung industri och Storbritannien i lätt industri. Enligt Chandler är britternas misslyckande i organisk kemisk industri särskilt slående, eftersom de var bra på det i början av 1870-talet (s 208). Chandler menar att britternas misslyckande i stål under den andra industriella revolutionen kanske är begripligt givet att de hade ledit i denna sektor 100 år tidigare; men i kemi och tyg hade de lika bra förutsättningar som några andra. (s 208) Chandler lyfter också fram ytterligare en förklaring till britternas misslyckade överlag: att medan US-amerikanska bolag styrdes med marknadsandelar och långsiktiga vinster som mål, så styrdes brittiska bolag utifrån att ge kortsiktiga cashflöden till familjeägarna. (s 209)

Tyskland utmärkte sig för bankernas inblandning i den andra industriella revolutionen, och hade även relativt bra teknisk utbildning.

Jag skippar Teece diskussion om Chandlers relation till ekonomisk teori, särskilt nyinstitutionell sådan, och går till diskussionen om hans relation till Gerschenkron och Schumpeter: hur originell är Chandlers analys av den andra institutionella revolutionen, frågar Teece. Teece menar att Chandlers analys passar in i Gerschenkrons story om att sena industrialiserares process är olik den första industrialiserarens, men menar samtidigt att skillnaderna i fokus är betydande:

"Chandler points out that the success of firms is often substantially disconnected from the home base; moreover, the development of firms is not simply a microcosm of the development of the nation state. In Chandler's view, the wealth of nations depends on the development of organizationalc apabilities. Gerschenkron and other historians rarely looked at organizational capabilities and the successes and failures of national firms; Chandler suggests they should have done, because it would have brought into focus the development of organizationacl apabilities essential for business development, and for industrial development more generally. If Gerschenkron has provided the covers and the preface for a book on the organizationala spect of economic development, Chandler has begun to write the chapter." (s 222)

Referens

Teece, David (1993) "The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism: Perspectives on Chandler's Scale and Scope", Journal of Economic Literature.