The Emerging Organizational Synthesis In Modern American History

Business History Review

Volumn 44, Issue 3, 1970, Pages 279-290

  Galambos, Louis ^a  

^a RUTGERS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84972270514     PISSN: 00076805     EISSN: 2044768X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3112614     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. Two recent analyses of the progressive synthesis are: John Higham, et al., History (Englewood Cliffs, 1965), 221-30, and Samuel P. Hays, “The Social Analysis of American Political History,” Political Science Quarterly, LXXX (September 1965), 373-94. The liberal framework still exercises some authority among historians of the New Deal: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s, The Coming of the New Deal (Boston, 1958), and The Politics of Upheaval (Boston, 1960), carry forward the progressive tradition in brilliant style. Even the historiography of the 1930's has been touched by revisionism, however, and an excellent example of the newer approach is provided by Barry D. Karl's perceptive analysis of Executive Reorganization and Reform in the New Deal (Cambridge, 1963).
2. Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historian (New York, 1968), xv, comments on the essentially negative quality of revisionism during the past two decades.
3. This viewpoint is brilliantly analyzed in Isaiah Berlin's study of The Hedgehog and the Fox (New York, 1957).
4. Irwin Unger, “The New Left and American History,” American Historical Review, LXXII (July 1967), 1237-1263. For a harsh indictment of the New Left, see David Donald's review of Barton J. Bernstein (ed.), Towards a New Past, in The Hedgehog and the Fox LXXIV (December 1968), 531-33.
5. I prefer “organizational” to the other terms which scholars have used. John Higham, et al., History, 231, refers to “the new institutionalism,” but this expression lacks precision and threatens to create unnecessary confusion between the new brand of history and the institutional school of economists. “Institutionalism” does not identify the particular type of institution, the large-scale, modern organization, which plays the leading role in the new synthesis. Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York, 1967), uses “bureaucratic.” This term has the advantage of being even more precise than “organizational,” but bureaucracy carries a heavy pejorative connotation which historians might eventually find burdensome.
6. Higham, History, 231.
7. This general question is discussed in Kai Erickson, “Sociology and the Historical Perspective,” the Maclver Lecture, given at the Southern Sociological Society (Atlanta, 1968). As devotees of historicism will recognize, this difference in emphasis can be of crucial significance. See R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (New York, 1956), especially 199 ff., for a superb argument against the behavioral orientation in history
8. Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (Glencoe, 1947), 324-341.
9. Edward N. Saveth (ed.), American History and the Social Sciences (Glencoe, 1964), 357-369.
10. (New York, 1941).
11. American Capitalism (Boston, 1952).
12. (New York, 1953), xi.
13. (New York, 1956).
14. Other studies developing closely related ideas include: C. Wright Mills, White Collar (New York, 1951), and The Power Elite (New York, 1956); Peter M. Blau, Bureaucracy in Modern Society (New York, 1956); R. K. Merton, et al. (eds.), Reader in Bureaucracy (Glencoe, 1952); Edward S. Mason (ed.), The Corporation in Modern Society (Cambridge, 1959); Adolf A. Berle, Jr., The 20th Century Capitalist Revolution (New York, 1954); W. Lloyd Warner, The Corporation in the Emergent American Society (New York, 1961); and W. Lloyd Warner, et al., The Emergent American Society, I (New Haven, 1967).
15. Some of the essays in W. Lloyd Warner's The Emergent American Society provide an exception to this rule; see, for example, Gibson Winter, “Religious Organizations,” I, 408-91. This volume has received less attention from historians than it probably deserves.
16. Higham, History, 231.
17. While this premise seems to have a Marxist ring, there is in fact a wide gulf between the Weberian and Marxist views of history.
18. Arthur H. Cole, Business Enterprise in its Social Setting (Cambridge, 1959); Allan Nevins, John D. Rockefeller (2 vols., New York, 1941); Harold F. Williamson and Orange A. Smalley, Northwestern Mutual Life (Evanson, 1957); Ralph W. and Muriel E. Hidy, Pioneering in Big Business (New York, 1955); Arthur M. Johnson, The Development of American Petroleum Pipelines (Ithaca, 1958).
19. (Cambridge, 1962).
20. Wiebe, Search for Order, 18.
21. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Henry Varnum Poor (Cambridge, 1956); “Management Decentralization: An Historical Analysis,” Business History Review, XXX (June 1956), 111-174; “The Beginnings of ‘Big Business’ in American Industry,” Business History Review, XXXIII (Spring, 1959), 1-31; “Recent Developments in American Business Administration and Their Conceptualization” (with Fritz Redlich), Business History Review, XXXV (Spring, 1961), 1-27; Giant Enterprise: Ford, General Motors, and the Automobile Industry (New York, 1964); The Railroads: The Nation's First Big Business (New York, 1965); “The Railroads: Pioneers in Modern Corporate Management,” Business History Review, XXXIX (Spring, 1965), 16-40; “The Coming of Big Business,” in C. Vann Woodward (ed.), The Comparative Approach to American History (New York, 1968).
22. Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge, 1962).
23. “The Large Industrial Corporation and the Making of the Modern American Economy,” in Stephen E. Ambrose (ed.), Institutions in Modern America (Baltimore, 1967), 91-94.
24. “The History of a Business Society,” Journal of American History, LIV (June 1967), 5-18. Cochran's attitude toward the progressive synthesis has not remained static over the years; compare this essay and his volume on The American Business System (Cambridge, 1957), with Thomas C. Cochran and William Miller, The Age of Enterprise (New York, 1942)
25. Cochran, “The History of a Business Society,” 6.
26. The Age of Reform (New York, 1955), 215-271.
27. “Bernard Baruch: Symbol and Myth in Industrial Mobilization,” Business History Review, XLIII (Summer, 1969), 115-133.
28. (Cambridge, 1959).
29. Samuel Haber, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920 (Chicago, 1964).
30. While Haber briefly surveys the 1920, his major emphasis is upon the years 1890-1920
31. Charles E. Neu, “The Changing Interpretive Structures of American Foreign Policy,” in John Braeman, et al. (eds.), American Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century (forth-coming at the Ohio State University Press).
32. “The Albert Shaw Lectures on Diplomatic History,” The Johns Hopkins University, 1965
33. Search for Order, 224-285.
34. Philip Gleason, “An Immigrant Group's Interest in Progressive Reform,” American Historical Review, LXXIII (December 1967), 367—79; and The Conservative Reformers: German-American Catholics and the Social Order (Notre Dame, 1968), 24, 74, 80-83,
35. The Professional Altruist: The Emergence of Social Work as a Career, 1880-1930 (Cambridge, 1965).
36. “Religious Organizations,” in Warner, Emergent American Society, I, 408-491.
37. Even Wiebe apparently finds this tendency disturbing. In a paper delivered before the Dallas meeting of the Organization of American Historians (1968), he called upon scholars to stress the role of the individual in history — a theme which is certainly not very prominent in either of his books.
38. Search for Order, 286-302
39. This is discussed in Alvin W. Gouldner, “Metaphysical Pathos and the Theory of Bureaucracy,” American Political Science Review, XLIX (June 1955), 496-507.