Günter Dinhobl (Hrsg.): Sonderband 7. Eisenbahn/Kultur – Railway/Culture (2004)
IV. Die Eisenbahn-Technik / Railway-technics - Manfred E. A. Schmutzer: Iron Rules Rule Iron Rails. Cultures and Their Technologies
Iron Rules Rule Iron Rails. Cultures and Their Technologies nantly family owned enterprises.19 In contrast to this „German entrepreneurs were more ready than the British and, in most cases, than the French to give up, in Ludwig Stoll- werck’s words, “patriarchalisch-familienegozentrische Auffassungen”, and instead to recruit teams of managers, to give those managers wide responsibility, and to share top-level decision-making with them.20 It is well known that Britain could not maintain its idiosyncrasies over time and was finally forced to succumb to the requirements of technology as well as to the rules of competition as evidenced by economies of scale and scope. Still, it is of much interest to our argument, that Chandler explains these differences in terms of inclinations, which are inherited and thus inherent in culture, rather than by rational or economic considerations. One of his arguments draws on the long tradition of German bureaucratic management which became thus internalized and allowed at the same time a different and higher social status for “Privatbeamte“, the label attributed to industrial managers. This stands in strong contrast to a “company servant“, the title given to them in England. Even more compelling however is a second point he makes; he traces some of the roots of these manifest differences back to the traditions of the respective legal systems. These differences are ancient and passed on by way of cultural traits although their consequences regulate societal interrelations. The above argument criticizing the inappropriateness of separating culture and society is here again corroborated. Germans, accustomed to ample protection of private agreements by courts of law, are, due to this juridical protection, more ready to subscribe to such agreements and even to accept vertical integration of various firms, than companies subject to Anglo-Saxon law. Lacking comparable legal security the latter preferred acquisitions and mergers - and still do so - which guarantee absolute control. This belligerent basic attitude makes strategic cooperation unlikely and was in general responsible for the German superiority in industry over Britain before the first world war. The influence of culture is of course not restricted to differences in legal systems. Another often neglected fact is the culture-dependence of the very notions of space and time as was already pointed out above. 10 It should be noted that T. Hughes comes to identical results in his study of electrical power systems in Britain; Hughes, Thomas P.: Networks of power: electrification in Western society, 1880- 1930. Baltimore 1993. 20 Chandler: Scale and Scope, p. 500. 313
