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

Manfred E. A. Schmutzer

zation. The outcome of the process is familiar. It was skillfully researched and docu- merited by the work of A. D. Chandler.16 Some results of his monumental work will be briefly summarized here. According to his presentation, American railroads became the pioneers in modem management in the 1850s.'7 Because of the complexities of their operations they formed for their internal organization smaller operating groups and appointed middle managers to supervise, monitor, and coordinate the different functional activities. Railroad managers devised a line-and-staff system of administration acting on one line of authority. This included among other requirements the setting of standards in materials, pricing, service, workloads and salaries. Unavoidably, managerial hierarchies emerged from these requirements. For strategic reasons railroad companies had not only to cooperate with other companies to ship goods and passengers across the continent in good time, but also had to expand their own enterprise across the North American continent. The spatial expansion was unavoidably followed by an expansion in terms of management and capital, resulting in very large enterprises. These again required more control, more uniformity and more standardization in many respects. To put the result in Chandler’s words:

The corporations operating them remained for many years the world’s largest business enterprises, administered by the world's largest managerial hierarchies.1*

Cultural and Technological Traits in Conflict It is of great interest for our argumentation to compare these developments with the analogous ones in Europe. Comparing for example Germany to Britain one aspect seems particularly instructive; although - or possibly because - the British were the first to have invented and developed railways and steam engines, they did not submit easily to the intrinsic requirements of this technology. Contrary to Germany and the US, Britain maintained for a long time its individualistic patchwork of small predomi- * 11

16 Chandler Jr, Alfred Dupont: The Visible Hand. The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Harvard, Mass. 1981 (Orig. 1977); Chandler Jr., Alfred Dupont: Scale and Scope. The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism. Harvard, Mass. 1990.

11 This presentation is not undisputed. M. R. Smith presents a somewhat different line of argument, as we shall see below. However both place the outcome roughly in the same period, so that the dispute becomes rather one of priority, an issue notoriously difficult to decide. Smith, Merrit Roe: Army Ordnance and the “American System" of Manufacturing 1815-1861. Military Enterprise and Technological Change, ed. by Merrit Roe Smith. Cambridge, Mass. 1985, S. 39-86.

'* Chandler: Scale and Scope, p. 57.

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