Becoming fully functional: The conceptual struggle for a new structure for the giant corporation in the US and UK in the first half of the twentieth century

Abstract

The rapid growth of the larger corporations in the US from the late nineteenth century onwards made the question of the appropriate structure for these new corporate giants of increasing importance to management writers. Particularly difficult was the relationship between line management and functional management as management hierarchies lengthened and specialisms grew in number and scope. Developing ideas from F.W. Taylor and Harrington Emerson by US and UK writers brought confusion as much as it brought progress. Attempts from the late 1920s to evolve organisational proposals by establishing principles of organisation brought modest advances but no conceptual breakthroughs. By the Second World War no management writers appear to have proposed or identified anything resembling the multidivisional form.