GM Passes Ford, 1918–1938: Designing the General Motors Performance-Control System by Arthur J. Kuhn

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 1067 engineers. Moreover, he concludes, the “appeals of the car were universal, not culturally determined” (pp. 28—29). A book that surveys such a large subject will inevitably disappoint readers interested in specific topics, most of which get briefer treatment than they would like. Those looking to Flink for insights on the ways automobiles intersected with women’s lives, for example, will find provocative (and, I think, defensible) his assertion that cars “have probably had a greater impact on women’s roles than on men’s” (p. 162). But they will also be frustrated because he devotes only two pages to this topic. Brevity of this sort, however, is to be expected in such a global study, even when it exceeds 400 pages. I myself wish the publisher had encouraged Flink to write a book half again as long, not so that an extra page might have been allocated to describing or explicating the role of cars in women’s lives but so as to make the volume more readable, particularly for a wider audience. Flink’s prose is always clear, but in the interest of covering so much in relatively small compass, he has had to pare his manuscript of almost all description and evocation. This, along with the frequent allusion to statistical or technical evidence in the text, results in a book that is dryly factual and not always easy to read. Such criticisms, however, in no way diminish Flink’s achievement. He has clearly established himself as the leading authority on the history of the automobile and has written a major work that will repay careful study by all scholars interested in the 20th century. Joseph J. Corn Dr. Corn teaches the history of technology at Stanford University and is currently doing research on maintenance and repair literature, focusing on the automobile. GM Passes Ford, 1918—1938: Designing the General Motors PerformanceControl System. By Arthur J. Kuhn. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986. Pp. xii + 380; bibliography, indexes. $29.75. The story of how General Motors surpassed Ford both in sales and profits in the 1920s to become the auto industry leader is familiar to students of automotive and business history. Briefly told: Henry Ford imposed autocratic, idiosyncratic rule on the Ford Motor Company after he bought out his minority stockholders in 1919; the team of executives responsible for the success of the Model T disintegrated under resignations and arbitrary firings; and Ford remained commit­ ted to the Model T long after it was outmoded. In contrast, under the leadership of Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., GM adopted a “rational” committee system of decision making on the basis of objective statistical data, developed sophisticated financial controls, vastly improved commu­ nications within the firm, rationalized its products into “a car for every 1068 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE purse and purpose,” and placed a new emphasis on styling, particu­ larly evident in the annual model change. As a result, in the interwar period Ford’s share of the market for new cars collapsed from 59 percent to about 10 percent, while GM’s share increased from only 15 percent to some 40 percent. Arthur J. Kuhn mines the secondary literature to retell this story in greater detail than any previous scholar. He draws on some hereto­ fore neglected sources, such as GM vice-president for finance Don­ aldson Brown’s 1957 Some Reminiscences of an Industrialist. Also, in comparison with other scholars, most importantly Alfred D. Chand­ ler, Jr., Kuhn places greater emphasis on the overall centralizing effect of Sloanism on GM; and in his epilogue, he demonstrates how Sloanism carried to its illogical extreme ultimately proved disastrous for GM in the 1970s and 1980s. Despite an impressive amount of research, Kuhn’s book does not challenge in any fundamental way the accepted interpretation of GM’s coming to outperform Ford. Indeed, Kuhn does not claim the inten­ tion of adding anything new to our substantive knowledge of the subject. Rather, he tells us that “this book presents a cybernetic and system-theory analysis of the General Motors Corporation (GM) and Ford Motor Company (FM) reversals between 1918 and 1938” and that “the...