Anglo-American Council Research Articles

Doing It for Themselves: The Steel Company of Wales and the Study of American Industrial Productivity, 1945–1955

This article examines the efforts of one British steel company to acquire knowledge about American industrial productivity in the first post-World War II decade. It argues that company information-gathering initiatives in this period were overshadowed by the work of the formal productivity missions of the Marshall Plan era. In particular, it compares the activities of the Steel Company of Wales with the Anglo-American Council on Productivity (AACP), whose iron and steel industry productivity team report was published in 1952. Based on evidence from its business records, this study shows that the Steel Company of Wales was undertaking its own international productivity investigations, which started earlier and were more extensive and differently focused from those of the AACP. It makes the case for viewing companies as active participants in the gathering and dissemination of productivity knowledge in Britain’s steel sector after 1945.

The Search for Standard Costing in the United States and Britain

This article describes the relationship between the understanding and practice of standard costing in both the U.S. and the U.K. and discusses the development of specific practices in the immediate post-World War II period. Based on a detailed review of the post-war literature, the authors conclude that the quantity and quality of standard costing and related scientific management practices (time study, variance analysis, etc.) reached a level in practice that many accounting historians have felt should have been achieved at an earlier point in time. Another principal finding is that standard costing, initially promulgated in the late 1910s, continued to develop in both the U.S. and the U.K. in evolutionary fashion into the late 1940s and 1950s, a finding which demonstrates that Britain was not as far behind America in terms of its standard costing practices as has been commonly believed. The article also explicates the relatively minor impact of the Anglo-American Council on Productivity, sponsor of sixty-six post-war visitations over a four-year period by British groups of employers, trade unionists and professionals, to study American industrial methods, including standard costing.

Understanding the Anglo-American Council on Productivity: Labour and the politics of productivity

Understanding the Anglo-American Council on Productivity: Labour and the politics of productivity

Institutional Stability in Management Practice and Industrial Relations: The Influence of the Anglo-American Council for Productivity, 1948–52

The endurance of institutional stability in British industrial relations and management practice during the initial post-war years rested on two factors; the international viability of the economy and the respite that victory in World War Two afforded to embedded patterns of regulation in both areas. This contribution addresses these issues through the vehicle of the AACP, specifically its British section. The AACP was created to examine the issues of management and productivity in British manufacturing. Its aim was to transform management practice and raise levels of productivity to the American average. However, although American management techniques informed the AACP, its British section diluted American proposals to afford respresentatives of British management an opportunity to secure institutional stability in industrial relations and management practice. The international viability of the British economy was not secured by an investment-led transformation that raised the economic scale of plant and equipment. Alternatively, recovery was secured by a sustained increase in output within the wider aims of the British government in its engagement with the Marshall Plan. This article engages with recent revisionist analysis to demonstrate that patterns of industrial relations are an effect of or ‘end game’ in the wider economic and political objectives of government which confront prescriptive mechanisms such as the AACP. The embedded nature of internal institutions in industrial relations and management practice must be positioned within the external context which underpin their stability.

The Anglo-American Council on Productivity (1948-52): The Ideological Roots of the Post-War Debate on Productivity in Britain

In the context of Britain's early post-war economic crisis, with food and commodity shortages and a persistent foreign exchange problem, national attention focused on the question of increasing industrial production. By 1948, with the introduction of Marshall Aid from the United States, that general quest for greater physical output had been overtaken by a more specific focus on increasing productivity, with low labour productivity coming to be identified as Britain's essential problem. Although there were indigenous factors which contributed to this particular focus on productivity, including some that were part and parcel of a general labour movement analysis, the argument here is that a highly important role in setting the agenda for the post-war political debate on productivity in Britain was played by Americans associated with the Marshall Plan, whose influence was exercised through the Anglo-American Council on Productivity (AACP). The early emphasis on physical production was a carry-over from the intense wartime production drive in munitions, especially after 1941 under Sir Stafford Cripps, the Minister for Aircraft Production. It was under Cripps, as President of the Board of Trade in the Attlee government, that the post-war production campaign was organized. With its corporatist, consensus-seeking approach to industrial policy, the Board of Trade aimed to mobilize support for its programme through another wartime creation - the National Production Advisory Council for Industry (NPACI) - consisting of seven members each from the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and the major employers' organizations, the Federation of British Industry (FBI) and the British Employers' Confederation (BEC), along with two representatives from the nationalized industries. The NPACI operated in parallel to the tripartite National Joint Advisory Council (NJAC) which also brought together the TUC, FBI and BEC, and served as the government's major consultative body on labour

The Failure of the Anglo-American Council on Producitivity

The Anglo-American Council on Productivity is the best-known body created as part of the Attlee Government's productivity drive. The (unavoidably impessionistic) evidence suggests that the impact of this body was rather limited. This article is concerned with the reasons for this failure. The effects of the AACP depended crucially on the role of the FBI, the main employer body represented on the Council. The FBI's attitude to the AACP was partly shaped by the rather uncongenial message of many of the Council reports which followed the visits of productivity teams to the USA—a message which emphasised that management, not workers, were commonly a fault in Britain's poor productivity performance. More broadly the FBI's attitude to the AACP was defensive, embracing it as a way of keeping government 'off their backs' rather than a positive enthusiasm for increased productivity. Generally British employers were enjoying high profits from a sellers' market, and saw little need to respond to a government which in any event found it difficult to find a clear focus for its productivity campaign.

Education for Management.

Journal Article Education for Management Get access Education for Management. Productivity Report. (London : Anglo-American Council on Productivity, U.K. Section, 1951. Pp. xii + 86. 4s. 6eZ.) N. F. Hall N. F. Hall The Administrative Staff College, Henley-on-Thames Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 62, Issue 247, 1 September 1952, Pages 638–641, https://doi.org/10.2307/2226916 Published: 01 September 1952

Productivity in the Packet Foods Industry: Report of the Anglo-American Council on Productivity

Productivity in the Packet Foods Industry: Report of the Anglo-American Council on Productivity

Mechanical Handling

The authors of this paper were members of the team appointed by the Anglo-American Council on Productivity to study and report on materials handling in industry in the United States of America. The purpose of the paper is to focus attention on certain aspects of the report, “Materials Handling in Industry”, which contains the findings, conclusions, and recommendations of the team, with particular reference to the application of mechanical handling inside factories. The importance and advantages of applying modern techniques in materials handling and also the need for more extensive use of known methods and equipment already available in Britain, are points particularly stressed by the authors. The opinion is expressed that better materials handling offers a greater opportunity to cut production costs and to increase productivity than any other single factor. The paper enlarges on some of the conclusions listed in the report, such as those relating to applications of methods and newer techniques, periodic reviews, layout and design, team work, and use of small power tools.

Book Reviews : Cotton Weaving. Cotton Weaving Productivity Team (British). London, Anglo-American Council on Productivity, 1950. 62 pages. Price, 2/-. (Available, without charge, from Office of Information, Economic Cooperation Administration, Washington, D. C.)

Book Reviews : Cotton Weaving. Cotton Weaving Productivity Team (British). London, Anglo-American Council on Productivity, 1950. 62 pages. Price, 2/-. (Available, without charge, from Office of Information, Economic Cooperation Administration, Washington, D. C.)

Simplification Creates New Problems for Top-Management

The reports of the Lemon Committee and of the Anglo-American Council on Productivity draw timely distinctions between the terms “standardization”, “simplification”, and “specialization”. This paper discusses simplification, with special reference to complex proprietary engineering products. The problems examined are those of determining and controlling a range of simplified products; the determination of domestic standards, classified as “manufacturing standards” and “constructional standards” for the components of those products; the need for, and effect of, more refined manufacturing standards with increasing volume of production; the possibility of obtaining varieties of end-product by alternative assemblies of simplified components, through what is here tentatively termed “rationalized construction”; and the increased complexity of the technical problems which the development of those products entails. Finally, attention is directed towards the new problems and responsibilities with which simplification confronts top-management, partly in the closer control of line of products, but chiefly in the integration of the design, production, and marketing functions.

Anglo-American Council on Productivity: return of Specialist Team on Mechanical Aids

Anglo-American Council on Productivity: return of Specialist Team on Mechanical Aids