Organizational Charts from 1915
17 June 2008 at 12:21 pm Peter G. Klein 6 comments
| Peter Klein |
These images come from Frank Fetter’s second principles treatise, his Economic Principles (1915), which included chapters on “Enterprise” and “Management.” Note that at the top of the hierarchy sits the “enterpriser,” a term Fetter borrowed from Frederick Hawley), instead of “entrepreneur” or “adventurer,” both of which were then in common use to describe the business person. (Adventurer meant simply “one who undertakes a venture.”) Hawley preferred enterpriser because it suggested not simply management, but “responsibility,” or “the subjection [of one’s actions] to the results of production” (Hawley, 1908, p. 470). This is essentially the concept of entrepreneurship proposed in recent Foss-Klein papers (some of which you can find here), namely judgmental decision-making about the deployment of resources in the face of Knightian uncertainty.
I like how the figure below identifies stockholders as enterprisers. My view that corporate shareholders are entrepreneurs, in the functional sense described above, is usually met with polite curiosity at best, bewilderment or scorn at worst. Maybe I should have been writing in 1915.
Entry filed under: - Klein -, Entrepreneurship, Management Theory.
1. Vintage orgporn « PublicOrgTheory | 17 June 2008 at 12:33 pm
[…] blogs, and when they’re as good as this one, how could I not? Peter Klein has found some vintage org charts that might be some of the earliest […]
2.
spostrel | 17 June 2008 at 5:41 pm
I’ve always been partial to the old term “projector,” which I think captures the forward-looking imaginative aspects even better than “enterpriser.” BTW, around Montreal I saw the word “entrepreneur” used to mean “building contractor,” so maybe we should find something with more international generalizability.
3.
Peter Klein | 17 June 2008 at 9:04 pm
Even worse is the literal translation, “undertaker”!
4. LinkSpasm - 21 June 2008 « PurpleSlog | 21 June 2008 at 2:39 am
[…] Org charts from 1915 […]
5.
Mike Sykuta | 30 June 2008 at 1:17 pm
So is this a confession that Foss- Klein were scooped by some 90+ years?
6.
Peter Klein | 1 July 2008 at 10:15 am
Those old guys were _way_ ahead of their time!