from GERMANY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
Concepts and Scope
The definitions used in this Chapter have to meet two requirements. First, they must be applicable within the whole period under discussion. They must be flexible and broad enough to subsume the tremendous changes occurring within entrepreneurship and management from the late eighteenth century to the twentieth. However, they need not be so broad and abstract as to cover all types of entrepreneurs and managers in history. They should rather be framed with regard to characteristics of the German economy which remained constant through this whole period (without necessarily existing at other times and places) and which were, at the same time, of central importance for the development of entrepreneurship and management. Such a characteristic we find in the fact that this has been, and – for the larger part of Germany – still is, a period of industrialization structured according to capitalist principles. The general features of industrial capitalism which are most central for the study of entrepreneurship and management during the whole period are (a) a factory system which is characterized by power-generating and manufacturing machines, by large amounts of fixed capital, by maturing techniques on an increasingly scientific basis, by the separation between organizational and operative functions, and by contractual labour working under centralized managerial authority, not at home, according to elaborate patterns of labour division; and (b) largely independent and autonomous business enterprises on the basis of the private ownership and control of capital, which is used for the production of goods and services and their sale on the commercial market, according to the criteria of profitability; business enterprises relate to each other mainly through market mechanisms.
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