Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T08:53:59.465Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Family Enterprise in an Industrial City: Strategies for the Family Organization of Business in Detroit, 1880

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Melanie Archer
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

While families have historically provided the basis of business organization in the United States, in the late nineteenth century the development of corporations and managerial capitalism weakened their role in business, especially in management (Bell 1962; Chandler 1977; Farber 1972; Hall 1977,1988; Kanter 1978; Mills 1956; Shammas et al. 1987). Chandler (1977) has postulated a historical decline in family management, control, and decision making in firms with the growth of industrial capitalism; others have asserted a continued presence of the family in business ownership (Davis and Stern 1980; Lansberg et al. 1988).

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , Spring 1991 , pp. 67 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1991 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Agresti, A. (1984) Analysis of Ordinal Categorical Data. New York: John Wiley and Sons.Google Scholar
Aldrich, J., and Nelson, F. D. (1984) Linear Probability, Logit, and Probit Models. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.Google Scholar
Anderson, M. (1971) Family Structure in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Archer, M. (1990) “The entrepreneurial family economy: Family strategies and self-employment in Detroit, 1880.” Journal of Family History 15: 261-83.Google Scholar
Bell, D. (1962) The End of Ideology. Rev. ed., New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Blumin, S. M. (1980) “Black coats to white collars: Economic change, non-manual work, and the social structure of industrializing America,” in Bruchey, S. W. (ed.) Small Business in American Life. New York: Columbia University Press: 100–121.Google Scholar
Bonacich, E. (1973) “A theory of middleman minorities.” American Sociological Review 38: 583–94.Google Scholar
Bonacich, E., and Modell, J. (1980) The Economic Basis of Ethnic Solidarity. Small Business in the Japanese-American Community. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Bose, C. E. (1984) “Household resources and U.S. women’s work.” American Sociological Review 49: 474-90.Google Scholar
Chandler, A. Jr., (1977) The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Davis, P., and Stern, D. (1980) “Adaptation, survival, and growth of the family business: An integrated systems perspective.” Human Relations 34: 207-24.Google Scholar
De Colange, L. (1880) American Encyclopedia of Commerce. Boston: Estes and Lauriat.Google Scholar
Decker, P. R. (1978) Fortunes and Failures: White-Collar Mobility in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Doyle, M. G. (1903) “Detroit’s pygmy shops.” Detroit Free Press, 4 October.Google Scholar
Farber, B. (1972) Guardians of Virtue: Salem Families in 1800. New York: Basic.Google Scholar
Farmer, S. (1969 [1890]) The History of Detroit and Michigan. Detroit: Gale Research.Google Scholar
Goldin, C. (1981) “Family strategies and the family economy in the late nineteenth century: The role of secondary workers,” in Hershberg, T. (ed.) Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family, and Group Experience in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 277–331.Google Scholar
Griffen, C., and Griffen, S. (1978) Natives and Newcomers: The Ordering of Opportunity in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Poughkeepsie. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Haines, M. R. (1981) “Poverty, economic stress, and the family in a late nineteenth-century American city: Whites in Philadelphia, 1880,” in Hershberg, T. (ed.) Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family, and Group Experience in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 240-76.Google Scholar
Hall, P. D. (1977) “Family structure and economic organization: Massachusetts merchants, 1700-1850,” in Hareven, T. K. (ed.) Family and Kin in Urban Communities, 1700-1930. New York: New Viewpoints: 38–611.Google Scholar
Hall, P. D. (1988) “A historical overview of family firms in the United States.” Family Business Review 1: 51–68.Google Scholar
Hareven, T. K. (1982) Family Time and Industrial Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hareven, T. K. (1987) “Historical analysis of the family,” in Sussman, M. B. and Steinmetz, S. K. (eds.) Handbook of Marriage and the Family. New York: Plenum: 37–57.Google Scholar
Hareven, T. K., and Plakans, A. (1987) Family History at the Crossroads. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Kanter, R. M. (1978) “Families, family processes, and economic life: Toward systematic analysis of social historical research,” in Demos, J. and Boocock, S. S. (eds.) Turning Points: Historical and Sociological Essays on the Family. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 316-39.Google Scholar
Katz, M.B. (1975) The People of Hamilton, Canada West: Family and Class in a Mid-Nineteenth-Century City. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Katz, M.B., Doucet, M. J., and Stern, M. J. (1982) The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Keil, T., and Usui, W. M. (1988) “The family wage system in Pennsylvania’s anthracite region: 1850-1900.” Social Forces 67: 185–207.Google Scholar
Lansberg, I., Perrow, E. L., and Rogolsky, S. (1988) “Family business as an emerging field.” Family Business Review 1: 1–8.Google Scholar
Laurie, B., and Schmitz, M. (1981) “Manufacture and productivity: The making of an industrial base, Philadelphia, 1850-1880,” in Hershberg, T. (ed.) Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family, and Group Experience in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 43–92.Google Scholar
Light, I. H. (1972) Ethnic Enterprise in America: Business and Welfare among Chinese, Japanese, and Blacks. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Mills, C. W. (1956) White Collar: The American Middle Classes. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Moch, L. P., Folbre, N., Smith, D. S., Cornell, L. L., and Tilly, L. A. (1987) “Family strategy: A dialogue.” Historical Methods 20: 113-25.Google Scholar
Modell, J., and Hareven, T. K. (1973) “Urbanization and the malleable household: An examination of boarding and lodging in American families.” Journal of Marriage and the Family 35: 467-79.Google Scholar
Muller, E. K. (1987) “From waterfront to metropolitan region: The geographical development of American cities,” in Gillette, H. Jr., and Miller, Z. L. (eds.) American Urbanism: A Historiographical Review. New York: Greenwood: 105-33.Google Scholar
Peel, M. (1986) “On the margins: Lodgers and boarders in Boston, 1860-1900.” Journal of American History 72: 813-34.Google Scholar
Dun, R. G. and Company Collection. Baker Library, Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration.Google Scholar
Polk, R. L. and Company (1880-81) Detroit City Directory. Detroit: R. L. Polk and Company.Google Scholar
Shammas, C., Salmon, M., and Dahlin, M. (1987) Inheritance in America: From Colonial Times to the Present. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Smelser, N. J. (1959) Social Change in the Industrial Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Thernstrom, S. (1973) The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Tilly, L. A., and Cohen, M. (1982) “Does the family have a history?” Social Science History 6: 131-79.Google Scholar
Tilly, L. A., and Scott, J. W. (1978) Women, Work, and Family. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census (1880a) Tenth Federal Census. Vol. 2, Statistics of Manufactures. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census (1880b) Manuscript schedules of the 1880 population census for Detroit. Raw data. National Archives, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Zunz, O. (1982) The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Zunz, O., Ericson, W. A., and Fox, D. J. (1977) “Sampling for a study of the population and land use of Detroit in 1880-1885.” Social Science History 3: 307-32.Google Scholar