Canadian business history
...question: Is history necessary? Does it have an impact on today’s society? From a personal point of view, I think it is important to be aware of the past; history suggests examples and teaches lessons. Business history does not only focus on the internal workings of the business world. It is also the reaction of business to the social, political and economical changes. So if people are not exactly being told what to do, they are at least given the opportunity to understand how much the internal and external forces are linked with each other and how certain decisions according to certain circumstances can affect a particular business positively or negatively. At the beginning of the 20th century, as described by Chandler, it is obvious that the managing system wasn’t perfect. The major structure of companies was a functional departmentalised, centralized structure allowing producing a single line of goods for one major product or market. There were also problems dealing with sudden changes in demand and top managers often were too focused on day-to-day operations. Being aware of that helps perfecting the system and creating new organizational structures, making one aware of the advantages and disadvantages of certain systems by judging how good or how bad it may affect certain companies. As such, General Motors for example improved the methods, and thus based its success on relieving top managers from day-to-day operations and by adopting a multi divisional structure allowing a flexible production of several lines for many products and markets. Another important thing is that people can learn from mistakes. Bliss discusses in his book some of the banks’ failures and attributes them to fraudulent abuses by bank personnel and the fact that banks made imprudent loans and investments to customers of little or no capital. Focusing on how banks work today, they are unlikely to behave like this anymore because history has proven that it was not the right thing to do. In both Bliss and Chandler’s books, the audience also learns the consequences of such events so they have an overview of what could happen if that was to happen again, so perhaps they could be more prepared. I think business history represents the roots of modern business and features the way to catch up and to learn not only to transform the older branches but also to advance in new areas of production and to avoid previous mistakes. However, is history always objective? Can we trust historians and can we rely on history? Obviously, history is not fully objective. In his book, Bliss assesses the failure and success of Canadian enterprise with his point of view. The central argument throughout the book is the fact that a substancial numbers of businessmen haven’t understood the nature of the country and its resources. As another example, although Bliss correctly highlights the inefficiency and financial waste that plagued state-subsidised and state-run railway ventures, his historical analysis is rendered partially invalid by a misunderstanding of the class nature of the Canadian state. These main lines suffered from poor business practices and the Canadian governments during the early years of the railways, was not very democratic, in that it hardly represented common Canadians. If state intervention was an evil during that period, then the blame lies at the feet of the same class of people who would also spearhead private railway enterprises if the economic conditions were right. The fact that they did turn to the state, and rely on it so heavily, is a testament to the necessity of the state in the construction of the national railway system. As for Chandler, the example of its Eight propositions regarding modern business enterprises shows that he is the one who criticizes, proposes and analyzes. Besides, there are certain aspects that have to be updated in order to be incorporated in our modern society. For example, in his well-known history of the large, modern corporation in the United States, Chandler argued that Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the market had been replaced by the visible hand of management — the explicit, systematic, and impersonal application of executive will in a highly structured context. Chandler justified this statement by noting the growing importance, since the mid-nineteenth century, of a type of corporation that had largely replaced the small-scale, locally dependent enterprises so common in most industries in the America of the early nineteenth...