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MANAGEMENT AUDIT APPROACH IN WRITING BUSINESS HISTORY: A COMPARISON WITH KENNEDY'S TECHNIQUE ON RAILROAD HISTORY
Abstract
The purpose of this dissertation is to add to both knowledge and method in the writing of business history. When a business historian attempts to evaluate or appraise the particular role of entrepreneurs, managers, or leaders, and the effect of their organizations upon society's economic, political, and social development, he needs some acceptable basis to determine whether the abilities of those individuals were superior, average, or poor, considering the conditions under which they had to operate. That is to say, those individuals who were only average when they might have been excellent under the same environmental conditions, certainly could not have made the largest possible contribution. This study centers its attention on the problem of how the business historian can determine the degree of management excellence or lack thereof in the managements of various firms. The preliminary management audit is proposed as a useful methodological tool for measuring, analyzing and comparing the managements of various firms or organizations for the purpose of writing business history. The preliminary management audit is compared to the more refined method of a complete management appraisal, used by Charles J. Kennedy in his thorough history of the Boston and Maine. In this dissertation, a careful explanation of the management audit technique is given and a preliminary management audit is applied to five selected railroads; the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe; the Boston and Maine; the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy; the Illinois Central; and the Louisville and Nashville; for the years 1870, 1880, 1890 and 1900. The findings from one of the railroads, the Boston and Maine, are then compared to Kennedy's findings from a complete management appraisal, and finally, the virtues and limitations of the preliminary management audit as tool for writing business history are discussed. It is concluded that although the findings from the preliminary management audit are tentative in nature and in many cases the data available was insufficient or questionable, the high degree of correspondence between these findings and Kennedy's complete management appraisal, with a small addition of other available data, render it a method worth serious consideration. More work needs to be done, however, to perfect this system as a new paradigm for measuring the management excellence of firms in the past. In fact, if and when this is accomplished, business historians perhaps would be able to reappraise the entire first century or two of modern, industrialization as to the precise significance of the role of entrepreneurship and management ability.
Subject Area
Business community
Recommended Citation
BURES, ALLEN L, "MANAGEMENT AUDIT APPROACH IN WRITING BUSINESS HISTORY: A COMPARISON WITH KENNEDY'S TECHNIQUE ON RAILROAD HISTORY" (1980). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI8021337.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI8021337