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Company roots
The earliest companies took root from Europe
to the Orient, and we document their stories: from Britain’s
East India Company and Hong Kong’s Jardine Matheson to
China’s great family-based companies of today.
But the nation that most seized on the idea
of the company—and was most transformed by it—was
the United States. America created companies of a size that
the world had never seen before.
Along with innovation and steady advances in
productivity, companies fomented vast cultural change. Labor
disputes, including bloody confrontations, ignited the backlash
against business at the turn of the 20th century. As companies
expanded, so did workers-rights organizations that in turn
fueled progressive political movements. Critics like Mary
Parker Follett, Ida Tarbell, Sinclair Lewis, and Frank Norris
cited abuses and demanded remediation.
But the most forceful challenge to the company
structure came from within companies themselves by a new class
of professional managers who tirelessly ushered in the modern
age—exemplified by General Motors chief Alfred Sloan,
godfather to minions of company men who followed.
A firm future
By 2000 the basic idea of a big company—a
multi-divisional, hierarchical institution that could offer
a lifetime career to its employees—had faltered amid
market tumult and shabby corporate governance. Contrary to
the opinions of anti-globalists, big companies today are ceding
dominance to smaller, more nimble companies that adapt more
easily to new technologies, fresh political winds and fickle
markets.
Scrutiny has deepened the economic foundation
that companies rest on. Some economists prefer to look at
the modern firm as a network of contracts. Others see it as
a bundle of organizational capabilities. However viewed, companies
continue to generate jobs, profits, and controversy.
When and if utopia comes, most modern assumptions
are that companies will build and sustain it.
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