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The Emerging Organizational Synthesis In Modern American History*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2010

Louis Galambos
Louis Galambos
Affiliation:
Professor of History, Rutgers University
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Abstract

Almost unnoticed in the midst of revisionist attacks on progressive history and the rise of the New Left, an organizational synthesis has been emerging which offers much to the student of modern America. Professor Galambos presents a historiographical survey of this synthesis and concludes that its chief strength is a mode of analysis blending the traditional tools of historical thought with ideas from the behavioral sciences.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1970 , pp. 279 - 290
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1970

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References

1 Two recent analyses of the progressive synthesis are: Higham, John, et al., History (Englewood Cliffs, 1965), 221–30Google Scholar, and Hays, Samuel P., “The Social Analysis of American Political History,” Political Science Quarterly, LXXX (September 1965), 373–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The liberal framework still exercises some authority among historians of the New Deal: Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., The Coming of the New Deal (Boston, 1958), and The Politics of Upheaval (Boston, 1960)Google Scholar, carry forward the progressive tradition in brilliant style. Even the historiography of the 1930's has been touched by revisionism, however, and an excellent example of the newer approach is provided by Karl's, Barry D. perceptive analysis of Executive Reorganization and Reform in the New Deal (Cambridge, 1963).Google Scholar

2 Hofstadter, Richard, The Progressive Historian (New York, 1968), xvGoogle Scholar, comments on the essentially negative quality of revisionism during the past two decades.

3 This viewpoint is brilliantly analyzed in Isaiah Berlin's study of The Hedgehog and the Fox (New York, 1957).

4 Unger, Irwin, “The ‘New Left’ and American History,” American Historical Review, LXXII (July 1967), 1237–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a harsh indictment of the New Left, see David Donald's review of Bernstein, Barton J. (ed.), Towards a New Past, in Ibid., LXXIV (December 1968), 531–33Google Scholar.

5 I prefer “organizational” to the other terms which scholars have used. Higham, John, et al., History, 231Google Scholar, refers to “the new institutionalism,” but this expression lacks precision and threatens to create unnecessary confusion between the new brand of history and the institutional school of economists. “Institutionalism” does not identify the particular type of institution, the large-scale, modern organization, which plays the leading role in the new synthesis. Wiebe, Robert H., The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York, 1967)Google Scholar, uses “bureaucratic.” This term has the advantage of being even more precise than “organizational,” but bureaucracy carries a heavy pejorative connotation which historians might eventually find burdensome.

6 Higham, , History, 231.Google Scholar

7 This general question is discussed in Kai Erickson, “Sociology and the Historical Perspective,” the MacIver Lecture, given at the Southern Sociological Society (Atlanta, 1968). As devotees of historicism will recognize, this difference in emphasis can be of crucial significance. See Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of History (New York, 1956), especially 199 ff.Google Scholar, for a superb argument against the behavioral orientation in history.

8 Weber, Max, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (Glencoe, 1947), 324–41.Google Scholar

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10 (New York, 1941).

11 American Capitalism (Boston, 1952).

12 (New York, 1953), xi.

13 (New York, 1956).

14 Other studies developing closely related ideas include: Wright Mills, C., White Collar (New York, 1951)Google Scholar, and The Power Elite (New York, 1956); Blau, Peter M., Bureaucracy in Modern Society (New York, 1956)Google Scholar; Merton, R. K., et al. (eds.), Reader in Bureaucracy (Glencoe, 1952)Google Scholar; Mason, Edward S. (ed.), The Corporation in Modern Society (Cambridge, 1959)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Berle, Adolf A. Jr., The 20th Century Capitalist Revolution (New York, 1954);Google ScholarLloyd Warner, W., The Corporation in the Emergent American Society (New York, 1961);Google Scholar and Lloyd Warner, W., et al., The Emergent American Society, I (New Haven, 1967).Google Scholar

15 Some of the essays in W. Lloyd Warner's The Emergent American Society provide an exception to this rule; see, for example, Winter, Gibson, “Religious Organizations,” I, 408–91.Google Scholar This volume has received less attention from historians than it probably deserves.

16 Higham, , History, 231.Google Scholar

17 While this premise seems to have a Marxist ring, there is in fact a wide gulf between the Weberian and Marxist views of history.

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19 (Cambridge, 1962).

20 Ibid., 206–24.

21 Ibid., 16–41.

22 Wiebe, , Search for Order, 18.Google Scholar

23 Ibid., 164–95.

24 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., Henry Varnum Poor (Cambridge, 1956)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Management Decentralization: An Historical Analysis,” Business History Review, XXX (June 1956), 111–74Google Scholar; “The Beginnings of ‘Big Business’ in American Industry,” Business History Review, XXXIII (Spring, 1959), 1–31;“Recent Developments in American Business Administration and Their Conceptualization” (with Redlich, Fritz), Business History Review, XXXV (Spring, 1961), 1–27Google Scholar; Giant Enterprise: Ford, General Motors, and the Automobile Industry (New York, 1964); The Railroads: The Nation's First Big Business (New York, 1965); “The Railroads: Pioneers in Modern Corporate Management,” Business History Review, XXXIX (Spring, 1965), 16–40; “The Coming of Big Business,” in Vann Woodward, C. (ed.), The Comparative Approach to American History (New York, 1968).Google Scholar

25 Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise ( Cambridge, 1962).

26 “The Large Industrial Corporation and the Making of the Modern American Economy,” in Ambrose, Stephen E. (ed.), Institutions in Modern America (Baltimore, 1967), 91–94.Google Scholar

27 “The History of a Business Society,” Journal of American History, LIV (June 1967), 5–18Google Scholar. Cochran's attitude toward the progressive synthesis has not remained static over the years; compare this essay and his volume on The American Business System (Cambridge, 1957), with Cochran, Thomas C. and Miller, William, The Age of Enterprise (New York, 1942).Google Scholar

28 Cochran, , “The History of a Business Society,” 6.Google Scholar

29 Ibid., 18.

30 The Age of Reform (New York, 1955), 215–71.

31 ”Bernard Baruch: Symbol and Myth in Industrial Mobilization,” Business History Review, XLIII (Summer, 1969), 115–33Google Scholar.

32 (Cambridge, 1959).

33 Haber, Samuel, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era, 1890–1920 (Chicago, 1964).Google Scholar

34 While Haber briefly surveys the 1920's, his major emphasis is upon the years 1890–1920.

35 Neu, Charles E., “The Changing Interpretive Structures of American Foreign Policy,” in Braeman, John, et al. (eds.) American Foreign Policy in the Twentieth Century (forthcoming at the Ohio State University Press).Google Scholar

36 “The Albert Shaw Lectures on Diplomatic History,” The Johns Hopkins University, 1965–1966.

37 Search for Order, 224–85.

38 Professor Jerry Israel is now working on a study along these lines; he is examining scientific management in the State Department, 1906–1924.

39 Gleason, Philip, “An Immigrant Group's Interest in Progressive Reform,” American Historical Review, LXXIII (December 1967), 367–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and The Conservative Reformers: German-American Catholics and the Social Order (Notre Dame, 1968), 24, 74, 80–83, 90–91.

40 The Professional Altruist: The Emergence of Social Work as a Career, 1880–1930 (Cambridge, 1965).

41 Ibid., 220.

42 ”Religious Organizations,” in Warner, , Emergent American Society, I, 408–91.Google Scholar

43 Ibid., 490.

44 Ibid., 483–91.

45 Search for Order.

46 Ibid., 166.

47 Ibid., 302.

48 Ibid., 133–63.

49 Even Wiebe apparently finds this tendency disturbing. In a paper delivered before the Dallas meeting of the Organization of American Historians (1968), he called upon scholars to stress the role of the individual in history — a theme which is certainly not very prominent in either of his books.

50 Search for Order, 286–302.

51 The price of this style of history is of course that sense of participation which energized the progressive historians and added a special and interesting quality to their work.

52 This is discussed in Gouldner, Alvin W., “Metaphysical Pathos and the Theory of Bureaucracy,” American Political Science Review, XLIX (June 1955), 496–507.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

53 No synthesis has ever included with equal facility every aspect of a complex nation's history. The organizational framework will probably not be very useful to the scholars studying the history of the Negro or to those who are working on many facets of immigrant groups in the American past. In effect, this synthesis will probably trade some of the emotional facets of history for a better understanding of how the highly organized sectors of society actually functioned.