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Doing It for Themselves: The Steel Company of Wales and the Study of American Industrial Productivity, 1945–1955

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2016

LOUISE MISKELL*
Affiliation:
Louise Miskell is professor of history at Swansea University and the author of several books and articles on modern British urban and industrial history. Department of History and Classics, Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP. E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

This article examines the efforts of one British steel company to acquire knowledge about American industrial productivity in the first post-World War II decade. It argues that company information-gathering initiatives in this period were overshadowed by the work of the formal productivity missions of the Marshall Plan era. In particular, it compares the activities of the Steel Company of Wales with the Anglo-American Council on Productivity (AACP), whose iron and steel industry productivity team report was published in 1952. Based on evidence from its business records, this study shows that the Steel Company of Wales was undertaking its own international productivity investigations, which started earlier and were more extensive and differently focused from those of the AACP. It makes the case for viewing companies as active participants in the gathering and dissemination of productivity knowledge in Britain’s steel sector after 1945.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2016. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved. 

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References

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Kipping, Matthias, Ranieri, Ruggero, and Dankers, Joost. “The Emergence of New Competitor Nations in the European Steel Industry: Italy and the Netherlands, 1945–65.” Business History 43, no. 1 (2001): 6996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Ranieri, Ruggero. “Learning from America: The Remodelling of Italy’s Public Sector Steel Industry in the 1950s and 1960s.” In The Americanisation of European Business: The Marshall Plan and the Transfer of US Management Models, edited by Kipping, Matthias and Bjarnar, Ove, 208228. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 1998.Google Scholar
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Ranieri, Ruggero. “The Productivity Issue in the UK Steel Industry, 1945–1970.” In Americanisation in 20th Century Europe: Business, Culture, Politics, vol. 2, edited by Kipping, Matthias and Tiratsoo, Nick, 357373. Lille, France: Centre for Research on the History of North-West Europe, 2001.Google Scholar
Ranieri, Ruggero. “Remodelling the Italian Steel Industry: Americanization, Modernization and Mass Production.” In Americanization and Its Limits: Reworking US Technology and Management in Post-War Europe and Japan, edited by Zeitlin, Jonathan and Herrigel, Gary, 236268. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Ricciardi, Ferruccio. “The Circulation of Practices: Americanizing Social Relations at the Cornigliano Steel Plant (Italy) 1948–1960.” Labor History 51, no. 2 (2010): 231248.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rostas, Leon. “Industrial Production, Productivity and Distribution in Britain, Germany and the United States.” Economic Journal 53, no. 209 (April 1943): 3954.Google Scholar
Schröter, Harm G. “Economic Culture and Its Transfer: Americanization and European Enterprise, 1900–2005.” Revue Economique 58, no. 1 (2007): 215229.Google Scholar
Seely, Bruce E. “The United States Steel Corporation.” In The Iron and Steel Industry in the Twentieth Century: Encyclopedia of American Business History and Biography, edited by Seely, Bruce E., 438446. New York: Facts on File, 1994.Google Scholar
Silberston, Aubrey. “Adamson, Sir (William Owen) Campbell (1922–2000), Industrialist.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Smellie, Gavin, and Adamson, Campbell. A Study in Steel Productivity in Great Britain and USA. Pontypool: Steel Company of Wales, c.1956.Google Scholar
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