The Spiegel venture into mail-order installment credit marketing is examined here in detail to illustrate application of the tools of economic analysis to a specific historical situation. Whether through chance or intuition, the innovator in this example, though lacking virtually all the pertinent data, made precisely the adaptation that hindsight analysis discloses to have been most likely to succeed.

Far from being a manifestation of the rising tide of business influence in society, the 1875 Resumption Act really demonstrated that to legislators of the day the wishes of important segments of the community were less important than considerations of party politics.

This searching probe goes beneath the common generalizations about integration to reveal in detail the causes, techniques, and results, not only as they relate to costs but also to problems of competitive strategy and over-all administration.

A perception of the importance of measuring overhead costs led Church to analyze the totality of management. Among the first to formulate a comprehensive theory, he studied management in historical depth and defined it as a distinct function with identifiable components that could be manipulated in the interest of greater efficiency.

The more deeply scholars probe the evolution of management methods and structure, the earlier are antecedents of modern practice detected. The 1882 report on the Pennsylvania Railroad organization exhibits a highly refined conceptualization of big business administration and must stand as a significant milepost in the history of management. Here are to be found many of the ideas and even some of the terminology to which much more recent birth dates have hitherto been ascribed.

Dominance of the American blanket trade was obtained and held for half a century through a combination of aggressive marketing, progressive manufacturing methods, and far-sighted administration of a business beset by constant difficulties, part of which were peculiar to the times; part familiar to business in every age and circumstance.

The object of this paper is to give some facts in connection with the development of the organization of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, to show how and by what steps this organization became what it is, and, so far as may be, why these successive steps in the development were taken.

This third annual bibliography has essentially the same coverage as that of last year. It includes selected histories of industries, histories of specific corporate functions, episodes in the history of companies, and histories of trade associations, as well as over-all histories of companies and biographies of businessmen. Although still limited geographically to the United States and Canada, several bibliographies of British, German, and Japanese company histories are included under the heading “Business History, Foreign — Bibliography.”