This chapter is concerned with the production by Greenwood and Batley of the machine tools whose sale has been described and analysed in the preceding pages. The production process in an industrial firm can be analysed in numerous ways, through study of the training and management of the labour force, the methods of management of the factory, the rate of building or other capital investment, or through other components of industrial behaviour. The records of Greenwood and Batley do not provide sufficient information to analyse these components separately. One measure, however, which serves to summarise the effects of all these other components, is that of changes in productivity, since the whole productive process, technical advance, and entrepreneurial behaviour contribute together to changes in the productivity of the factors of production.

The measurement of productivity is not only a useful method of summarising the behaviour of an individual firm, but it is also crucial to an understanding of the economic history of an industry, or of a country as a whole. Before presenting the results of an analysis of productivity change in the operations of Greenwood and Batley, it is therefore important to examine the possibility of generalising from the experience of this one firm to the experience of the engineering industry as a whole. If such generalisations can be based on the records of Greenwood and Batley, then it may be possible for these records to contribute towards the solution of the controversial topic of the course of the British industrial economy in the second half of the nineteenth century.