This chapter explores the evolution of managerial roles in modern businesses, emphasizing the transition from owner-operated structures to professional management. It examines how middle managers now facilitate resource coordination, shaping the contemporary economic landscape.
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In the days of Calvin Coolidge, it was said the “business of America is business.” By contrast to other cultures like the Japanese, whose “business is the Japanese”, America’s combination as a youthful country and having a vast untapped frontier, especially in its early years, made the one common denominator of a polyglot nation a drive to tap vast natural resources and build wealth based on a large internal market. To operate at this unprecedented speed at scale unleashed by new technologies such as the railroad and telegraph, author Alfred D. Chandler contends, a new managerial revolution had to take place, creating the hierarchical behemoth corporations that America has become known for and have proliferated in today’s modern global economy.
