British Management 1950–1980

Abstract

The governance, managerial structures, and functional performance of large British companies at the end of World War II had preserved intact that in existence before the War: proprietorial governance (Quail 1996, 2000), sparse or nonexistent top management, poor financial planning and control, functional silos, and weak coordination of production and marketing. The nature of and changes in British management over the period to 1980 were conditioned by the slow changes in the preexisting company culture and structure, foreign competition, the role of the State, and the resurgent City of London and finance capital leading to a merger boom and great increases in the size of businesses. The general story is of a slowly increasing managerial professionalization and capability emerging during an escalating crisis of competitiveness into the 1970s and beyond. At the same time developments in company law, state regulation and intervention, and activist finance began to create a new environment within which managements had to operate and which conditioned managerial structures, skills, and priorities. In short by 1980 a managerial revolution of a kind was emerging within the firm but operation remained constrained by tradition and the external forces of financialization and global competition. The chapter starts with a general description of the business context within which management operated including a brief analysis of the prewar “inheritance” in terms of firm governance, organizational structures and recruitment, and the relative performance of UK business in an international context. There then follows a more detailed account of UK governance and management structure recruitment and performance. The general conclusion is that by 1980 preconditions for a possible managerialist transformation of UK business were being established.