Strategy and Structure in the Manufacturing Sector

For the business historian, entrepreneurship is an elusive factor, but it is necessarily at the centre of his subject. Other inputs are also an essential part of the production process — capital and labour being those most commonly evaluated, for example — but these are both more readily defined and more easily quantified1 than the vital input of entrepreneurial skill which in part determines the extent, and efficiency, of the use of such inputs within the individual firm. There is no general agreement on what in more precise terms constitutes the entrepreneurial function, nor on what determines the supply of, or demand for, entrepreneurs; and there is, as yet, little normative management theory against which to judge the observed performance of businesses in a dynamic industrial environment. In focussing attention on one central aspect of entrepreneurship — the choice of the firm’s strategy and the response to strategic innovation through changes in organisational structure — Professor Chandler has therefore done business historians a valuable service.2