ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION The first half of the twentieth century witnessed the rise of a number of large enterprises that came to dominate the Dutch economy in the decades after World War II. Alfred Chandler, who wrote a number of books on similar developments in the USA, Great Britain and Germany, argues that this should first of all be attributed to the consequences of the ‘second industrial revolution’ (Chandler 1990). In the decades after about 1880 a number of fundamental technological innovations in chemicals, electricity, machine building (the internal combustion engine) and oil refining led to the growth of new industries that were to revolutionize the industrial structure of the world economy during the twentieth century. Two special features of these new technologies were their large economies of scale and their high capital intensity. The economies of scale could only be exploited optimally by producing on a very large scale, for an extensive national or preferably international market. The entrepreneurs who came to control these new industries therefore had to make huge investments in (1) production facilities; (2) a distribution apparatus; (3) the management skills needed to run the firm. As a result, there arose a new kind of firm, the managerial enterprise, which was characterized by the separation of management and ownership, and by a complex bureaucratic organization.
