ABSTRACT
MANY changes in the way in which business was run, inthe institutions onwhichlitdepended, and in the arrange-ments through which it made its impact on the public were becoming obvious at the opening of the twentieth century. They were changes which suggested that economic activities generally were becoming more elaborately organized, less individualistic, more impersonal, more concentrated within large and powerful bodies under unified control. The rapid adoption of corporate form, the amalgamation of firms, the more frequent appeal to the impersonal investor, the enlargement of establishments in many branches of business, the increase in the number and scope of representative bodies among both employers and workpeople were all signs of what was happening. But before 1914 they had not wrought a complete transformation in economic organization. There was at that time still plenty of scope for the small firm and the individual; most types of business were highly competitive; and most of the decisions which had the greatest effect on the relations of businesses with employees or customers were local and limited in their application. To some extent the incompleteness of the change was an illustration of the familiar timelag in the making of social adjustments to new conditions. But it was partly due also to the continuance, in some fields, of conditions which offered no fatal obstacle to small-scale localized activities and informal, often improvisatory, industrial relations.
