ABSTRACT
The previous chapters have demonstrated that the US productivity gospel had only a relatively modest impact in Britain. The American effort produced new institutions and no doubt helped make productivity a public issue in the 1940s and 1950s, but its effect on the ground-in factories and boardrooms-can only be described as variable. If real change occurred, it seems usually to have involved a small ‘head’ of already forward-looking firms, with a much larger ‘tail’ continuing to follow their time-honoured conventions.
