ABSTRACT
Professional directors and managers not dependent for their position on the ownership of their firms’ capital arrived on the scene long before 1939 and even before 1900. But it was in the twentieth century, and more especially since the war, that the control of most great firms passed into their hands and that owner-managers ceased to be the representative type of business leadership. This transformation at the top levels of industrial and commercial personnel was not, however, purely administrative, or as some people would call it, ‘organizational’. It was deeply rooted in the changes which for some time had been taking place in the very structure of industrial and commercial property. For some decades before the war and also after the war, the provenance of capital was in the process of transformation. Some old sources of investable capital were drying up; new ones were flowing in ever-greater abundance. These shifts in the ownership of capital and in the sources of its current flow must be taken into account before the changes in industrial and commercial leadership itself can be understood.
