ABSTRACT
In the nineteenth century, the United States became one of the main industrial powers of the world, and the most important process in the evolution of its labor force was the transformation of artisans into workers. By the end of the nineteenth century, both industrial betterment and social Darwinism began to lose importance as managerial ideologies. The new ‘plutocracy’ of the captains of industry adopted an ideology that was a fusion of Samuel Smiles’s ‘Gospel of Work’ with the ideas of Herbert Spencer. In eighteenth-century England, the management of enterprises was characterized by the existence of a personal relationship between entrepreneurs and workers that generated tacit confidence. Contemporaneously with the emergence of industrial betterment in the decade of 1870, a new type of enterprise began to take shape in Europe and the United States. Some of the most important companies in the United States of that time applied welfare schemes.
