Business Leadership: Diverse Origins and Variant Forms

The reasons why business leadership in the various countries emerged in different ways, and at least in the early stages progressed along different roads, can be easily understood. Nations, races,, and civilizations have not evolved pari passu,and when, if at all, they reached the stage of high-capitalism, they did so at different moments in the world's history. The variant states of technology and of business technique prevailing at those moments were bound to influence the way business leadership came and the garb it wore. But there is a second, equally important factor making for the divergencies that we find. Each and every society that gave birth to, or adopted modern business leadership was at that moment a stratified society. This statement holds true of and is important for the United States also, as has been brought out in recent research on the social origins of American business leaders in various industries and at various periods. Thirdly, the institutional setup, i. e., the array of existing laws and prevailing thoughtpatterns as well as social organizations, manifested as great variations among the countries of emergent high-capitalism as that between England of 1790 and Japan of 1870. How then can one expect to find one standardized type of business leadership all over the world or a standardized motivation or a standardized behavior pattern? One can certainly not assume that a Japanese Samurai desiring business leadership in 1870 or an Indian Parsi in 1920 had much in common with a Boulton or a Wedgwood of England's early days, all of whom, however, stood, historically speaking, at about the same point in their country's economic devel-