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Перевод для С.Г. из Москвы
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Double-entry is a particular kind of mirror book, embodying the balanced and interconnected writing of the equal and opposite signs of debit and credit - or rather, with its journals, cash books and ledgers, it was like Vincent's Speculum an interconnected series of such books.

Of course, once having achieved its new format accounting could develop its own distinctive power. Having grafted onto the simple form of chronological narrative the new impersonal format of the mirror book it could develop a new discursive voice; instead of just being a narrative of transactions, it could become.a critical commentary upon them. Thus by the fifteenth century we find 'anticipations' of much later practices: for instance, as de Roover points out (1974: 123), Italian merchants:

had begun by 1400 to use accounting as a tool of management and control... by developing the rudiments of cost accounting, by introducing reserves and other modes of adjustment such as accruals and deferred items, and by giving attention to the audit of balance sheets.

At the same time, the case of double-entry underlines the fact that new information technologies do not in themselves effortlessly transform the world. While accounting was occasionally deployed to striking economic effect (Solomons, 1968), for over four centuries forms of accounting including double-entry had in general a remarkably limited impact. Accounting in itself was certainly not a profession (bookkeepers and accounts clerks lay well below that threshold), and there is ample evidence (de Roover, 1974; Yamey, 1977) that ledgers and balances were kept sporadically even in large and successful businesses; even the East India Company used accounting practices which gave only limited attention to annual profit measurement (Yamey, 1977: 21, 26). Meanwhile annual audit, the use of the accounting data for prediction and cost control, the development of a systematic concern with the changing value of assets over time: these are all conspicuously absent from the majority of business enterprises. As late as the Industrial Revolution, the extent of accounting's use was still limited, being mainly for financial stewardship purposes, as a check on honesty, or for very rudimentary forms of cost control.

Taken overall, such premodern approaches to accounting had a tem­poral orientation facing more towards the past than the future. Accounting faced the past insofar as it was a record of what had happened and what workers or stewards did or did not do (and it faced the present insofar as it produced more or less timely and updated financial statements); but it seldom faced the future to be used, like now, as a means of predicting or shaping future activity or exerting a constant and watchful accountability over the future performance of workers, managers and directors. In short, accounting exercised a kind of control which aimed to conserve loss rather than maximize gain. It did not operate as part of something one might call 'management'.

All this would change, dramatically and swiftly, during the nineteenth century, particularly in the USA. Yet, as must by now be clear, the explanation for this transformation cannot easily be sought in any technical transformation in accounting itself, since double-entry had existed by this time for some five centuries. Furthermore it cannot be put down in any straightforward economistic way as accounting emerging smoothly to meet the new economic 'demand' of industrialization, for neither management nor accounting played any noticeable role in the Industrial Revolution in Britain.

As Sidney Pollard concluded in The Genesis of Modern Management, as late as 1830 in Britain (1) there was no specialist field of knowledge representing 'a management science or at least a management technology', and (2) there was no workforce category who could be designated a

Keith Hoskin and Richard Macve

'managerial class' (1965:250). There were, of course, enterprises which used accounting and disciplinary techniques, often quite extensively: the Crow-ley Iron Works (c. 1710) for instance and, from the 1770s on, Wedgwood's pottery near Stoke-on-Trent and Boulton & Watt's manufactory in Birm­ingham (McKendrick, 1970: Pollard, 1965; Thompson, 1967). But even recent re-evaluations of the evidence (e.g. Fleischman and Parker, 1991) fail to discover an integrated management structure taking shape. Cost experi­ments (such as those of Wedgwood) were not utilized to coordinate production, control costs and maximize productivity on a regular basis. What appears to be lacking is any approach which simultaneously analysed both financial and human performativity, rendering the interrelated but separable values of products and persons jointly calculable. Instead, as Alfred Chandler details in The Visible Hand (1977), these managerial breakthroughs were first developed in the USA from the 1830s.



The genesis of modern business: the West Point connections

The modern business enterprise is the first organization in history to consist, as Chandler puts it, of 'many distinct operating units... managed by a hierarchy of salaried executives' (1977: 1). It is the first system where managers manage other managers and report upwards to senior executives; and where each department/division 'has its own set of books and accounts which can be audited separately from those of the large enterprise'. As Chandler emphasizes, the competitive advantage of the modern business enterprise lies in its capacity for 'administrative coordination', which has proven over the past century to engineer 'greater productivity, lower costs and higher profits than coordination by market mechanisms' (1977: 4). It is a system which has, essentially, to be run and managed 'via the numbers'.

As Chandler describes it, the beginnings of modern business are to be found in two unlikely sites. Single-unit management 'had its genesis in the United States at the Springfield Armory' (1977: 75). As a result of innovations such as detailed quality control and inventory accounting systems, Springfield played a major role in the development of the 'American System of Manufacture', the first system to succeed in achieving integrated mass production using interchangeable parts (1977: 72). Mean­while multi-unit management was being pioneeed on the US railroads. This occurred initially on the grandiosely-named Western Railroad (which ran all the way west from Boston to Albany, New York), where a line-and-staff system of organization was introduced following an accident in 1841. This was 'the first modern, carefully defined, internal organizational structure used by an American business enterprise' (1977: 97).

Yet these two distinct developments can now be shown to be linked

aspects of one transformation. The pioneers of the new business practices in • both arenas had an unusual profile. As Chandler (1977: 95) concedes, they:

were a new type of businessman. It is worth emphasizing again that they were salaried employees with little or no financial interest in the companies they served. Moreover most had had specialized training.

But what the key pioneers, both at Springfield Armory and on the railroads, had in common is the same specialized training as cadets at the US Military Academy at West Point (indeed the first two pioneers were classmates, graduating together in the Class of 1819); and West Point in 1817 had been transformed into perhaps the most 'disciplinary' educational institution that existed at that time.

Towards grammatocentrism and calculability: the West Point educational revolution

In 1817 Sylvanus Thayer was appointed as West Point's fourth Superin­tendent, and immediately introduced from the French Ecole Polytechnique both its new scientific curriculum (based on texts written by the great French scientists of the day) and its disciplinary pedagogy based on the constant deployment of writing, examination and grading.18 In addition, Thayer added a managerial dimension all his own, running the Academy like a modern CEO, issuing his orders in writing and setting up his own line-and-staff system. Under Thayer, therefore, students encountered the powers of writing, examining and grading with an unprecedented intensity, First, the imposition of a regime of calculability was swift and compre­hensive. By 1819 Thayer, expanding on the French precedent, had deve­loped a marking system used in every subject and in every class enabling the cumulative ranking of each individual cadet. Each student performance was graded (initially on a system running from + 3 to - 3, later from + 3 to 0 with quarter-point gradations); and each cadet's 'account' was kept in a Weekly Class Report summated each term and then, after factoring in the results from the twice-yearly examinations, totalled up for a final Annual Merit Roll. This ranked every cadet in the Class on a weighted cumulative total of all marks obtained, and each yearly total was then carried forward so that at the end of his four years every cadet had a specific graduating position. In addition, from 1826 Thayer added a numerical demerit system for Conduct and integrated the demerit score into each individual's account before calculating the Merit Roll positions, completing the system in 1832 when he introduced a cut-off point of 200 demerits above which expulsion was immediate and without exception. Thus was a new kind of human accountability instituted in the most rigorous form by an alphanumeric combination of numerical and linguistic judgements.

At the same time Thayer set up an intensely grammatocentric managerial regime. Even though West Point had under 300 cadets when he took over, he set up a line-and-staff system which separated the Academy into two divisions, which were then sub-divided down into companies, with strict reporting always in writing in continual relays of communication up and down each line of command. Significantly this system culminated not with Thayer himself but with his second-in-command, the Academy's Comman­dant.19 Meanwhile Thayer himself operated outside these lines, setting policy, collating reports and coordinating the whole system via a central 'Staff Office', with the assistance of a personal clerk and two cadets.

Thayer thus established himself as a separate locus of authority. He became a ghostly presence, hardly ever seen by most of the cadets, knowing them principally through the individual files kept meticulously by his clerk. In their everyday lives he 'entered the picture only as a court of last resort' (Fleming, 1969: 50), and those summoned to formal interviews were disconcerted to discover how much he knew of them despite the lack of personal contact - in fact through reading off slips prepared from the files and pasted inside the pigeon holes on his desk: a kind of VDU data base before the computer. In many respects the Thayer system recalls Foucault's 'panopticism', as a system with the power to see into every aspect of individual life while the source of its vision remains invisible. But it was specifically a grammatocentric form of panopticism, whose modus operand! was constant writing, grading and examination.

The net outcome of Thayer's innovations was that disciplinary power and disciplinary knowledge could be simultaneously internalized in a new and potent way. The graduates of the Thayer system were both highly trained in the scientific disciplines (particularly maths and engineering) and in the wider uses to which writing, grading and examining could be put to engender human productivity and accountability. Having learned to learn under this unprecedented disciplinary human success system they could go out to translate its practices into the business arena.

West Point graduates and the genesis of managerialism

Chandler has tended to play down any West Point connection, noting (1977: 95) that while two of his 'pioneers of modern management', George Whistler of the Western Railroad and George McClellan of the Illinois Central, had military experience, these two 'were the least innovative of the lot'. He concludes that the military model had only an 'indirect impact on the beginning of modern business management' and that 'there is little evidence that railroad managers copied military procedures' (1977: 95-7). We would agree with Chandler insofar as these pioneers were not

translating military procedures as such: but our review of the evidence suggests that what they were translating instead was Thayer's West Point procedures. Chandler's global conclusion appears at the least premature: in particular where two graduates of West Point's Class of 1819 are con­cerned, the above-mentioned George Whistler and his classmate Daniel Tyler.

Whistler now appears to have played a major innovatory role since the first known railroad line-and-staff system is traceable directly to his tenure as Superintendent of the Western Railroad between 1838 and 1842. Tyler at the Springfield Armory merits a similar accolade. For the development of an economically effective system of labour and cost control now appears attributable to a time-and-motion study he undertook in 1831 (50 years before Frederick W. Taylor's scientific management), a study which for the first time established norms of production and unit cost. But the point we stress is that both these initiatives, for all their surface differences, draw on the disciplinary practices of Thayer's West Point: Thayer's organizational structure in Whistler's case, and his calculative system of accountability in Tyler's.



Accountability at the Springfield Armory

Taking the Springfield Armory case first, Chandler's view (1977: 73-4) is that single-unit managerialism was initiated under the Superintendency of Roswell Lee, which ran from 1815 to 1833. As noted by historians of technology (e.g. Deyrup, 1948; Smith, 1985), major steps towards the successful achievement of interchangeable-part manufacture were made at Springfield under Lee, including standardized go/no go gauges, division of labour, quality control, plus a meticulous 'double-entry' bookkeeping system (Chandler, 1977: 73).20

However the history of technology is not necessarily the history of business innovation; and there are two major problems here. First, it is now apparent that Lee's innovations did not produce economic breakthrough. Paul Uselding's detailed re-analysis of Springfield's production and cost figures shows that there were virtually no efficiency gains in costs or productivity over the 1815-33 period; breakthrough actually occurred only after 1841 (Uselding, 1972, 1973).21 Second, careful re-examination of Lee's uniformity initiatives shows that they were not managerial at all (nor indeed was his accounting system a double-entry one). What has happened in the Springfield Armory case is that technological innovation has been mistakenly equated with managerialism and so the detail of what took place has not been properly assessed.

The available records on the National Armories are fortunately copious

(e.g. Deyrup, 1948; Smith, 1977), which makes it possible to distinguish the differences in the technological and business histories to a high degree. And what the detailed evidence shows is that Lee, while pursuing technological improvement, ran the workforce in a traditional and premodern way, aiming at maintaining good stewardship (i.e. minimizing loss of materials through poor quality work, damage or pilfering) and promoting good conduct via such traditional tactics as rules on attendance and proper behaviour plus fines or expulsions to enforce the rules.22 Furthermore the evidence also shows that he never attempted to exert a managerial form of control focused on cost minimization and productivity maximization, the twin paths to the modern goals of profitability and performativity.

In the first place Lee's accounting system made administrative coordina­tion unlikely since it was in charge/discharge not double-entry format: Lee accordingly used it as it was most easily used, to operate separate lines of control tracking reciprocal interchanges between individuals on the stew­ardship principle. In one set of charge/discharge accounts flows of materials were tracked, but in physical terms only; in separate payroll accounts the record of each individual's payments were kept; meanwhile the work returns recorded actuals, ensuring simply that each worker was paid for actual pieces made (for piece-workers) or hours worked (for fixed-wage earners). Such a system set up relays of reciprocal obligation passing from individual to individual, but Lee never developed it to integrate plant-wide financial and performance data and thus coordinate performance across the whole workplace.

In the second place there was no tracking of time taken per piece manufactured or even enforcement of regular hours: the skilled workforce came in, as an 1819 armory inspection remarked, 'as many hours as they choose' (Dalliba, 1823: 543). Thus there was no way of establishing norms of performance or pay (what the average worker should achieve or earn). Instead Lee followed a very different approach, setting his wage rates 'in line with but slightly above wages at other armories' with further cost-of-living adjustments (Deyrup, 1948: 105-6). Thus over the period up to 1830 wages tended to rise while productivity remained static, as evidenced for instance by a suspicious uniformity in each barrel-welder's monthly production, which as Deyrup drily puts it (1948: 110) 'implies ... consider­able excess productive capacity'.

Under these circumstances it is not surprising that, as Chandler acknow­ledges, Lee failed 'to obtain more effective internal coordination and so speed up the flow of materials through his establishment' (1977: 74). His was not a system equipped with practices geared to going beneath the surface of actual performance and costs, towards establishing objective norms of what could be done and/or effective quantified measures of worker accountability.

However, those are the innovatory principles given shape by Tyler's 1831 time-and-motion study, as recorded in Tyler's own Autobiography (1883). In January 1831 the US Ordnance Department appointed him as the first independent Inspector of Contract Arms, and sent him to Springfield. Once there he quickly saw the slack built into Lee's regime. Tyler then goes on (1883:21-2):

Early in the month of February I commenced my examination of the Springfield Armory, and during six months .,. I kept watch in hand, timing every operation into which the manufacture of the musket was divided ... never leaving until I was satisfied ... that I had arrived at the exact time necessary for the performance of each particular task. In this way I came to know accurately what the workmen could earn daily at ten hours' service under the Government prices, and I was enabled to determine ... first what the fair price was for each division of 'piece work9 and second the exact working time necessary to produce a Springfield musket.

In this inspection the power of disciplinarity finally penetrates into the workplace, as Tyler deploys the practices he had internalized at Thayer's West Point: examining, grading performance, establishing norms and rendering humans objectively accountable. It penetrates further the follow­ing year as a Board of Inspection (which includes Tyler) formally recom­mends a total reform of the work culture. The terminology used, as reported by Deyrup (1948: 169) is significant. For the Board's report:

divided the Armory workers into six classes according to the degree of skill and intelligence necessary for each occupation and established for each group a standard wage for a ten hour day, capable of being earned by a workman of average skill and energy ... From questioning the workforce and examining the Armory's pay-roll the board made recommendations as to appropriate piece rates and the number of pieces which should constitute a good day's work.

'Classes', 'intelligence', 'standards', 'examining': this is certainly a dis­course of normalization (cf. Miller and O'Leary, ch. 4 in this volume); but at the same time it is one which imports into the business world the terminology of educational disciplinarity.

There remains, of course, the historical problem pointed out by Useld-ing. Why, if this system was such a breakthrough, did cost and productivity efficiencies not occur until 1842? The reason, as Tyler's 'Autobiography' makes clear (1883: 21-2), was that the Springfield workforce quickly recognized what was at stake and organized what in the short term proved a successful strategy of resistance. They wrote to the Secretary of War and even made a direct appeal to President Andrew Jackson, to such effect that the Board's recommendations were overruled. So the old piece-rates and work practices remained in place. In 1834 Tyler resigned his commission, recognizing that he was not now going to achieve rapid promotion.

However with the inauguration of President William Harrison in 1841 a

reformist agenda was introduced, a new military Superintendent was appointed and a three-man 'civilian' Board of Enquiry was appointed to review the work practices at Springfield. Significantly the board included both the ex- West Point Professor of Mathematics and Tyler himself. Its recommendations, adopted in January 1842, were directly drawn from the 1832 Board. Fixed hours of work were introduced, a time-log was kept of the hours actually worked by piece-rate workers and the piece-rates were set according to the 1832 tariff, thus succeeding in 'reducing the wages to the point previously recommended' (Tyler, 1883: 22).

The productivity and cost outcomes were dramatic, as is highlighted in the figures for the barrel-welding shop. This was one of the most highly-skilled tasks, and one where there was no technological change in produc­tion methods over the whole period from 1820 to 1859; yet even so, from 1 842 the average number of barrels welded per man went up from a figure never above 2500 before 1840 to around 4000 by 1843, while piece-rates dropped from an average of c. 27 cents up to 1841 to 13 cents by 1844 (Deyrup, 1948: appendix D, tables 5 and 6).

Here, then and not in Lee's earlier uniformity initiatives, lies the previously-hidden genesis of modern single-unit management. What took place at Springfield was a power-knowledge revolution which, by introduc­ing the writing and examining practices which could integrate the surveil­lance and control of time, activity and cost, made the modern concerns with productivity, performativity and profitability articulable.



Line-and-staff structure on the Western Railroad

Meanwhile, over the same period but in a different surface way, the Thayer system was penetrating railroad business culture as Tyler's classmate George Whistler developed the first known line-and-staff system. Again, though, the chronology has been not quite clear and the provenance of the system has failed to command much attention.

According to Chandler (cf. Salsbury, 1967: 185), the system was intro­duced following a head-on collision in November 1841 on the single-track line the Western had just opened through western Massachusetts. As a result in only six weeks Whistler set up a management system with clear lines of authority, structured round a central staffoffice plus three operating divisions. Transportation and Machinery divisions had their separate heads while he personally had direct line responsibility for the Roads division in addition to running the central Staff Office, Within each line information flowed up and down through three regional managers who in turn had local managers below them. In Chandler's words, Whistler succeeded in 'fixing definite responsibilities for each phase of the company's

business, drawing solid lines of authority and communication for the railroad's administration, maintenance and operation' (1977: 97).

However, though Whistler's success is not in doubt, the details of the story require reconsideration. First re-examination of the archives shows that Whistler introduced the system not in 1 841 but two years earlier when the railroad first opened. For the initial Regulations he drew up in 1839 already had the three divisions, plus the detailed division of responsibilities between each line, and the central Staff Office. So he does not invent the system following the 1841 crash, instead he just streamlined it then, to eradicate confusion and overelaboration in the command chain. But that chronological change then raises in acute form the issue of how this organizational system, without apparent business precedent, came so easily to Whistler's hand.

Chandler's own preferred solution was that it was a response to technological innovation such as the telegraph (1977: 95), which made a new kind of long-distance administrative coordination feasible; but this now becomes questionable since Samuel Morse only developed the tele­graph in 1 842-3 . On the other hand, there is to date no evidence of any prior analogous system in use in any business context.23 And Whistler's career before joining the Western also offers an unlikely source of inspiration.2*

However it turns out that he had, while a cadet at West Point, a particularly close acquaintance with Thayer's grammatocentric line-and-staff administrative system. By an intriguing coincidence, when in 1817 Thayer was choosing two cadets to form his initial Staff Office, he chose Whistler as his Cadet Staff Sergeant. Thus it was not just on the Western Railroad that Whistler was a pioneer: he had helped Thayer set up the line-and-staff system in the first place.

Hence as at the medieval moment, it becomes apparent that there are direct but overlooked links between the educational and economic worlds. The time-and-motion study and the line-and-staff system have the same genealogy, leading back to Thayer's West Point system. Therefore where Chandler sees two separate lines of innovation in single-unit and multi-unit organizations, we would see two aspects of one disciplinary transforma­tion. What was established under the guise of 'administrative coordination' was a new power of writing, examination and grading.



'Management by the numbers': accounting on the Pennsylvania Railroad

The Springfield Armory and the Western Railroad constitute only a first step towards the establishment of the modern business enterprise, and so of the principles of grammatocentrism and calculability at the heart of

economic discourse. The more visible and decisive step comes in the 1850s on the Pennsylvania Railroad. We return once more to Chandler's history. Following the earliest innovations there were, he argues, in the 1 850s two further significant structural developments (1965: 37-40):

One was the building of a separate Traffic Department to administer the getting and processing of freight and passengers. The other was the creation of a central office manned by general executives . . . [who] concentrated less on day-to-day operation and more on long-term problems of cost determination, competitive rate setting and strategic expansion. In both these developments the Pennsylvania made the largest contribution.

The Pennsylvania Railroad was begun in 1847, under inauspicious circumstances." Yet by 1 870 it had by effective management and strategic development, become the dominant railroad in the USA. Indeed Chandler goes so far as to say (1965: 22):

So effective was their work that the Pennsylvania not only became the largest business enterprise in the nation (if not the world) but also was just as famous for being one of the most efficiently administered.

Not coincidentally, it is here that accounting began to move from margina-lity to centrality in business practice.
The team that ran the Pennsylvania Railroad in those early years included some truly significant individuals: J. Edgar Thomson, its first Chief Engineer; Thomas A. Scott, hired as a Station Agent in 1850, the Railroad's Vice-President by 1858 and by 1862 appointed to be Assistant Secretary of War in charge of railroads on the Union side in the Civil War; and Scott's protege, Andrew Carnegie, hired in 1853 at the age of 17, who rose to Divisional Superintendent before striking out into an even more spectacular career in iron and steel. In any understanding of the rise to global dominance of modern accounting-based economic power these men must play a key role: particularly Carnegie, since his success was built upon importing the Pennsylvania Railroad management system into the manu­facturing sector.26

Carnegie's success simply serves to underline the significance of the innovations introduced on the Pennsylvania. And there the person who must take centre stage is Thomson's No. 2, Herman Haupt. For it is Haupt who introduced the first genuinely 'divisionalized' organizational structure (formally published in the 1857 Organization Manual) and who also set up the Traffic Department (Ward, 1971).

The chronology is as follows. Haupt's earlier career had been as a surveyor, bridge designer and principal of an Academy: initially hired by Thomson as a surveyor in 1847, he was quickly promoted because of his outstanding and speedy surveying work and in early 1849 was appointed

Superintendent of the Railroad, reporting directly to Thomson. Immedi­ately, at Thomson's request, he went round the leading railroads and got details on their organizational and personnel practices, and by the end of March had prepared a best-practice organizational plan, largely based on the Baltimore & Ohio system. But where the latter created one;department for Working of the Road and one for Collection and Disbursement of Revenue, Haupt divided responsibility among four departments, Trans­portation, Maintenance of Way, Motive Power and Maintenance of Cars, all reporting to himself as Superintendent. At the same time he created a General Transportation Office concerned solely with 'regulating all the other offices on the line and in securing accuracy and uniformity in their accounts'(Ward, 1971:78).


Here we see the application of the grammatocentric approach, establish­ing a system which depends upon constant writing and guarantees an expanding role for writing, as it is able to bring more and more functions into the ambit of administrative coordination within the organization. At the same time Haupt imposed a new regime of calculability drawing particularly on accounting data. From 1851 he was including summary but detailed operational data in the Annual Report, data which ;was derived from the accurate and timely information which poured in on;a daily basis to the central Traffic Office (Ward, 1971: 82-3). As a result Haupt was soon effectively managing by the numbers.

Among his accounting based decisions Ward notes the following. In 1850 he costed the toll sheet issued by the directors and suspended it because it did not cover full costs. In 1851, having identified on the basis of the accounting returns an opportunity to expand westward passenger traffic he initiated a strategy of getting immigrant traffic from New York to Pitts­burgh to travel via the Pennsylvania, even though he had to strike deals with so many other railroads and canal companies that he retained only $1.55 out of a $5.25 through ticket (Ward, 1971: 82-3). And in strategic costing vein, while Thomson tended to favour a fixed 'high toll on a relatively low volume of freight', Haupt, having studied the freight volume, 'analysed the fixed and variable costs ... and determined that the rates could be drastically lowered' (Ward, 1971: 81). He also introduced dis­counts for large shippers, for those who shipped in full carload lots and for those who offered return-journey business.


Haupt's initiatives appear to mark the watershed in the emergence of managerialism, for here we see, combined with the earlier calculative technologies promoting accountability and productivity, the accounting technologies to promote systematic cost control and profitability. By 1857 the company was keeping '144 basic sets of accounting records' (Chandler, 1977: 110), an information load so great that a separate Accounting Office

was hived off. With Carnegie then exporting the Haupt management system into manufacturing, and with other railroads having to follow the system in order to compete and survive, the rules of US business discourse were soon definitively changed. Businesses began to be reconstructed in the image of the proactive, future-oriented organization, managed by the numbers and thoroughly grammatocentric.

But why should Haupt be the man to produce this integrated system for managing by the numbers? It turns out that, like Daniel Tyler and George Whistler, he is one more product of West Point. However he is from the next generation, graduating in the Class of 1835 by which time the full Thayer system had been developed, including the sanction of expulsion for those over 200 demerits.

Intriguingly that system, by Haupt's own admission, marked a major turning point in his life. He entered West Point in 1831 aged only 13, and spent his first two years in card-playing and novel-reading and collecting his share of demerits caring, as he says, 'but little how nearly I approached the limit if it was not exceeded: a very unwise course'.27 But at the end of his Sophomore year in June 1833 he ended up on precisely 200 demerits, and believed he was about to be expelled. As humiliation loomed he underwent a conversion experience and resolved, in his own words, to 'turn over a new leaf, renounce cards and novels and apply myself to study'. From that moment on he became a total devotee of the disciplinary way of life, beginning with his own self-discipline. Indeed, the private academy he ran in Gettysburg before joining the Pennsylvania was itself run on the Thayer principles, right down to the demerit system for conduct.

Thus once more we find the educational connection. And in this case the special significance of the Pennsylvania Railroad, both in itself and as borne out by the subsequent success of Carnegie, is that it brings to fruition the kind of accounting based managerial system that can survive any one individual. Haupt in fact severed his links with the Pennsylvania in 1856. But he had already put together a system, based now on grammatocentric structure, a general commitment to calculability and a specific commitment to the constant use of accounting, which no longer needed him in person.



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