Organizational Literature, Germanic

Organizational Literature from Business Economics

The first German business school (Handelshochschule) was founded in Leipzig in 1889 and was soon followed by others established in Cologne, Frankfurt, Aachen, and Berlin. While their curricula mainly concentrated on instrumental aspects of management, the business schools were at the same time influenced by the scientific tradition of German [Page 1124]universities, according to which professors were expected not only to teach but also to do research and publish. In 1912, a major debate arose over whether business education should focus on the interests of entrepreneurs only or whether it should be linked to more-encompassing economic issues. This dispute finally resulted in an emancipation of the discipline of business economics (Betriebswirtschaftslehre) from political economics, with the former concentrating on the affairs of the individual enterprise.

In their beginnings, business economics and education were strongly dominated by accounting issues. Business economics was, in fact, almost equivalent to accounting science, a fact that may be explained by the economic conditions at that time. High rates of inflation in the early 1920s challenged the practice of accounting and called for inquiry into the information value of accounting numbers. Perhaps most prominent, in this respect, were the contributions of Eugen Schmalenbach, who published his first essay on accounting in 1919 and who can be regarded as a founding figure of German accounting research. His and other authors' contributions on accounting were responsible for the early reputation of business economics. In the late 1920s, however, the field of business economics began to widen. Other functional areas, such as sales and logistics, began to gain academic relevance, and one can also connect the beginning of Germanic organization studies as a distinct subdiscipline of business economics to that time. Nordsieck's introductory book on organization studies (Grundlagen der Organisationslehre), published in 1934, can be regarded as the first major Germanlanguage discussion of the challenges of organizing work, and it would remain influential up until the 1960s. Nordsieck and most other early German writers on organization were mainly concerned with the functional organization of work and thus with issues of task differentiation and coordination, and questions of the organization of social relations were hardly dealt with in this literature. A dominantly technical approach to organizations would remain a characteristic feature of German organizational theory up until the present. In this respect, Germanic organizational literature differs from the tradition in countries such as France, where social relations and questions of power have been dealt with more prominently.

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