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Published by EH.NET (August 2000) 
 
Timothy L. Alborn, _Conceiving Companies: Joint-Stock Politics in Victorian 
England_. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. ix + 297 pp., 5 
(hardback), ISBN: 0415180791 
 
Reviewed for EH.NET by Prabhu Guptara, International Institute for the 
Management of Telecommunications, University of Fribourg, Switzerland. 
<[log in to unmask]> 
 
 
Since the early twentieth century, the joint-stock company and the state 
have together exemplified modern bureaucratic institutions. For even 
longer, companies and states have wound their way through an inconclusive 
cycle of proposals to regulate, deregulate, or otherwise adjust their 
boundaries. _Conceiving Companies_ suggests a new perspective on the rise 
of large-scale companies by locating their origins in political and social 
practice. In the process, it challenges the clear division between the 
state and the market that has shaped regulatory theory and policy. In the 
same way, Alborn questions the standard dichotomies of City versus 
Industry, and gentleman versus philistine, as arising too much from our 
seeing those times through spectacles manufactured in our own. 
 
The book is divided into three sections, each on a different facet of 
"joint-stock politics." The first section surveys the East India Company 
and the Bank of England, two expressly political institutions which needed 
to adjust to new tendencies in the nineteenth century to view companies as 
more properly part of the market. The second locates England's early 
joint-stock banks in the voluntarist and regionalist political culture of 
the 1830s, then traces their departure from these origins through the end 
of the century. The final section argues that Victorian railways, in 
shielding themselves from state intervention, neglected their public 
relations with creditors, customers and workers, and suffered economically 
as a result. 
 
Alborn's main contribution is to focus on the "political" identity of early 
corporate enterprise, in contrast to earlier historians who have posited 
either a heroic story of corporate growth set against a backdrop of 
regulations and other outside impediments to maximum economic efficiency, 
or a story about the birth of the regulatory state valiantly preserving 
democracy from the worst ravages of large corporations. These approaches 
lose sight of the fact that companies have never been merely 
profit-maximizing machines subject to recurrent breakdowns owing to the 
human error of inept state intervention, nor have they been merely selfish 
agglomerates of capital in need of supervision by accountable state 
authorities. Of course companies do have to make money and states are the 
ultimate non-profit organization, yet companies have always had important 
political accountability to shareholders, customers, workers and suppliers, 
as well as environmental and other interests. So Alborn offers a new 
definition of the modern company as an institution that proactively employs 
a dynamic balance of political and economic means to achieve economic ends. 
 
Recovering the modern company's political past suggests a need to 
re-examine what constitutes "success" for companies: was it realistic, let 
alone in their own and the public's best interest to try and depart form 
their earlier conception as public institutions which both originated in 
and were responsive to political concerns? In turning their back on 
"politics," companies were making a calculated political decision to oppose 
the emergence of a more centralized democratic state in Victorian times. 
The resulting state and the resulting relationships between the state and 
companies have had important economic and political consequences. To what 
extent, and by what measures, was and is this "successful"? 
 
Alborn points out that, by virtue of participating in a culture of 
voluntarism and regional politics, promoters of Victorian companies arrived 
at their task with a specific range of assumptions about how to raise 
revenue and delegate authority. These provided them with new insights into 
what economists today would recognize as more efficient methods of 
organizing capital. 
 
In doing all this, Alborn synthesizes and extends existing scholarship but, 
like most other contemporary scholars of Victorian England, he 
systematically ignores what was the most important ingredient of the 
socio-political culture of the time - religion. The roots of religion were 
of course in the "private" sphere, but the "public" sphere till at least 
the end of the First World War cannot be understood without reference to 
it. In that sense, Alborn is still too much a child of our times, though he 
attempts systematically in other ways to raise himself beyond it. 
 
 
Professor Prabhu Guptara is affiliated with the International Institute for 
the Management of Telecommunications (University of Fribourg, Switzerland) 
where he supervises Ph.D. research and teaches in the MBA program. He is 
also Director, Executive & Organisational Development, based at the 
Wolfsberg Executive Development Centre of UBS A.G. (formerly called the 
Union Bank of Switzerland). His recent publications include _Top Executives 
in the Global 100 Companies and Their I.T.-Competence_ (1998, ADVANCE: 
Management Training Ltd. and the Wolfsberg Executive Development Centre). 
 
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Published by EH.Net (August 2000). All EH.Net reviews are archived at 
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