Hume enterprises in Australia, 1910-1940 : a study in micro-economic growth

Abstract

The purpose of this study has been to describe and analyse the rapid growth of Hume enterprises between its inception in 1910 and the outbreak of World War II. Our central hypothesis is that while the firm's growth was the product of a complex interaction of factors, the key to this process was the ambition, drive and inventive-innovative abilities of the firm's founder, W.R. Hume. To demonstrate this it has been necessary to show that the firm's greater-than-average rate of growth was mainly due to factors internal to the firm, that the internal factors which initiated and sustained this growth were the product of W.R. Hume's drive and innovative capacity, that these internal factors were of central importance in the resulting growth process, and that the upper limit to the firm's rate of growth was determined by factors outside W.R. Hume's control rather than by the exhaustion of his desire for expansion. For this purpose the dissertation has been organised around a general demand - supply framework, examining the market in which this firm operated on the one hand, and the supply determinants of growth (changes in factor inputs and productivity) on the other. This constitutes the major part of the study, and has been developed in Chapters 2 to 9. In the final chapter an attempt has been made to utilise the foregoing work to reconstruct the firm's historical growth process, indicating the system of incentives for growth and the resulting interaction of the firm's internal resources with its environment. It will be seen that the conclusions of this study have much in common with those theories (by Marris and Penrose) which stress the growth orientation of firms, which recognise the importance of innovation in the firm's growth process, and which examine constraints (shortages of managerial resources, and a minimum profit rate) on the rate of this growth. On the other hand our conclusions have little in common with the general characteristics of those theories which are based upon the assumption of short-run profit maximisation.