Hume enterprises in Australia, 1910-1940 : a study in micro-economic growth
Date
1971
Authors
Snooks, G. D.
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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.
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