Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/822

 806 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

the tacit admission that if a rigid civil-service system could be established, it might then be feasible to place industrial enterprises under the management of government bureaus. But the truth is that no civil-service examination ever devised is adequate to select out industrial capacity, or catch in its meshes that indefinable, unclassified, evasive quality of practical genius which enables one man to take charge of a business undertaking and bring it through to success, while another, of equal or even superior tech- nical knowledge, makes a total failure of the attempt.

Natural selection is the only method that has ever been found to develop the highest type of managing ability in the industrial field, and no feasible substitute for it has ever been proposed. How would it be possible, for example, to establish tests of busi- ness policy and management which should be regarded as the accepted " standards " ? There are, in fact, no accepted " stand- ards " of policy for the successful conduct of business enterprises. The conditions of success are not only constantly changing, but they are widely different at one and the same time, in different plants, according to the situation, character of the market, pre- vious traditions of the business, and a hundred and one features irreducible to concreteness. What might be regarded as essential business principles in one situation, and made the basis of a general competitive examination, might yield a group of success- ful candidates notably unfit to conduct enterprises under the varied and changing conditions of other situations not covered by these established tests. On the other hand, it is doubtful if some of the most successful managers of modern industries could themselves pass an examination of the sort which would probably be regarded as necessary to select the best managing talent.

To bring all these considerations to bear against the municipal operation of complex industrial enterprises is not, however, to concede the entire case to the opposite contention of unlimited private control. There are grave abuses and inadequacies in pri- vate management, here and there, as well as under public enter- prise, although usually of a different character, and capable of being remedied by other means than sacrificing the positive advantages and permanent incentives to efficiency and improve-