Financial Control and Management by Committee

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the management of one of Britain’s most important multination companies, J & P Coats Ltd., for the time period 1890-1960, a topic which has not hitherto fore been examined in detail. In particular, the thesis will look at the firm’s financial and accounting systems, insofar as the surviving records permit, going on to examine the system of committees by means of which the enterprise was controlled and directed over the time concerned. The thesis reveals that the financial system run by the company reflects the tight control exercised by the committee system, and indeed, was indispensable to it. As a theoretical focus, the study compares what is found with the writings of Alfred D. Chandler Jnr., who held that, in general, British family capital and management of businesses inhibited their growth and development as compared with firms in the USA, in particular. The thesis concludes that Coats did not fit this interpretation, and was highly successful in spite of departing from the M-Form organisational structure regarded by Chandler as the key to the success of large American enterprises.