How the Drafting of the Clayton Antitrust Act Helped Spread the Managerial Approach to Efficiency

Abstract

Managerial sciences are generally considered to be the art of efficiently running business. Their influence, though, extends far beyond the corporate sphere, and they play an important part in public administration and in particular in its dialog with society at large. Here, from the viewpoint of historical institutionalism, we document one of the earliest successful examples of the wider application of management science: the 1914 antitrust rules (the Clayton Antitrust and Federal Trade Commission Acts) from the perspectives of economic scholars as technical experts, the early years of the Wilson administration, and the spheres of business and society. The societal debate about business and efficiency and the successive implementation of scientific managerial ideas in the administrative sphere, saw management science permeate the whole of American society and become an almost irrefutable aspect of everyday life and representations, thereby enabling it to spread well beyond the boundaries of the firm.