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Steel City. Entrepreneurship, strategy and technology in Sheffield, 1743-1993

Details:

  • Author(s) Tweedale, Geoffrey
  • Publication type Monograph
  • Year published 1995
  • Pages 436pp; illus
  • Publisher Clarendon Press
  • Place Published Oxford

Topics:

  • Name Industrial rationalisation
  • Name Public ownership & control inc nationalisation, municipalisation & privatisation
  • Name Entrepreneurship inc cultural influences, opportunity, etc
  • Name Innovation, diffusion & invention, inc technology & products
  • Name Business interest representation & co-operation
  • Name Business/Industry failure, decline, lack of success, etc: decline of industries
  • Name Production of goods & services - methods & organisation
  • Name Diversification strategies

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Winner of the Wadsworth Prize for Business History, 1995. Scholarly work providing a broadly chronological account of the commercial and technological development of Sheffield's steel industry. Aimed at two groups of reader: first, industry historians for basic information on the development of the Sheffield industry, its companies and businessmen; second, economists and business historians for details of how Sheffield relates to 'current debates about entrepreneurship and British economic performance'. Arranged in four parts: 1] 'Establishing competitive superiority, 1743-1918' - determinants of steel city; factor creation in special steels; business performance and industrial structure to 1914; sustaining a lead in cutlery and tools; arsenal of the world; 2] 'Meeting the challenge of competition in the 1920s and 1930s' - family firm in tool steelmaking; mergers, diversification and large scale special steelmaking; individualism in the era of mass produced cutlery and tools; 3] 'From boom time to the loss of competitive advantage. The late 1930s to the 1980s' - Sheffield steel in war and peace to 1960; rationalisation and nationalisation; survivors and new agendas'; 4] 'Epilogue. Steel City and UK industrial decline'. Much on individual businesses, notably: John Brown & Co Ltd; Charles Cammell & Co/Cammell Laird & Co Ltd; Thomas Firth & Co/Firth Brown Ltd; Samuel Fox & Co Ltd; Hadfields Ltd; William Jessop & Son Ltd; Samuel Osborn & Co Ltd; Joseph Rodgers & Co Ltd; Vickers Ltd; George Wostenholm & Son Ltd; Crucible Steel Makers' Association