Second Industrial Revolution
Modern business management

Railroads are credited with creating the modern business enterprise by scholars such as Alfred Chandler. Previously, the management of most businesses had consisted of individual owners or groups of partners, some of whom often had little daily hands-on operations involvement. Centralized expertise in the home office was not enough. A railroad required expertise available across the whole length of its trackage, to deal with daily crises, breakdowns and bad weather. A collision in Massachusetts in 1841 led to a call for safety reform. This led to the reorganization of railroads into different departments with clear lines of management authority. When the telegraph became available, companies built telegraph lines along the railroads to keep track of trains.

Railroads involved complex operations and employed extremely large amounts of capital and ran a more complicated business compared to anything previous. Consequently, they needed better ways to track costs. For example, to calculate rates they needed to know the cost of a ton-mile of freight. They also needed to keep track of cars, which could go missing for months at a time. This led to what was called "railroad accounting", which was later adopted by steel and other industries, and eventually became modern accounting.

Later in the Second Industrial Revolution, Frederick Winslow Taylor and others in America developed the concept of scientific management or Taylorism. Scientific management initially concentrated on reducing the steps taken in performing work (such as bricklaying or shoveling) by using analysis such as time-and-motion studies, but the concepts evolved into fields such as industrial engineering, manufacturing engineering, and business management that helped to completely restructure the operations of factories, and later entire segments of the economy.

Taylor's core principles included:
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