Abstract

Amateurs to Fat Cats? British CEOs in the 20th Century

Of late, the corporate leader, be it Chief Executive Office (CEO) or Chairman, is a rather neglected figure in the business and economic history literature. As a theme or unit of analysis the corporate leader is significantly less attended to than say the entrepreneur. This is surprising considering the rich literature around business elites, in both history and the social sciences. This paper addresses this gap through a study of British Corporate leaders across the 20th century. We construct a dataset of British CEOs between 1900 and 2009. The CEOs are drawn from the top 100 British companies by market capitalization, rebalanced every decade. This provides a sample of c.450 companies, and c.1400 CEOs. This data is used to contribute to two debates: First, we seek to understand how the role of the corporate leader has changed in Britain across the 20th century. The extant literature has shown how the source of ultimate corporate power evolved from elected Chairman to appointed executives, redefining the scope and authority of the role. We examine this using change in designations to understand how these roles evolved. Second, we seek to understand who becomes a CEO in Britain and whether their profile has changed across the century. An extensive literature on the sociological analysis of business elites identifies who rises to the top. Variables including birthplace, nationality, education, and class, have been commonly used in analysis of the formation and evolution of elite castes. The impact of recruitment and training, and the importance of certain functions and roles, such as accounting and engineering, are also considered as factors shaping trajectories to the top. We use a range of biographic variables to chart how the profile of British corporate leaders evolved and challenge a number of established narratives around British corporate leaders.