American Business Enterprise: A Study in Industrial Organisation; A Report to the Electors of the Gartside Scholarships on the Results of a Tour in the United States in 1906-7

American Business Enterprise - is a work which was published 1907 and written by Douglas Knoop, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Sheffield. The report that follows contains some general impressions that the author received after approximately nine months of traveling in Canada and the United States of America. He spent most of his time in large cities of the East, where he communicated with various representatives of the business community and often had the opportunity to assess how close the relationship between the university and commercial life was. The author made no attempt to investigate the conditions of any particular industry, but focused his attention on points that seemed to lend themselves to research. This course was probably the most interesting and instructive at the time, but it made it very difficult to write the report, as it was impossible to make many specific statements or go into details. The following report is mainly intended for the general reader, and the author has tried to exclude all expressions of a technical nature. It attempts to provide a succinct account of American business ventures and sometimes mentions conditions in England for comparison purposes. All this is at best just a sketch, and the author hope that the reader will judge it that way.