| Summary: | In 1900 the Pennsylvania Railroad Company implemented a pioneering pension plan that became a model for American business in the twentieth century. Although scholars have described the two-stage creation as management’s effort to achieve corporate efficiency and control over its labor force, this paper demonstrates a more complicated, untidy evolution. Employees played a vital, active role in the quarter-century development of the pension scheme, repeatedly shaping the process and its results directly and indirectly, consciously and unconsciously. Furthermore, the plan’s evolution was a messy, often decentralized, and incremental process considerably at oddsw ith the firm’s reputation for systematic, analytical management.
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