rom which universities have been approaching the task of
educating men for business. Prior to 1900, university education for
business in the few universities that attempted anything of the sort
was confined to such branches of applied economics as money and
banking, transportation, corporation finance, commercial geography,
with accounting and business law to give it a professional flavor.
There were also general courses labeled commercial organization and
industrial organization, but these were almost entirely descriptive of
the general business fabric of the country, and had but the most remote
bearing on the internal problems of organization and management which
an individual business man has to face. The assumption was that a man
who was looking forward to business would probably do well to secure
some information about business, but there was little attempt at
definite professional training of the kind given to prospective
lawyers, physicians, or engineers.

Within the past few years universities have begun to undertake
seriously the development of professional training for business. The
result has been that through organized research and through
investigations by individual teachers and students, the universities
are gathering up the threads of different tendencies toward scientific
business and are themselves contributing important scientific results.
Out of all this there is emerging a body of principles and of tested
practice which constitutes an appropriate subject-matter for a
professional course of study, and points the way to still further
research.

One of the earliest results of an approach to business in an attitude
of scientific research, is the discovery that there are certain
fundamental principles which are alike for all lines of business,
however diverse the subject-matter to which analysis is applied.
Substituting the principle of likeness for diversity as the
starting-point of business analysis, has far-reaching consequences not
only for education and research but for management as well. First among
these consequences is the fact that search for elements of likeness
leads at once to replacing the trade or industry with the function as
the significant unit both of research and organization.

If we start our study of business by separating manufacturing,
railroading, merchandising, banking, and the rest, with a large number
of more or less logical subdivisions in each field, and then try to
work