Swen Steinberg's book, a revision of his doctoral dissertation submitted in 2013 at the Technical University of Dresden, analyzes the corporate culture of Kübler & Niethammer in Saxony. The author follows Hartmut Berghoff's premise that business history must consider a firm's internal and external “interactions” (p. 12). Steinberg's impressive long-term analysis of Kübler & Niethammer from 1856 to 1956 covers much of the complex ground of modern German history. Thus, the book is not only a valuable contribution for business historians who focus on religion and entrepreneurship, family firms, corporate culture, and paper manufacturing. It should also interest social historians, economic historians, and scholars of modern German history.
In the introduction, Steinberg sets his study in the context of a business history that analyzes “fields of interaction” in a microhistory perspective (p. 11). He focuses on the interactions between the family owners, the employees, and the firm's political and social environment. The author then introduces three key analytical concepts: the entrepreneurial patriarchalism of the owning family in its specific German/Saxon Protestant tradition; corporate culture and the perception of the firm as a “Christian community”; and the setting of Kübler & Niethammer in the rural environment of the “industrial village” of Kriebstein (pp. 25, 32). Three research questions frame the analysis: How did religious ethics shape the owners’ business principles? How were those principles implemented in the firm and adjusted to changes in the political and social environment? And how effective were those principles in mitigating conflicts and promoting business success? Following these research questions, the book is structured “from the inside to the outside,” following a thematic structure (p. 13). While the author applies his thematic approach very systematically, the reader has to go through the entire period of investigation several times. This leads to a number of redundancies (for example, see pp. 74, 209). Those redundancies and the occasionally very detailed descriptions, particularly in chapter 5, partially explain the length of the book.
Chapter 2 sketches the business development of Kübler & Niethammer from the company's roots in the early 1800s to the 1950s. It covers the formation of the Reich in 1871, World War I, the inflation of 1923, the demise of the Weimar Republic, the Nazi era including World War II and forced labor, Soviet occupation, and the early years of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). This overview sets the stage for chapter 3. There, Steinberg meticulously traces the background and values of the Niethammer family, with its continuities and changes over three generations. The family emerges as a typical representative of the German Protestant Wirtschaftsbürgertum with its patriarchal social agenda, strong nationalism, and involvement in the church, in business associations, and in political parties. While Steinberg is able to trace a continuity of religious values into the third generation, he also shows the family's increasing involvement with the Nazi regime. Four Niethammer brothers of the third generation became members of the Nazi Party; one brother was active in the SS as early as 1933 and became a leading figure in the economic administration during World War II.
Based on the family's values, the author then develops a “Saxon concept of corporate culture” for Kübler & Niethammer in chapter 4 that he sees as paradigmatic for many, particularly small and medium-sized, businesses in the region (p. 163). While this chapter primarily focuses on the founder, Albert Niethammer, Steinberg also shows a strong intergenerational continuity of Kübler & Niethammer's corporate culture. Its main characteristics, such as expectations of loyalty from the workforce in exchange for social benefits, survived the upheaval of the Weimar Republic. The corporate culture was highly adaptable to the Nazi perception of “the community of the firm,” or Betriebsgemeinschaft (p. 205).
The following—and long—chapter 5 analyzes the practice of Kübler & Niethammer's corporate culture. The author first focuses on the relationship between the owning family and management and then describes cases of the Niethammers applying Christian values in the firm. One such case is the foundation of a corporate kindergarten in 1879 as the first such institution in the entire region. Albert Niethammer's explicit goal was to educate his workers’ children according to Christian principles, with the idea of also fostering potential future employees. Chapter 5 then continues with the political involvement of the owner family, its antisocialist agenda in shaping workers’ opinion, and the long-term continuities of owner-employee relationships through the Nazi era. One example of the author's excellent application of methodology is the subchapter in which Steinberg analyzes “key terms and metaphors” in various forms of internal communication to reconstruct corporate culture (p. 248). In concluding this chapter, the author emphasizes the long-term continuities of Kübler & Niethammer's corporate culture that were prevalent in Kriebstein through the 1960s, long after the former owners had emigrated to West Germany. Steinberg reiterates this argument again in chapter 6, where he analyzes the interaction between the company and the local and regional environment. Nazi defeat, Soviet occupation, and expropriation of the owners in 1945 did not result in a radical break with the past. Instead, the embeddedness of the Niethammer family and their concept of corporate culture continued to shape the firm's corporate culture long after Kübler & Niethammer had become a state-owned enterprise (for example, see p. 404).
Steinberg's book connects to a wider debate on corporate culture, with a particularly interesting additional focus on the GDR. He successfully applies a microhistorical approach to business history that is supported by a wealth of empirical data, both qualitative and quantitative (for example, see p. 222), from corporate records, government records, and personal papers. The author also convincingly applies his methodological approach “from the inside to the outside” by analyzing the value-system of the owning family, its impact on corporate culture, and the interaction between the company and its environment. The focus on a medium-sized firm in the rural periphery in particular brings important attention to industrialization processes that are sometimes neglected in economic and business history.
I have three points of criticism to this otherwise very well-written book. First, given the wealth of his material, one might have wished for a more explicit reference to the wider, interdisciplinary and international discourse on religion and entrepreneurship. The author briefly refers to the discourse but does not fully develop the potential of his study in this aspect. For example, the analytical value of terms such as religion, piety, and belief could have been explored further. Second, the concept of corporate culture appears too much as a top-down mechanism. The workers and their reception of corporate culture, their agency in accepting or rejecting the owners’ values, could have been emphasized more. Third, while the author stresses the intergenerational continuity of Kübler & Niethammer's corporate culture, the third generation appears to have been influenced significantly less by the founder's religious values. One wonders how quickly the firm would have become “secularized” even without state socialism. Nonetheless, Unternehmenskultur im Industriedorf is a valuable contribution and it exemplifies how business history can be relevant to adjacent fields of research.
