Corporate Connections
Business charts became an important technology of corporate integration. These graphics were not merely technical, however. They told a story about how individual corporations functioned. Note how over time, the relationships they depicted became more directional and self-contained, presenting the large firm as a complex machine with interlocking parts in constant motion. Yet as corporations stretched themselves across the national canvas, these charts began to tell a broader story about the workings of the economy generally. Economic events in one place – a spike in Texas oil prices or a dip in New York employment – could be understood as the consequence of subtler changes earlier in a tangled economic chain.