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Small Business in America: A Historiographic Survey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Mansel G. Blackford
Mansel G. Blackford
Affiliation:
Mansel G. Blackford is professor of history at Ohio State University
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Abstract

Small businesses have held a paradoxical position in U.S. history: their particular forms and structures have received little scholarly attention compared to that devoted to big business, yet they have always been a significant part—social and cultural, as well as economic and political—of American life. This essay discusses the changing views on the role of small-scale enterprise in the United States, outlines the current state of historical research, and suggests profitable areas for future study.

Type
Surveys and Debates
Information
Business History Review , Volume 65 , Issue 1: Small Business and Its Rivals , Spring 1991 , pp. 1 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1991

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References

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62 Wall Street Journal, 21 Nov. 1988; see also Ibid., 8 Nov. 1988.

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64 Ibid., 3. For a critique of Storey and Johnson, see Fitzroy, “Firm Size, Efficiency and Employment.”

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71 Soltow, , “Small City Industrialists in the Age of Organization: A Case Study of the Manufacturers' Association of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, 1908–1958,” Business History Review 33 (Summer 1958): 178–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar, is one of the few studies on this topic.

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74 See, for example, “What Do Women Want? A Business They Can Call Their Own,” Business Week, 22 Dec. 1986; and “Why Women Aren't Getting to the Top,” Fortune, 16 April 1984.

75 Although winning some places in the management of small businesses in the 1970s, blacks were, nonetheless, underrepresented as workers in small businesses as compared to big businesses. Women, in contrast, constituted a larger proportion of the work force in small as opposed to large firms. See Storey and Johnson, Job Generation and Labour Market Change, 160.

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78 Several scholars have compared individual aspects of small business development across national boundaries, but no comprehensive historical account exists. See, for example, Oakley, Ray, Rothwell, Roy, and Cooper, Sarah, Management of Innovation in High Technology Small Firms (New York, 1988)Google Scholar; Storey, , ed., The Small Firm: An International Survey (London, 1983)Google Scholar; and Storey and Johnson, Job Generation and Labour Market Change.