In 1993, four years prior to the publication of Clayton Christensen's highly influential book, The Innovator's Dilemma, the Business History Review published an article by Christensen titled “The Rigid Disk Drive Industry: A History of Commercial and Technological Turbulence.” The article relates the theory of disruptive innovation to Alfred D. Chandler's work on large vertically integrated enterprises. It was published during a pivotal era of scholarship on innovation, management practice, and industry evolution, much of which used the history of firms, industries, and technologies to build theory. I survey the impact and critiques of Christensen's research agenda, highlighting how it illustrates where the boundaries associated with the “lessons of history” should be drawn.

Decarbonization is a momentous challenge for capitalism and makes one ask which changes in its morphology may be necessary to achieve that objective. The contribution by the French economist Albert Aftalion (1874–1956), with its emphasis on intermediate levels of aggregation (the “meso“ approach), the differentiated time profiles of economic actoivities, and their differential speeds of reaction to dynamic impulses, provides an invaluable heuristic for conceptualizing the structural transformations required by transition to a low energy regime. Aftalion’s analysis of industrial capitalism emphasizes that structural changes occur along multiple co-existing time horizons. This provides tools to analyze the time constraints on the sequencing of structural changes for different sectors on a decarbonization trajectory without neglecting the strict time requirements for implementing effective climate change mitigation. This interplay of time horizons is central to decarbonization, and it will require a new balance between the invisible hand of markets and the visible hand of states and other public bodies. Moreover, Aftalion’s emphasis on material constraints offers a novel approach to conceptualizing the importance of intermediate levels of aggregation in economic theory, thereby offering a new basis for sectoral policymaking and a fundamental challenge to institutionalist accounts of the morphology of capitalism.

Since the Business History Review's special issue on Latin America twenty years ago, many articles and monographs have been published utilizing archival sources. An examination of many of these studies and experience in archives suggest that the historian of Latin American business must use a variety of sources to study individual firms and the relationships between business and the national societies in which they operate. In this essay Professor Reber discusses eight types of archives found in the United States, Latin America, Great Britain, France, and Spain which hold manuscripts of interest to those studying both the economic and business history of Latin America. She also offers advice about bibliographic aids, guides, and, briefly, printed primary source materials useful in supplementing the often hard-to-find archival data.

The editor of the Business History Review has asked me, as the oldest “new” economic historian, to make a comment on the 1993 Nobel Prize award in Economics—a comment directed to “real” historians—which I am not—and especially to business historians, of whose product I have been an often satisfied—though occasionally restless—consumer. Needless to say, I find this to be an assignment difficult to fulfill. Praise will be put down to “trendy” insincerity and criticism to jealousy. Nor will Historians miss the irony in all the excitement generated by the award within a sub-tribe whose main charge has been to minimize the biographical, the “human” element in historical explanation. The self-styled “new” economic history movement, christened half-jokingly as early as 1968 by an ingenious neologism, “Cliometrics,” was now, twenty-five years later, awarded what is formally known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Science in Honor of Alfred Nobel, in the persons of two of its very keen and most prolific, best-known, energetic, and indomitable practitioners, Douglass C. North of Washington University (St. Louis, Mo.) and Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago (Chicago, Ill.). Surely there is some lesson in marketing in all this to make business and entrepreneurial historians sit up and take notice.

This article studies the evolution of business in Mexico from the Revolution (1910–1920) to the early 1980s, a period when the state played a major role in the economy and undertook nationalistic policies. It explores the development of distinctive features that characterize business in Latin America: the importance of family-owned diversified business groups and immigrants, the prominence of illegal business, the central role of the entrepreneur, and the greater need to forge ties with government agents for company success. We argue that while some of these features had existed earlier, during this era they took the form that has prevailed until the present day.

We examine a classic “wheel of retailing” episode: the abandonment of the five-and-dime pricing formula by American variety chains. The variety chains switched from a conventional product lifecycle, focusing on cost reduction through standardization, to a reverse path up the “service cost–unit value” continuum. We show that, rather than reflecting deteriorating managerial acumen, this shift was a response to the continued imperative for growth following retail format saturation. Firm-specific (rather than format-specific) competitive advantages were too weak for any chain to be confident it could win a within-format price war, making interformat competition through raising price points more attractive.

Barry Eichengreen's new book Hall of Mirrors is a detailed, excellent, and somewhat pessimistic comparison of the two most serious financial crises ever—their causes, development, and consequences. Readers well versed in the comprehensive literature on the Great Depression and the Great Recession in the United States and Europe will not find much information in Hall of Mirrors that is completely new, but most others will. What is new is the comparative approach: the detailed and analytically successful search for similarities and differences between the Great Depression and the Great Recession.

We live in an age of extraordinary corporate power and frequent corporate scandals: malfeasance at American defense contractors, savings and loans, and health-care companies in the 1980s and 1990s; grossly manipulated financial statements at major companies in the 1990s and early 2000s; blatant schemes of tax evasion in the same decades, conjured up by leading law and accounting firms; major safety lapses at Toyota, General Motors, and British Petroleum; rampant bribery of foreign officials by Siemens; and widespread deceptions/manipulations associated with the securitized mortgage markets, emissions standards by automakers such as Volkswagen, the setting of interbank interest rates, and the creation of unauthorized accounts at Wells Fargo.

Research into the organization of the firm typically contrasts family businesses with impersonal corporate structures, and kinship ties among corporate elites are often associated with inefficiency and corruption. This analysis of over 14,000 equity investors and executive officers finds that familial networks were embedded in early corporations, not just among directors but also among small shareholders in the firm. Related investing was especially prominent among women and other relatively disadvantaged groups. Personal ties in newer, riskier enterprises encouraged capital mobilization in emerging ventures and persistence in shareholding, and related investing was significantly associated with lower risk of corporate bank failures. The results support a more positive view of family networks in business organizations and in overall economic development.

The nature and application of Europe's first supranational antitrust law are the subjects of Professor Schmitt's analysis. The problems and policies regarding mergers and combinations experienced during the first six years of ECSC are of particular importance in the study of the evolution of international government-business relationships.

In the early days of the Republic, opposition to a national bank derived from fear, ignorance, and a basic cleavage of prophecy. To many persons banks were synonymous with speculation; others viewed them as “aristocratic engines” designed to advance the interests of the few over those of the many. Most important, however, was the discrepancy of viewpoints between those who envisaged an agricultural nation and those who already sensed the embryonic stirrings of a vast industrial economy. To the htter, a strong central bank seemed indispensable. The struggle to establish the First Bank of the United States emphasized the rural-urban cleavage that was to influence much nineteenth-century history. It was also a conspicuous early recourse to implied Constitutional powers, anathema to States' Rights defenders and a great hope of businessmen in a still feeble nation.

The appeal by scholars for businessmen to incorporate historical consideration in their records management programs is likely to be more widely heeded if businessmen (and scholars) are aware of contemporary experience with business history. Until recently no systematic effort had been made to determine what that experience had been. The present article surveys the factors which have led to authorization of company histories; experiences in selecting authors; uses to which company histories have actually been put; impacts on employee, customer, and public relations programs; and comparative costs incurred in specific instances.

Historians of the Progressive Era have recently focused much attention on the role played by businessmen in the reform legislation of that period. Mr. Blackford's study considers this topic in the case of a significant portion of the California business community.

This article traces the birth and early growth of a major industry. Before Imperial Leduc No. 1 brought in the Edmonton field in 1947, Canadian oil producing operations had been sporadic. The Edmonton and subsequent discoveries in western Canada created an industrial giant overnight, providing historians and economists with a remarkable, documented, accessible case study of the process of industrial growth. Imperial Leduc No. 1 generated economic impulses that surged through a nation. The immediate effects were felt by the Canadian oil industry itself, which crystallized into a new pattern of integration. The domestic consumer of petroleum products was vitally affected, and his counter-reactions created new necessities. Canadian economic development in general was immediately and largely influenced; the flow of oil touched off a chain reaction in state and national fiscal affairs, in agriculture, in population trends, in education, in public expenditures, and in Dominion politics. Nor was the end here. The impulse for change swept across international boundaries, affecting monetary exchange and the competitive alignments of the world petroleum industry.

This article investigates the history of the Progressive Era effort to develop new techniques and technologies of control over American business and corporations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A revolution in Progressive economic regulation was rooted in the intellectual work of the so-called institutional economists—particularly in the context of what economists and lawyers like Richard Ely, John Commons, and Walton Hamilton ultimately talked about as the movement for the “social control” of business, with distinct emphasis on the legal and regulatory “foundations” of modern capitalism. With increased attention to dynamics rather than statics, the real social economy rather than ideal rational actors, and historical and institutional rather than theoretical and abstract renderings of business, industry, and the market, the institutionalists were directly concerned with problems of control, particularly those mechanisms of control available through law, politics, the state, and new technologies of legislative and administrative regulation.

On October 27–28, 1961, the Harvard Business History Group sponsored a conference devoted to the theme “Business History as a Teaching Challenge.” The purpose was simple enough — get experienced, active practitioners in business history together with newcomers to the field in the expectation that interaction between the two groups would be mutually beneficial. This hope was realized, though the specific results were somewhat different — and perhaps more valuable — than those originally anticipated. The 50 participants found themselves more involved with a discussion of the appropriate subject matter of business history, past accomplishments, and future possibilities, than with current teaching problems and techniques. This development was not totally unanticipated, but the enthusiasm with which it was embraced came as a pleasant surprise. It therefore seems appropriate to precede the papers given at the conference with a brief summary of the present status and future prospects of business history in the light of the discussion and the written comments later submitted by participants.