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What Is Business History?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2015

Christine Meisner Rosen
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Enterprise & Society , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , September 2013 , pp. 475 - 485
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Copyright © The Author(s) 2013. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved.

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References

1. Business historians began openly and vigorously critiquing the Chandlerian synthesis and articulating alternatives to it in the mid-1990s. See the articles in the special issue of Business and Economic History 26, no. 1 (Fall 1997) on “The Future of Business History,” (which were presented at a conference on this topic at the Hagley Museum in 1997) and Kenneth Lipartito, “Culture and the Practice of Business History,” Economic and Business History 24, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 1–41; Blackford, Mansel G., “Business History and Beyond,” Business and Economic History 26, no. 2 (Winter 1997): 283–89Google Scholar; and John, Richard R., “Elaborations, Revisions, Dissents: Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.’s, The Visible Hand After Twenty Years,” Business History Review 71 (Summer 1997): 180–200 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a sense of the wide variety of ways in which business historians were rethinking the subject matter of our field at that time. For some more-recent expressions of these views, see McKenna, Christopher D., “In Memoriam: Alfred Chandler and the Soul of Business History,” Enterprise & Society 9, no. 3 (Sept. 2008): 422–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and John, Richard R., “Business Historians and the Challenge of Innovation,” Business History Review 85 (Spring 2011): 185–201.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Salter, Malcolm S., Innovation Corrupted: The Origins and Legacy of Enron’s Collapse, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008 Google Scholar; Laird, Pamela Walker, Pull: Networking and Success since Benjamin Franklin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006 Google Scholar; Clarke, Sally H., Trust and Power: Consumers, the Modern Corporation, and the Making of the United States Automobile Market, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2007 Google Scholar; Usselman, Steven, Regulating Railroad Innovation: Business, Technology, and Politics in America, 1840–1920, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2002 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levinson, Marc, The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America, New York: Hill and Wang, 2011 Google Scholar; and Rosen, Christine Meisner, “The Role of Pollution Regulation and Litigation in the Development of the U.S. Meatpacking Industry, 1865–1880,” Enterprise and Society: The International Journal of Business History 8 (June 2007): 297–347 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also John, “Business Historians and the Challenge of Innovation.”

3. Among the highlights are Gorman, Hugh S., Redefining Efficiency: Pollution Concerns, Regulatory Mechanisms, and Technological Change in the U.S. Petroleum Industry, Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 2001 Google Scholar; McCarthy, Tom, Auto Mania: Cars, Consumers, and the Environment, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007 Google Scholar; LeCain, Timothy J., Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009 Google Scholar; Ross, Benjamin and Amter, Steven, The Polluters: The Making of Our Altered Environment, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010 Google Scholar; Markowitz, Gerald and Rosner, David, Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.Google Scholar

4. Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962 Google Scholar, and Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977.Google Scholar

5. Hounshell, David A., From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Yates, JoAnne, Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.Google Scholar

6. McCraw, Thomas K., Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adams, Louis D. Brandeis, James M. Landis, Alfred E. Kahn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

7. I will not attempt to provide a full bibliographical breakdown here. Suffice it to say that the editors regularly published explicitly themed issues on such very non-Chandlerian topics as “Business History and the History of Technology” (Winter 1980), “East Asian Business History” (Summer 1982), “Transportation” (Spring 1984), “Business in Latin America” (Winter 1985), “Entrepreneurs in Business History” (Spring 1989), “Government and Business” (Spring 1990), “American Business Abroad” (Summer 1990), “Small Business and its Rivals” (Spring 1991), “Financial Services” (Autumn 1991), and “Experts, War and the State” (Winter 1994). Intriguingly, there was even a themed issue on issues relating to fisheries conservation and management and employee exposure to industrial toxic chemicals that did not receive an explicit label though now it is obvious that the articles fall into the area of business and the environment (Winter 1988). Even most of the articles in some of the themed issues that sound like they could fit Chandlerian synthesis turn out to fall outside it: see, for example, “British Business History” (Summer 1983), “Service Issues” (Autumn 1990), and “High-Technology Industries” (Spring 1992). The articles in nonthemed issues are even more diverse.

8. This description of schematic thinking boils down a great deal of complex material into a highly simplified summary. It is based on the following: DiMaggio, Paul, “Culture and Cognition,” Annual Review of Sociology 23 (1997): 269–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rumelhart, David E., “Schemata and the Cognitive System,” in Handbook of Social Cognition Vol. I, eds Wyler, Robert S. and Srull, Thomas K., Hilllsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1984, 161–88Google Scholar; Fiske, Susan T. and Linville, Patricia W., “What Does the Schema Concept Buy Us?” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 64, no. 4 (December 1980): 543–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kertzer, David I., Ritual, Politics, and Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 79–82 Google Scholar; D’Andrade, Roy, The Development of Cognitive Anthropology (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 122–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hajer, Maarten and Laws, David, “Ordering Through Discourse,” in The Oxford Handbook of Public Policy, eds Moran, Michael, Rein, Martin, and Goodin, Robert, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006, 409–24Google Scholar. Quotes are from DiMaggio, “Culture and Cognition,” 269; Fiske, Susan T. and Kinder, Donald R., “Involvement, Expertise, and Schema Use: Evidence from Political Cognition,” in Personality, Cognition and Social Interaction, eds Cantor, Nancy and Kihlstorm, John F., Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1981, 173 Google Scholar, quoted in Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power, p. 80. and Ibid; p. 80. Business historians interested in the cultural and cognitive selection pressures that constrain management decision may find that schema theory provides useful insights.

9. DiMaggio, “Culture and Cognition,” 271–72, 279–81; Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power, pp. 81–82; and Rumelhart, “Schemata and the Cognitive System,” 180–83.

10. Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed., Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. John, “Business Historians and the Challenge of Innovation,” 191.

12. Chandler, The Visible Hand, vii.