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From Firm to Networked Systems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Thomas P. Hughes
Thomas P. Hughes
Affiliation:
THOMAS P. HUGHES is Mellon Professor of the History and Sociology of Science, Emeritus, at theUniversity of Pennsylvaniaand Distinguished Visiting Professor at MIT.
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Extract

Because of Alfred D. Chandler Jr.'s widely influential books and articles, historians of management and of business have often taken a firm, especially a manufacturing firm, as their unit of analysis. Despite its usefulness as an organizing concept, the firm-based approach does not take into consideration the management of networked systems, which have spread widely and posed major managerial challenges in recent decades. In the following essay, I shall compare the firm and the networked-systems approaches, but first I should stress that I am not dealing with networked systems in general, which are numerous and vary greatly in form. My attention, instead, is focused upon networked electric-power systems.

Type
Articles
Information
Business History Review , Volume 79 , Issue 3 , Autumn 2005 , pp. 587 - 593
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2005

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References

1 Based on a discussion with Richard John, who is working on a history of telephony in the United States.

2 Hughes, Thomas P., Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore, 1983, 1993), 201–26Google Scholar.

3 See my essay in The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, eds. Bijker, Wiebe E., Hughes, Thomas P., and Pinch, Trevor J. (Cambridge, Mass., 1987)Google Scholar.

4 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977)Google Scholar; and Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1990)Google Scholar.

5 Lamoreaux, Naomi R., Raff, Daniel M. G., and Temin, Peter, “Beyond Markets and Hierarchies: Toward a New Synthesis of American Business History,” American Historical Review 106 (April 2003): 404–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Hughes, Networks of Power, 201–26.

7 Singer, Bayla, “Power to the People: The Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland Interconnection, 1925–1970” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1983)Google Scholar.

8 Hughes, Networks of Power, 331–34.

9 For more on the complicated history of EBASCO, see Networks of Power, 395–400.

10 Kessler, Harry Graf, Walther Rathenau: His Life and Work (New York, 1969), 96Google Scholar.

11 Rathenau, Walther, Zur Kritik der Zeit (Berlin, 1919), 58Google Scholar.

12 Ibid, [translated from the German], 13.