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Global Perspectives on Modern Business

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Louis Galambos
Louis Galambos
Affiliation:
Louis Galambos is professor of history and editor of The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower at Johns Hopkins University.
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Extract

The dominant paradigm in business history has for many years been the synthesis developed by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. Like most paradigms that define a field of scholarship, Chandler's has attracted swarms of devotees and critics, and for some years, it was customary to perform a ritual bow toward his work in the first or second paragraph of any article appearing in the Business History Review. This was true whether the substance of the article appeared to support or contradict Chandlers concept of the development of modern private enterprise.

Type
Essays
Information
Business History Review , Volume 71 , Issue 2 , Summer 1997 , pp. 287 - 290
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1997

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References

1 Fligstein, Neil, The Transformation of Corporate Control (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar, clearly overstates his case for a political interpretation of business history, but his volume can be used as a healthy corrective to a paradigm that just as clearly understates the role of the political system in shaping business behavior.

2 See, for example, Scranton, Philip, Figured Tapestry: Production, Markets, and Power in Philadelphia Textiles, 1885–1941 (New York, 1989).Google Scholar Roger Lloyd-Jones and Lewis, Myrddin J., “Personal Capitalism and British Industrial Decline: The Personally Managed Firm and Business Strategy in Sheffield, 1880–1920,” Business History Review 68 (Autumn 1994): 364–411.Google Scholar See the special issue of Business History 38 (July 1996), ed., Andrew Godley and Duncan M. Ross, on “Banks, Networks and Small Firm Finance.” Kinghorn, Janice Rye and Nye, John Vincent, “The Scale of Production in Western Economic Development: A Comparison of Official Industry Statistics in the United States, Britain, France, and Germany, 1905–1913,” Journal of Economic History 56 (March 1996): 90–112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 For example, see Davis, Clark, “‘You are the Company’: The Demands of Employment in the Emerging Corporate Culture, Los Angeles, 1900–1930,” Business History Review 70 (Autumn 1996): 328–62.CrossRefGoogle ScholarMoran, Nora K., “‘The Importance of Being Excellent’: Human Relations and ‘Corporate Culture,’ 1930–1995,” Essays in Economic & Business History 14 (1996): 229–48.Google ScholarLipartito, Kenneth, “Culture and the Practice of Business History,” Business and Economic History 24 (Winter 1995): 1–41Google Scholar; in the same issue see Naomi R. Lamoreaux, “Constructing Firms: Partnerships and Alternative Contractual Arrangements in Early Nineteenth-Century American Business,” 43–71. See also, Lipartito's article, “When Women were Switches: Technology, Work and Gender in the Telephone Industry, 1890–1920,” American Historical Review 99 (Oct. 1994): 1075–1117.

4 The reference is to the kind of very large, very successful firms that populate Chandler's books and articles.

5 Nelson, Richard, “Capitalism as an Engine of Progress,” Research Policy 19 (1990): 193–214.CrossRefGoogle ScholarNelson, Richard, National Innovation Systems: A Comparative Analysis (New York, 1993).Google ScholarHenderson, Rebecca M. and Clark, Kim B., “Architectural Innovation: The Reconfiguration of Existing Product Technologies and the Failure of Established Firms,” Administrative Science Quarterly 35 (1990): 9–30.CrossRefGoogle ScholarHounshell, David A., “The Evolution of Industrial Research in the United States,” in Engines of Innovation: U.S. Industrial Research at the End of an Era, ed. Rosenbloom, Richard S. and Spencer, William J. (Boston, 1996), 13–85.Google Scholar Naomi R. Lamoreaux and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, “Inventors, Firms, and the Market for Technology: U.S. Manufacturing in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” NBER Working Paper Series on Historical Factors in Long Run Growth, Historical Paper 98 (April 1997). Galambos, Louis, with Sewell, Jane Eliot, Networks of Innovation: Vaccine Development at Merck, Sharp & Dohme, and Mulford, 1895–995 (New York, 1995).Google Scholar

6 Carlson, W. Bernard, Innovation as a Social Process: Elihu Thomson and the Rise of General Electric, 1870–1900 (New York, 1991).Google Scholar

7 On convergence see Naomi Lamoreaux and Louis Galambos, “Understanding Innovation in the Pharmaceutical Industry,” paper presented to the conference on “Understanding Innovation,” Johns Hopkins University, 6–7 June 1997.

8 Rosenberg, Nathan, Inside the Black Box: Technology and Economics (Cambridge, 1987).Google Scholar

9 See, for example, OECD, Globalisation of Industry: Overview and Sector Reports (1996).

10 Jones, Geoffrey, The Evolution of International Business: An Introduction (London, 1996).Google ScholarLazonick, William, Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor (Cambridge, 1990).Google ScholarLazonick, William and West, Jonathan, “Organizational Integration and Competitive Advantage: Explaining Strategy and Performance in American Industry,” Industrial and Corporate Change 4 (1995): 229–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar And of course Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).Google Scholar See also two publications with a built-in comparative dimension: Pohl, Hans, ed., “Transnational Investment from the 19th Century to the Present,” Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte 81 (Stuttgart, 1994)Google Scholar; and Davids, Mila, Goey, Ferry de, and Wit, Dirk de, eds., Proceedings of the Conference on Business History (Rotterdam, 1994)Google Scholar, especially Leslie Hannah, “Technological and Managerial Explanation of Large European Countries: Differential Rates of Convergence on American Productivity Levels, 1945–1973,” 153–69.