Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-15T14:48:47.363Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Business Historians and the Challenge of Innovation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2011

Richard R. John
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Literature Review
Information
Business History Review , Volume 85 , Issue 1 , Spring 2011 , pp. 185 - 201
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., Shaping the Industrial Century: The Remarkable Story of the Evolution of the Modern Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industries (Cambridge, Mass., 2005);CrossRefGoogle ScholarChandler, , Inventing the Electronic Century: The Epic Story of the Consumer Electronics and Computer Industries (New York, 2001).Google Scholar

2 Narratives organized around individual inventors have long proved congenial to historians of technology. For a recent exemplary essay that demonstrates the possibilities of this approach, see Hintz, Eric, “Portable Power: Inventor Samuel Ruben and the Birth of Duracell,” Technology and Culture 50 (Jan. 2009): 24–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For an exemplary monograph, see Carlson, W. Bernard, Innovation as a Social Process: Elihu Thomson and the Rise of General Electric, 1870–1900 (Cambridge, U.K., 1991).Google Scholar

3 Buder, Stanley, Capitalizing on Change: A Social History of American Business (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2009);Google ScholarAppleby, Joyce, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (New York, 2010).Google Scholar

4 Noble, David F., America By Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York, 1977).Google Scholar

5 Smith, Merritt Roe, Harpers Ferry and the New Technology (Ithaca, 1977);Google ScholarSmith, , ed., Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience (Cambridge, Mass., 1985);Google ScholarHounshell, David A., From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States (Baltimore, 1985);Google ScholarHounshell, and Smith, John K. Jr., Science and Corporate Strategy: Du Pont R&D, 1902–1980 (New York, 1980);Google ScholarScranton, Philip, Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865–1925 (Princeton, 1997);Google ScholarZeitlin, Jonathan and Sabel, Charles, eds., World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in Western Industrialization (Cambridge, U.K., 1997).Google Scholar

6 Lamoreaux, Naomi R., Raff, Daniel M. G., and Temin, Peter, “Business History and Economic Theory,” in Oxford Handbook of Business History, ed. Jones, Geoffrey and Zeitlin, Jonathan (New York, 2008), 37–66;Google ScholarLamoreaux, , “Partnerships, Corporations, and the Theory of the Firm,” American Economic Review 88 (May 1998): 66–71;Google ScholarLamoreaux, , Raff, Daniel M. G., and Temin, Peter, eds., Learning By Doing in Firms, Markets, and Countries (Chicago, 1999);Google ScholarLamoreaux, and Raff, , eds., Coordination and Information: Historical Perspectives on the Organization of Enterprise (Chicago, 1995).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Hounshell, 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 In contrast to most of the contributors to Challenge, Hounshell explicitly critiques existing categories of knowledge, such as “pure science,” which he calls an “ideology.” Hounshell, David A., “The Evolution of Industrial Research in the United States,” in Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century, vol. 2, ed. Kutler, Stanley I. (New York, 1996), 832.Google Scholar

8 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 108 (Apr. 2003): 404–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Elsewhere, Lamoreaux, Raff, and Temin have made it plain that they equate business history with a “provisional account” of the “circumstances” under which “archetypal coordination mechanisms have risen and declined.” Lamoreaux, , Raff, , and Temin, , “Against Whig History,” Enterprise and Society 5 (2004): 386.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Williamson, Oliver E., The Economic Institutions of Capitalism (New York, 1985).Google Scholar I am grateful to Matthias Kipping for reminding me of Williamson's contribution to our understanding of coordination mechanisms that mediated between the firm and the market.

10 John, Richard R., “Elaborations, Revisions, Dissents: Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.'s The Visible Hand after Twenty Years,” Business History Review 71 (Summer 1997): 152n1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Lipartito, Kenneth, “Culture and the Practice of Business History,” Business and Economic History 24 (Winter 1995): 1–41;Google ScholarClarke, Sally H., “Consumer Negotiations,” Business and Economic History 26 (Fall 1997): 101–22;Google ScholarUsselman, Steven W., “Still Visible: Alfred Chandler's The Visible Hand,” Technology and Culture 47 (July 2006): 584–96;CrossRefGoogle ScholarMcKenna, Christopher D., “In Memoriam: Alfred Chandler and the Soul of Business History,” Enterprise and Society 9 (Sept. 2008): 422–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 For a related critique of recent historical writing on entrepreneurship by management scholars, see Jones, Geoffrey and Wadhwani, R. Daniel, “Schumpeter's Plea: Rediscovering History and Relevance in the Study of Entrepreneurship,” Working Knowledge—February 2006, Harvard Business SchoolGoogle Scholar Working Paper 06-036. In this essay, Jones and Wadhwani embrace historical institutionalism, which they define as the systematic analysis of the relationship between business and the state: “Institutionalism focuses on how the historical development of certain kinds of rules (e. g., laws, norms, rights) affects the nature of competition and innovation in industries” (p. 15).

13 Scranton, Philip, “Beyond Chandler?” Enterprise and Society 9 (Sept. 2008): 426–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 The propensity of business historians unfamiliar with Schumpeter's literary style to read Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy as an obituary for capitalism is understandable. Schumpeter entitled the first section of chapter 12 “The Obsolescence of the Entrepreneurial Function”; called the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies, and the Rockefellers the “true pacemakers of socialism”; and referred at least once to the “perfectly bureaucratized giant industrial unit.” Even so, he predicated his analysis of the triumph of socialism on the satiation of hu- man wants–an eventuality that he regarded as “very far off”–and confined his most detailed analysis of “The Problem of Bureaucratic Management” to a different section of the book in which he speculated about the problems that would confront a future “socialist regime.” Schumpeter, Joseph A., Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York, 1975; 1st ed. 1942), 131–34, 205–10.Google Scholar

15 McCraw, Thomas K., Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), ch. 21.Google Scholar

16 Galambos, Louis, “Identity and the Boundaries of Business History: An Essay on Consensus and Creativity,” in Business History around the World, ed. Amatori, Franco and Jones, Geoffrey (Cambridge, U.K., 2003), 16;Google ScholarGalambos, , “End of the Century Reflections on Weber and Schumpeter–with Karl Marx Lurking in the Background,” Industrial and Corporate Change 5, no. 3 (1996): 925–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Galambos, Louis, “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in American History,” Business History Review 44 (Autumn 1970): 279–90;CrossRefGoogle ScholarGalambos, , “Technology, Political Economy, and Professionalization: Central Themes of the Organizational Synthesis,” Business History Review 57 (Winter 1983): 471–93;CrossRefGoogle ScholarGalambos, , “Recasting the Organizational Synthesis: Structure and Process in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries,” Business History Review 79 (Spring 2005): 1–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 Galambos, Louis, “Reflections on Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.,” Enterprise and Society 9 (Sept. 2008): 415–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 For a more detailed critique of Galambos's stage model of American economic development, see John, Richard R., “Ruling Passions: Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Ruling Passions: Political Economy in Nineteenth Century America, ed. John, (University Park, 2006), esp. 17n26.Google Scholar

20 Galambos, Louis, “The Triumph of Oligopoly,” in American Economic Development in Historical Perspective, ed. Weiss, Thomas and Schaefer, Donald (Stanford, 2004), 244–45.Google Scholar It is perhaps worth noting that Galambos's characterization of the nineteenth-century Ameri- can economy as “atomistic” and “highly competitive” is a locus classicus of a habit of mind that Schumpeter sagely warned against. To contend that the economy was once competitive, and is now monopolistic, Schumpeter reflected, involves the “creation” of an “entirely imagined golden age of perfect competition that at some time somehow metamorphosed itself into the monopolistic age, whereas it is quite clear that perfect competition has at no time been more of a reality than it is at present.” Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 81.

21 Galambos, Louis and Pratt, Joseph, The Rise of the Corporate Commonwealth: United States Business and Public Policy in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1988).Google Scholar

22 Galambos, Louis and Abrahamson, Eric John, Anytime, Anywhere: Entrepreneurship and the Creation of a Wireless World (Cambridge, U.K., 2002), 6.Google Scholar See also Galambos, “Identity and the Boundaries of Business History,” 16.

23 My characterization of what one might–somewhat awkwardly–call Galambosian business history is informed by Galambos's three programmatic Business History Review essays on the “organizational synthesis,” as well as by the following: Galambos, Louis, “The Innovative Organization: Viewed from the Shoulders of Schumpeter, Chandler, Lazonick, et al.,” Business and Economic History 21 (Fall 1993): 79–91Google Scholar; Galambos, “Identity and the Boundaries of Business History”; Galambos, , “Myth and Reality in the Study of America's Consumer Culture,” in The Modern Worlds of Business and Industry: Cultures, Technology, Labor, ed. Merrill, Karen R. (Turnhout, Belgium, 1998), 183–203Google Scholar; and Galambos, , “What Makes Us Think We Can Put Business Back into American History?” Business and Economic History 20 (1991): 1–11.Google Scholar

24 Galambos, “Innovative Organization,” 87; Galambos, “Myth and Reality,” esp. 190–94.

25 Louis Galambos, “Identity and the Boundaries of Business History,” 28–29. Harvard historian Sven Beckert urged historians to move in an analogous direction–that is, to subsume “business history” under the more capacious rubric, “history of capitalism”–during a state-of-the-field roundtable at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in April 2010. Such a rebranding has the advantage of bringing business history into dialogue with a variety of related fields, including social history, cultural history, and labor history, and, in so doing, making it more explicitly contextualist. Even so, it is not without its problems. It would, for example, presumably exclude the study of business phenomena in times and places that are noncapitalistic. In addition, it might encourage tendentious and sterile theoretical debates about the dynamics of capitalism, and, conceivably, even the neglect of business institutions altogether. Nevertheless, it has the advantage of foregrounding a key concept–namely, “capitalism”–that business historians often take for granted, while open- ing up the field to historians who regard the identifier “business” as unduly constraining.

26 Galambos, “Technology, Political Economy, and Professionalization.”

27 Galambos, Louis with Sewell, Jane Eliot, Networks of Innovation: Vaccine Development at Merck, Sharp & Dohme, and Mulford, 1895–1995 (Cambridge, U.K., 1995);Google ScholarVagelos, P. Roy and Galambos, Louis, Medicine, Science and Merck (Cambridge, U.K., 2004); Galambos and Abrahamson, Anytime, Anywhere.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 Galambos, “Recasting the Organizational Synthesis,” 3–4, 36. Galambos structured this essay–the third in his “organizational synthesis” trilogy–as a critical evaluation of the “Castells framework” (p. 4). Galambos is not alone in calling the attention of business historians to Castells, as well as to other social theorists who have tried to explain the distinctiveness of the post-1970 period. The neglect of Castells by the contributors of Challenge is puzzling, since business historians in recent years have repeatedly emphasized his relevance to the field. This is true even for one of the editors of Challenge. Scranton, “Beyond Chandler?” 426–29; John, Richard R., “Rendezvous with Information? Computers and Communications Networks in the United States,” Business History Review 75 (Spring 2001): 1–7; Usselman, “Still Visible,” 592 n12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 Castells, Manuel, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford, 1996), 4, 13, ch. 3.Google Scholar See also Castells, , The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (Oxford, 2001), ch. 1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 For a related discussion, see Kipping, Matthias, “Business–Government Relations: Beyond Performance Issues,” in Business History around the World, ed. Amatori, Franco and Jones, Geoffrey (New York, 2003), 372–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31 The constitutive role of the state in shaping business strategy is, for example, a central theme in the original essays collected together in John, Richard R., ed., Ruling Passions: Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America (University Park, Penn., 2006).Google Scholar These essays emphasize the influence of political structure on business strategy, rather than–as is, for example, typically the case in Challenge–the other way around.

32 Aspray, William and Ceruzzi, Paul E., eds., The Internet and American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 2008).Google Scholar

33 Usselman, Steven W., Regulating Railroad Innovation: Business, Technology, and Politics in America, 1840–1920 (Cambridge, U.K., 2002).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 John, Richard R., “Turner, Beard, Chandler: Progressive Historians,” Business History Review 82 (Summer 2008): 227–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35 On the political economy of Western Union, see John, Richard R., Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), chs. 4–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the historiographical context, see John, , “Telecommunications,” Enterprise and Society 9 (Sept. 2008): 507–20. Western Union's business strategy in the post–Civil War decades has long been something of an Achilles heel for business historians. It is, for example, probably not coincidental that the telegraph business was the specialty of Richard B. DuBoff, the coauthor of one of the earliest and most trenchant critiques of The Visible Hand.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36 John, Network Nation, ch. 5.

37 I am indebted to Edward J. Balleisen for this distinction.