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Agenda for the 1970's: The Firm and the Industry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

Arthur M. Johnson
Arthur M. Johnson
Affiliation:
University of Maine at Orono
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Extract

Forecasting developments in firm and industry studies during the next decade is a risky business. Students of firms and industries ask widely different questions about the causes, processes, and/or results of change, and they employ an equally wide variety of methodologies in seeking answers. As a result, objectives are more surrounded and enveloped than taken in accordance with a widely accepted and nicely articulated battleplan. This paper, then, is not offered as a battleplan for the next decade but as a survey of the fronts where the possibilities of advance seem most promising, with some effort to suggest targets and weaponry that are or might become relevant.

Type
Economic History: Retrospect and Prospect. Papers Presented at the Thirtieth Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , March 1971 , pp. 106 - 117
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1971

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References

1 Hidy, Ralph W., “HISTORY: Business Histor,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, VI (New York: The Macmillan Company & The Free Press, 1968), p. 474Google Scholar.

2 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., and Galambos, Louis, “The Development of Large-Scale Economic Organizations in Modern America,” The Journal of Economic History, XXX (1970), p. 202Google Scholar. The distinction between generalizes and particularizers was also made by Herman Krooss in his paper, “Economic History and the New Business History,” ibid., XVIII (1958), p. 470.

3 Hidy, “History …,” p. 476.

4 Gras, N.S.B. and Larson, Henrietta M., Casebook in American Business History (New York: F. S. Crofts, 1939), p. 3Google Scholar.

5 Krooss, “Economic History …,” p. 469.

6 Hidy, “History …,” p. 476.

7 Williamson, Harold F., Daum, Arnold R., Andreano, Ralph, and others, The American Petroleum Industry, 2 volumes (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University, 1959–1963)Google Scholar. Edith T. Penrose has shown the potential of an alternative approach, focusing on the economics of the large international oil firms, in The Large International Firm: The International Petroleum Industry (London: George Allen and Onwin, Ltd., 1968)Google Scholar.

8 See the bibliography in Hidy, pp. 479–80. The variety of research projects aided by Harvard Business History Fellowships and the types of articles and books receiving the Newcomen Awards of the Business History Review are evidence of this new emphasis in the discipline.

9 McGouldrick, Paul F., New England Textiles in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968)Google Scholar; Temin, Peter, Iron and Steel in Nineteenth-Century America: An Economic Inquiry (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1964)Google Scholar.

10 Davis, Lance E., “And It Will Never Be Literature,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, Second Series, VI (1968), p. 75Google Scholar.

11 Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., comment on Alfred H. Conrad, “Econometrics and Southern History,” ibid., p. 67.

12 See, for example, Chandler's, “The Structure of American Industry in the Twentieth Century: A Historical Overview,” Business History Review, XLIII (1969), pp. 255–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Davis, Lance and North, Douglass, “Institutional Change and American Economic Growth: A First Step Towards a Theory of Institutional Innovation,” The Journal of Economic History, XXX (1970), pp. 131–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Eichner, Alfred S., The Emergence of Oligopoly: Sugar Refining as a Case Study (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1969)Google Scholar. Ozanne's, Robert studies of A Century of Labor-Management Relations (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967)Google Scholar and Wages in Practice and Theory at McCormick and International Harvester (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968)Google Scholar are comparable examples of the fruitful marriage of theory and history.

15 Cole, Arthur H., “Meso-economics: A Contribution from Entrepreneurial History,” Explorations in Enterprise, Second Series, VI (1968), pp. 5–6Google Scholar.

16 Thomas C. Cochran, “Toward a Useful Model for Social Change,” a paper prepared for the Columbia University Seminar on Economic History, 1970 (mimeographed).

17 The difficulty of defining perception precisely and the virtues for research purposes of a loose definition are discussed in Warr, Peter B. and Knapper, Christopher, The Perception of People and Events (London, New York, Sidney: John Wiley & Sons, 1968), pp. 1–5Google Scholar.

18 Krupp, Sherman, Pattern in Organizational Analysis, A Critical Examination (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1961), p. 95Google Scholar. The importance of perceptions in relation to organizational behavior is stressed by Litterer, Joseph A., The Analysis of Organizations (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1965), ch. iiiGoogle Scholar.

19 Chandler and Galambos, “The Development of Large-Scale Economic Organizations …,” pp. 203–04.

20 In an unpublished doctoral dissertation, “Dynamism and Stability in the Evolution of a New Industry” (Boston: Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, 1968), Thomas W. Dunn has demonstrated the importance of this phenomenon in understanding the development of the plastic pipe industry.

21 The problem of relating organization to environment, and particularly the contingency aspect, is the focus of Lawrence, Paul R. and Lorsch, Jay W., Organization and Environment, Managing Differentiation and Integration (Boston: Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, 1967)Google Scholar. As they point out, Professor Alfred Chandler found that different environmental conditions required different structures and that the rate of environmental change “created the pressure for strategic and subsequently structural change” (ibid., pp. 197–98). This paper suggests that there is a reciprocal relationship between perceptions of decision-makers and the type of organization in which they function that may significantly affect the nature and timing of a firm's response to such pressures.

22 Knight, Kenneth E., “A Descriptive Model of the Intra-Firm Innovation Process,” The Journal of Business, XL (1967), pp. 487–96Google Scholar.

23 Ibid.Cyert, R. M. and March, J. G., A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1963)Google Scholar.