Abstract
In a 2011 editorial for the Business History Review, reprinted in this compendium, Friedman and Jones asserted that “there has rarely been a moment when the view that ‘history matters’ has been so widespread” (2011: 1). This view has lately been underscored in the current popular and policy interest in historical analysis stimulated by Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and in the search for explanations following the global financial crisis. How business history capitalizes on this has lately fuelled vigorous debates on the nature and contribution of the discipline and its relationship to other domains. It is clear that the field has come a long way from its beginnings, where it could be simply defined as “the collective biography of firms, large, and small, past and present” (Gras, 1934: 385). Recent publications, such as Bucheli and Wadhwani’s Organizations in Time (2014) and Rowlinson, Hassard, and Decker’s recent historical position piece in the Academy of Management Review (2014) reflect a renewed engagement with management and organization studies. How can business historians embrace the opportunities offered by the “historic turn” in the social sciences (Clark and Rowlinson, 2004)? How can academics from other disciplines engage with business history and business historians? How best to define business history as a discipline in itself? Friedman and Jones have undertaken a valuable exercise for anyone interested in these questions by editing this timely volume of 42 papers tracing the origins and development of the discipline over eighty years. The papers included here remind us that although there has “long been an opportunity to encourage a greater dialogue between business history and social sciences” this has been “difficult to achieve” (p.xxii), and that, over its evolutions, business history has faced and adapted to challenges, posing questions and answering questions with differing degrees of success.
To review the development of business history the book is divided into four parts. Focusing on “creating a discipline” the first part leads with Gras’s seminal 1934 Economic History Review paper, published only seven years after the creation of the first chair in business history at the Harvard School of Business Administration, where much of the subject’s foundations were laid. The papers selected reflect this, with contributions from Harvard ground breakers NSB Gras, Henrietta Larson, Fritz Redlich, and Arthur Cole. The final paper in the section by Peter L Payne reminds us that outside of the United States, business history developed reflecting different national historical conditions.
Part two, “debates and alternatives”, largely concerns the pivotal influence of Alfred Chandler Jr, opening with his 1978 address to the Business History Conference, and includes papers which reflect his growing influence on the development of the discipline internationally. It is worth remembering that this influence also provided the impetus for the more formal appreciation of accounting history (Richardson, 2008: 252). Papers by Thomas Cochran and Louis Galambos provide alternatives to the Chandlerian concerns, as scholars looked to alternative theories and to widen their focus to actors other than large firms.
Part three examines “business history and the social sciences” and helps to place current discussions on the future of the discipline into a long-term perspective which the editors characterize as “central to the troubled identity of the discipline itself”. This debate will be familiar to accounting historians, who have mirrored a similar dialogue with the social sciences (Edwards and Walker, 2009) and the emergence of the “new accounting history” (Miller et al., 1991). This section opens with TAB Corley’s paper arguing for aligning business history more closely to economics, and closes with a paper by the book’s editors summarizing the areas where business history’s contribution has been strongest, and calling for future research to focus in key areas.
Part four examines business history’s complex relationship to the study of history, noting that in the US, the Harvard Business School aside, many practitioners had relocated into history departments. The selection of papers in this section, by scholars including Kenneth Lipartito, Philip Scranton, Roger Horowitz, Angle Kwolek-Folland, and Patrick Fridenson, display an increasing engagement with wider questions related to society, gender, race, and discourses on power.
Business history neophytes too will find the concise introduction an excellent review of the history of the discipline, in terms of contextualizing the selected papers into both intellectual and institutional contexts, and the volume makes a good companion to The Oxford Handbook of Business History (Jones and Zeitlin, 2008). The authors have been excellently placed to select key papers, with Jones in particular having been instrumental in broadening the subject in the post-Chandlerlian era. In choosing papers the authors “tried to avoid those that are widely available, preferring to turn to materials that are harder to locate, yet equally important” and so include conference papers and addresses as well as published work available elsewhere. As with any selection of papers, some areas are given more prominence than others, especially in a field where books often represent new landmarks. All the material is in English, but this bias is compensated for to some extent by the inclusion of papers reviewing the development of business history in specific national and regional contexts, such as Takeshi Yuzawa’s “Recent trends of business history in Japan” 2009 Asia-Pacific Economic and Business History Conference paper and María Inés Barbero’s “Business history in Latin America: A historiographical perspective” reprinted from the Business History Review.
At over 700 pages, the book has the feel of a compendium of primary sources, with selected reproductions of the originals, including typed conference papers, chapters, and journal reprints, with the corresponding variety of font styles, sizes and spacing one would expect. At a list price of £243.00 (discounted if you order online) this volume will repay the effort taken to ensure that your university librarian has this essential volume on order.