Rejoinder

My paper lays out some methodological thoughts concerning the writing of firm and industry history (with implications, of course, for work seeking larger patterns in such histories). I wrote it in part because many young business historians want to know how they can make their work more useful, and salient, to business school faculty members, deans, and search committees without having to give up traditional archival research and methods and instead retool as applied statisticians in the high social science mode. It seemed my thoughts might conceivably be helpful.

Four commentaries follow the paper. The Editor has offered me an opportunity to respond briefly to the commentators, and I do so below.

I should make some prefatory remarks. Some difficulties seem more or less intrinsic to writing about a historical methodology of the sort I propose within the compass of an article. Three seem most worth flagging from the start. One is that if the readership is to be heterogeneous, as was my intention here, the background professional training, practices, expectations, and literature debates and developments of individual readers may be very different. What is clear to some may seem vague, even vague in a somewhat sinister way, to others. A second is that such an article is in effect a claim that a certain approach is not only desirable but also feasible. The simplest demonstration of feasibility is a sufficiently detailed example. The length constraints of the article format may preclude a satisfying demonstration of feasibility of this sort. The third also concerns length constraints. My intention was to present a thought-provoking article, not a treatise. Some arguments were necessarily given somewhat telegraphically. Implications, and the full domain of their relevance, were not exhaustively drawn out. All of these issues come up in the commentaries. They are not obviously defects in the my essay’s underlying ideas.

The commentary of Andrew Popp, the incoming editor of this journal, gives some evidence of the ability of the program I propose to speak to business historians. Popp’s response addresses the essay at a very high level of abstraction. His central theme is the embeddedness of historical action in time. He reminds us of the vivid and powerful writings of the heterodox and now (unjustly) rarely read British economist George Shackle on this subject. I am basically very sympathetic to the Shackle approach as Popp describes it. I am not clear that because the future has not happened yet, it does not in any even abstract sense exist; and I am similarly not clear that because imagination is required to conceive future courses of events, genuinely possible courses of events are entirely artifacts of the imaginer’s mind.¹ But the core of the argument from Shackle seems to me illuminating. It also seems to me, as to Popp, supportive of my basic argument.

I am more cautious about Popp’s critique of the usefulness of evolutionary economics in this setting. His account of evolutionary economics seems to me too reductive. The three tenets he identifies are distinctive but do not in themselves exhaust the content of the evolutionary economics view of organizational action. The evolutionary element has always involved curiosity about the sources of population variation over time. My paper develops a view of how to understand historical instances of these sources in terms of human agency without, it seems to me, doing any great violence to the larger set of ideas. That view seems to me to be entirely compatible with Popp’s discussion of imaginative capacities and hopeful engagement.

Sidney Winter’s commentary takes place at a level a little closer to the operations of firms. Its engagement is evidence that the program speaks to evolutionary economists and that it may thus speak to the larger community of strategy academics in business schools whose work is informed by the insights of the school. He is himself an interested potential consumer of the sort of history I describe and he offers reasons to think the sort of thing I am proposing fits in with his sense of how the world works and with what he as a theorist would...