Comment: Relevance and Representativeness

I would like to use my brief remarks to reflect on JoAnne Yates's conclusion, the idea of expanding the audiences for our brand of intellectual product, namely, business history. Specifically, how can we make business history relevant and meaningful for management researchers, educators, and students? Alternately, to what extent should we aspire to make business history relevant to these communities? Reflecting upon JoAnne Yates's proposal, I will review some obstacles to the successful integration of history into management research, education, and practice, and I will propose one modest goal of my own.

Before delving into this topic in detail, let me frame my comments with an update and a quick pop quiz: since coming to Maryland in 2001, my research has focused on collecting digital ephemera from the Dot Com Era. Having studied the early history of the automobile industry for many years, where I was the beneficiary of a rich archival record, I was concerned that future scholars would have trouble researching the history of the internet technology companies of the 1990s—especially failed ones—because the companies left little in the way of material traces for scholars to interpret. In response, and with the help of many partners, I established what I refer to as "The Digital Archive of the Birth of the Dot Com Era." This digital archive includes multiple collections that document various aspects of technology entrepreneurship during the Dot Com Era; the collections include, but are not limited to business plans and planning documents, corporate operating documents and legal records from Dot Com companies. From the start, my goal has been to save a rich enough set of digitalia—so-called born-digital archival materials—from these companies to allow future scholars—the doctoral student of 2050 or 2075 or even 2100—to write a dissertation about business and culture in the remarkable historical moment that was the late 1990s. I have spent most of the past four plus years building this Archive and trying to understand how to interpret it.

The building phase is coming along fairly well: we have (a) business planning documents from over 3000 separate companies, (b) in-depth company-specific collections that extend to thousands of digital objects, and (c) legal records that document the venture creation process in extraordinary detail. As of Friday morning, March 10, 2006, over 53,600 people from more than 100 countries have registered to use the business plan archive, including 2785 users with '.edu' addresses, and I have approved more than 50 requests for enhanced research-level access from scholars and students representing forty domestic and international research universities and teaching colleges.

The second half of the archive challenge has involved trying to interpret these materials. "What," one may well ask, "do we need to know about the Dot Com Era now, in 2006? Didn't we all just live through it?" So we did. Back to the quiz: let me pose the following thought-experiment. Imagine a random sample of one hundred companies, founded in 1999 at the frothy height of the internet market bubble. All of these companies were created to exploit the commercialization of the internet, and all sought (but did not necessarily receive) funding to help them do so from professional venture capital investors. Of these, one hundred Dot Com ventures, how many do you think survived five years as independent entities—to the end of 2004—pursuing their original business model? Zero? 2 percent? 5 percent? 10 percent? Pick your own number and remember it. We shall return to it shortly.

The main issue I would like to raise concerns the problem of 'representativeness' and the relationship between representativeness and relevance. JoAnne Yates asks, can business history be made more relevant to management scholars? Does the study of firms as users—the interorganizational consumption junction—offer us a topical path to increased relevance? I think the answer, in general, is yes, but we need to understand the impediments toward relevance before we go further, and I will review several.

As David van Fleet and Daniel Wren found in their study of attitudes about the relevance of history...