Recent Trends in Business History Research: Capitalism, Democracy, and Innovation

Introduction

Today I am going to talk with you about some trends I have noticed in the field of business history over the past two decades.¹ These observations come from editing Business History Review (BHR), especially the part of that work that has to do with assigning book reviews. I have the opportunity at the journal to see a stream of books come in from publishers and then out to reviewers. The books that have come in have been a great source of fascination to me. Each is an achievement, in its own way, and I have great respect for anyone who goes through the process of book-writing from beginning to end—from the original conception of a book through to its ultimate publication. They are a lot of work—and are especially hard to pull off when academic life is eaten up by administrative obligations, or teaching, or a thousand other things. Saul Bellow said that "noise" would be a defining problem of the twentieth century—deafening, unending, tireless noise—from gadgets, technology, advertising, and "the terrible excitement and distraction generated by the crises of modern life."² I have long thought there was some truth in that—and the quote is from the 1970s.

So I would like to begin this talk by acknowledging your scholarship, your books, and articles. Your work has changed the way we think about the world and is a real achievement. It is the opposite of "noise." For much of this talk, I will focus on specific books, ones that have helped reframe and expand the field. This is not intended to be a "best books" list or anything like that, but simply a list of writings that, to me, illustrate larger trends.

At Harvard Business School in the 1990s

While I do not intend to give a biographical speech, some context is helpful to explain my introduction to the field of business history—an introduction that was traditional, at least in its approach to the field, but not typical, in that I have been fortunate to have met so many leading historians. I have been not an "Eyewitness to History" but an "Eyewitness to Business History."

After completing my Ph.D. at Columbia, I arrived at Harvard Business School as a postdoctoral fellow in 1997. Alfred Chandler was still alive and active, as, of course, was Thomas McCraw, who was then head of the Business–Government unit that I joined that year. Geoff Jones had not yet arrived from Reading but would in a few years, and he became my coeditor at the journal and made it far more international in its perspective. When I came to HBS, I knew little about the field of business history and had not ever been to the Business History Conference.

Much of my knowledge of business had come from whatever I could glean from growing up around Boston on the Route 128 corridor, which was then populated with engineers at Raytheon, Digital Equipment Corporation, Lincoln Labs, and Mitre. I was, unknowingly, a child who grew up in the pages of Anna Lee Saxenien's Regional Advantage.³

But for my formal knowledge of the history of business, I turned, in graduate school, as I am sure many in the audience here have done, to the works of Alfred Chandler—and his books opened my eyes to a much larger canvas—one of merchants, railroads, managers, org charts, M-Forms, and so on, in great detail. So it was an exciting experience to meet Chandler, an exceedingly cordial and endlessly curious scholar, who lived nearby to the Business School in an apartment filled with modern paintings made by his wife, the artist Fay Chandler. Chandler shaped my introduction to the field and also how I made sense of the historiography that came after him.

Chandler, then nearly 80, had recently published a lengthy, seventy-two-page article entitled, "The Competitive Performance of U.S. Industrial Enterprises Since the Second World War." This was then, and remains today, one of my favorite articles. I saw...