Histories of Business and the Everyday

Introduction

What has been the relationship between business, as a set of institutions and practices, and the ways in which people have lived and experienced their everyday lives? The history of the everyday is a well-established subfield of social and cultural history, but it is one with which business history has had very little dialogue. This article is an attempt to establish the potential for a fruitful conversation between business history and the history of the everyday. It positions this neglect as a puzzle and sets out why business history should engage with the everyday, before asking; what is the everyday, what are histories of the everyday, and what is their potential. Thereafter, I explore why business history has neglected the everyday and how we might go about bringing the everyday in to business history. I conclude with an exploration of the potential gains and implications for business history (and related fields) from a turn to the everyday.

Business History and the Everyday

Business historians study a set of extremely powerful institutions and practices, at the center of which sits the business enterprise itself. As a field, as with economics, business history has a strong interest in change and dynamics and tends to focus on exemplars of change—those novel or innovative institutions and practices that set in motion the most far-reaching processes of change. The multidivisional corporations of the Second Industrial Revolution would be prime examples of such exemplars. We see them as bringing about change in terms of methods of organizing, the material conditions of life, and, most obviously, economic growth. The changes they have wrought have been of the greatest magnitude. We study both what happens inside these organizations and how they relate to the external environment—for example, how they relate to government, to the market, and to the citizen as consumer or employee—but the business enterprise remains the basic analytical building block. The business corporation is positioned as one of the most important institutions under modernity—a powerful agent of change that rivals the state in terms of influence and reach. As business historians we of course think that business matters. As such, business must have done much to shape how people have experienced everyday life, and yet business history has very largely neglected this question. This is a puzzle. The relationship between business and the everyday seems to have a taken-for-granted (and timeless) quality to it, but that is an assumption that is, I think, misplaced. We know that business has played a very important role in processes of economic growth and development and improving standards of living (while also sometimes causing immiseration and growing inequality) and seem to think that is a largely sufficient measure of the impact of business on societies and cultures. There is a related tendency to essentialize the corporation or to concentrate on relatively small and exclusive cadres of individual actors, such as top management. However, I contend that business impacts on the experience of everyday life in ways that are profound and extend far beyond the economic or the organizational. Interactions with business are fully and deeply woven into the fabric of our everyday lives; our interactions with business are constant and frequent. If, as Pat Hudson contends, "mankind is more than waist deep in daily routine," then business forms a very significant element of the waters in which we now wade.¹ Or, as William Cronon says in the preface to Nature's Metropolis, since the nineteenth century, "market institutions" have even come to "define our relationships to each other."² And experience of the everyday matters to people. It is how we are in life, and it is where our lives unfold. Pleasures and sorrows are largely located and experienced in the everyday. It is where our most important relationships are formed and are sustained. It is in the everyday that people find value and make meaning. We do not live abstractly, timelessly, placelessly. We live concretely, in this place, at this time—and very rarely is business absent from this place, this time. Enquiring into the relationship between...