The Routledge Companion to Business History

John Wilson, Steven Toms, Abe de Jong, Emily Buchnea, John Wilson, Steven Toms, Abe de Jong, Emily Buchnea

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781135007829
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

The Routledge Companion to Business History is a definitive work of reference, and authoritative, international source on business history. Compiled by leading scholars in the field, it offers both researchers and students an introduction and overview of current scholarship in this expanding discipline.

Drawing on a wealth of international contributions, this volume expands the field and explores how business history interacts theoretically and methodologically with other fields. It charts the origins and development of business history and its global reach from Latin America and Africa, to North America and Europe. With this multi-perspective approach, it illustrates the unique contribution of business history and its relationship with a range of other disciplines, from finance and banking to gender issues in corporations.

The Routledge Companion to Business History is a vital source of reference for students and researchers in the fields of business history, corporate governance and business ethics.

"This collection is an excellent starting point for understanding the field and finding areas where business history, management theory, and social science can intersect." Canadian Business History Newsletter, January 2019

Part I
The discipline of business history

1
Introduction

John F. Wilson, Steven Toms, Abe de Jong and Emily Buchnea

Rationale

In putting together this Companion, the editors were motivated by the desire to expand current thinking on the discipline of business history and to produce a comprehensive and current work of reference which can be cited as an authoritative, international source on the subject. While we recognize the impossible nature of covering every single topic or region that has been researched by business historians, we wanted to showcase the rich variety of work that is being done, contrasting methodological approaches, international settings, multiple periods of history, ancient and modern and cross-cutting themes. This multi-perspective approach illustrates the unique appeal of business history and underlines its contribution to a number of adjacent disciplines. In achieving this set of aims, we were also keen to demonstrate how business history now interacts with other fields, theoretically and methodologically, in a much more dynamic way. While extensive work needs to be done in these respects, by bringing together a highly talented group of business historians we are progressing the discipline’s research agenda, enhancing knowledge and understanding and offering researchers and students an introduction to, and overview of, current scholarship in a discipline that has moved out of the shadow of economic history into a fully fledged genre with its own identity.

Indeed, business history has made enormous strides in the last twenty-five years, with vibrant professional associations operating across several Continents, all of which converged on Bergen for the inaugural World Business History Conference in August 2016. Similarly, the journals closely linked to business history continue to flourish, increasing both the number of issues published each year and their readership, especially in other disciplines. One of the most significant benefits arising from this process of evolution has been a significant switch in emphasis away from the study of single firms into a much richer study of business systems and the context in which they evolved over much longer time periods. Journal editors have played an instrumental role in fashioning these changes, while the increasing move of business historians into business schools has prompted a reevaluation of methodologies and perspectives in order to link much more closely to the social sciences.

Consonant with previous efforts to define the discipline of business history (Wilson, 1996; Jones and Zeitlin, 2008), the editors have based their work on the premise that business history is concerned with understanding how business organizations evolve, in their institutional, national and international contexts through managerial process, by engaging with a variety of source material. The intersection between business history and the broad field of business studies has also opened up fresh areas for research, including the study of international business and globalization, business networks and clusters, corporate governance and entrepreneurial behavior. This most recent phase has also expanded the range of methodologies that business historians can employ, complementing the traditional use of archival research by incorporating new sources of quantitative and qualitative data, including oral history, visual records and statistical and financial data.

The broad intention behind this Companion is to provide a framework for the study of all these dimensions of business history, accommodating the best traditions with new perspectives that have been driven by a rapidly increasing flow of contributions from the wider social sciences and business schools. As a consequence, the scope of the book goes beyond the traditional and reflects increased international scope and a wider range of methodologies. This will provide an introduction to, and overview of, current scholarship in the expanding discipline of business history, using a structure that builds the research agenda and at the same time offering thematic perspectives on major business issues and problems. The expectation is that the approach will benefit a wide range of scholars, most obviously business historians, but more importantly scholars whose background may be in the social sciences, other branches of history or who are indeed entirely new to the discipline. For the general reader, it will provide an introduction to the historical dimensions of a range of issues that permeate the concerns and policy agendas of today’s entrepreneurs, managers and regulators.

In this context, while we do not intend to provide an extensive business history bibliography, it is worthwhile highlighting some of the key stages in the discipline’s development. This theme is elaborated further in Chapter 3 by Kipping, Kurosawa and Wadhwani, but it is worth noting that of central importance to the way in which the discipline has matured relates to the way in which business historians have progressively moved away from the large American corporation-oriented work of Alfred Chandler, a scholar who dominated the discipline up to the 1990s. Chandler’s work has now largely been overridden by a range of alternative approaches that have generated much more effective ways of understanding business evolution in a range of international contexts. Chandler’s last major publication was in 1990 (Scale and Scope), following which business historians in several countries not only challenged his paradigm, but also offered alternative approaches to a model of business evolution that owed much to a preoccupation with big business operating in a distinctly American fashion. Wilson (1996) produced the first textbook on British business history in the mid-1990s, while Jones (1996) published a history of international business in the same year. These works stimulated widespread debate about the nature of business history, and especially the extent to which it could be regarded as a social science, given the increasing tendency of especially scholars of organization studies to delve into the field.

One of the key features of this new dimension to business history research was a desire to offer a fresh interpretation of business evolution. This was at the centre of work by Toms and Wilson (2003), who while using the Chandlerian focus on scale and scope economies, outlined through the use of a two-by-two matrix the need to incorporate a wider range of influences that included accountability and governance perspectives, the development of efficient capital markets and the impact of globalization. At the same time, scholars such as Clark and Rowlinson (2004) and Usdiken and Kiesr (2004) were focusing social scientists’ attention on what is now referred to as a culturalist ‘historic turn’ in organization studies, providing a platform for work that is continuing to generate deep insights into both a business history methodology and the way in which business organisations have evolved. It was also apparent that by the beginning of the twenty-first century a significant majority of business historians were located in business schools, rather than history departments, revealing a further motive to link more closely with social science research methodologies. More recently, Scranton and Fridenson (2013) filled many of the gaps in Chandler’s paradigm by offering an innovative theme-based approach to reimagining business history, including a critique of traditional practices. Similarly, Amatori and Colli (2013) have also challenged previous perspectives. A highly novel approach was mooted by Bucheli and Wadhwani (2014), who adopted a structure based on the theories and methods of management research, prompting the emergence of a fresh interest in temporality as a means of opening up new opportunities that management scholars such as Suddaby, Kipping and Rowlinson (all of whom feature in Bucheli and Wadhwani, 2014) have seized effectively. This is exciting research that will no doubt continue to provoke strong feelings amongst historians and social scientists alike, indicating how business history has the potential to stimulate debate and attract the brightest minds. Indeed, there is an increasing expectation that business historians need to develop much greater fluency in bridging the gap between historical and social science research, as well as incorporating more theoretical approaches in developing insights into longitudinal studies (Maclean et al., 2015).

While an integration of all of these approaches is difficult to achieve comprehensively, it is nonetheless necessary if the present state of the art of business history is to be truly represented. The present work consequently complements these contributions by offering fresh themes, international overviews and methodologies, thus providing a crucial bridging mechanism with other social sciences and contributing to the broad aim of linking business history with complementary disciplines, broadening the audience for our work and reinvigorating established approaches.

Structure and contents

The proposed structure will achieve these objectives through the exploration of the following key themes:

• The discipline of business history (agendas, historiography, debates, interdisciplinary approaches and methodology)

• Business ownership (looking at various organisations, including private, public, family and not-for-profit)

• International varieties of capitalism (regional and national perspectives)

• Institutions (from pre-industrial to de-industrial and global)

• Management and ethics (culture, ethics, organisation, etc.)

The rapid expansion of the discipline referred to earlier suggests the value of a structure based on key themes, in that it is necessary to showcase the rich variety of business history. This multi-perspective approach thereby illustrates the unique appeal of business history and underlines its contribution to a number of adjacent disciplines. Key themes running through the sections and chapters will be: new approaches and emerging issues, sources, methodologies and the emergence of new subject areas within business history; areas which have become pertinent to the current business landscape (for example, corporate governance policy, CSR and sustainability); applying new methodologies (networks); revisiting well-worn topics with fresh perspectives (pre-modern business history, gender and globalization); and identifying areas for further research. Clearly, a chronology would have been more ambitious, if not impossible, in view of the international scope, interactions of business and economic institutions, sector specialisms and the dramatis personae of individuals involved. Instead, the themes provide a selection of direct entry points and bridges between business history and other fields of enquiry.

As has been noted recently (Rowlinson et al., 2009), business and management scholars moving into business history lack methodological guidance, not least from historians. Part I of the Companion addresses that gap, whilst also providing an overview of principle debates and controversies in business history. In Chapter 2, Toms and Wilson provide specific guidance on the methods and potential pitfalls of archival research and the use of historical evidence of all types to inform wider debates. This theme is taken further in Chapter 3 by Kipping, Kurosawa and Wadhwani, who note that business history has evolved as a discipline in its own right and has bolstered its relationships with cognate disciplines. It goes on to provide deep insights into the role of business history as nested in the evolution of other disciplines, extending the coverage outside the USA and Western Europe to demonstrate a broad international and cross-disciplinary nature of business history. In Chapter 4, de Jong et al. review the most influential recent papers in business history, providing an introduction and insight into key business history publications whilst gauging their impact through a citation analysis. Taken together the chapters in this section provide an overview and introduction to the main debates and methodologies in business history.

Part II is organised around different models of business ownership, drawing on the extensive business history and adjacent literature that has explored the reasons why businesses fall under different types of ownership at different stages of national and international economic and institutional development. In Chapter 5, Colli defines personal capitalism and presents a model in which this form of capitalism can be a stage in development, where technology, culture and institutions induce a diffusion of firm types, leading to multiple varieties of personal capitalism. Chapter 6 by Quail introduces managerial capitalism, where the business owners are mere financiers and companies are managed by professional executives. The historical overview shows that over time a variety of forms of managerial capitalism have prevailed. Chapter 7 by Colvin is different in nature, as he describes how the history of banking has been studied over the twentieth century. Simultaneously, this chapter discusses the main contributions to banking history. Smith and Tennant in Chapter 8 present the historical development of financial capitalism, and in particular the contributions by business historians to the debate about financialization. Finally, Webster completes the overview in Chapter 9, discussing the so-called third sector, namely, co-operatives, mutuals, charities and social enterprises. The five chapters demonstrate the rich contributions of business history to ongoing debates about business ownership and control.

As business history can be used to explain the evolution of such arrangements within a variety of international contexts, Part III offers an important contribution to the debate about which models of capitalism work and why nations succeed or fail economically, linking closely with the ‘varieties of capitalism’ debate. This encapsulates a series of such contrasts by taking a broadly continental perspective (with the exception of Asia, which proved impossible to cover as a single entity), including hitherto neglected regions. Austin in Chapter 10 demonstrates this graphically, emphasizing how in Sub-Saharan Africa such is the dominance of subsistence production and exchange that firms are significantly less dominant than in industrialised economies, a problem compounded, for the purposes of historical investigation, by the paucity of archive material. Ville and Merrett in Chapter 11 are more concerned with how Australia fits into the ‘varieties of capitalism’ debate, revealing that while managerial capitali...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• PART I The discipline of business history
• PART II Business ownership
• PART III International varieties of capitalism
• PART IV Institutions
• PART V Management and ethics
• Index