The.oxford.handbook.of.Business.history

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THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF

BUSINESS

HISTORY

Edited

by

GEOFFREY JONES

and

JONATHAN ZEITLIN

OXFORD

UNIVERSITY PRESS

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OXFORD

UNIVERSITY PRESS Great Clarendon Street, OxfordOX2 6DP

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First published2008

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ISBN978-0-19-926368-4 13579108642

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Editors would like to acknowledge the editorial and logistical assistance of Katherine McDonald at Harvard Business School in preparation of this Handbook. Katherine took on the responsibility over two years of monitoring the progress of each chapter manuscript, undertook adroit language and style editing, and engaged in regular, sometimes daily, communications with authors. At Oxford University Press, David Musson initiated the entire project, and subsequently he and Matthew Derbyshire have been unfailingly helpful and supportive as it progressed. The whole project proved rather more lengthy and time-consuming than the Editors had imagined. We would therefore like to thank our respective families, Dylan and Rattana, and Claire, Sam, and Josh.

Geoffrey Jones Jonathan Zeitlin

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PART I APPROACHES AND DEBATES

x

xi

XlI

1

2. Business History and History 9

PATRICK FRIDENSON

3. Economic Theory and Business History 37

NAOMIR.LAMOREAUX, DANIEL M. G. RAFF, AND PETER TEMIN

4. Business History and Economic Development 67

WILLIAM LAZONICK

5. Business History and Management Studies 96

MATTHIAS KIPPING AND BEHLUL USDIKEN

6. The Historical Alternatives Approach 120

JONATHAN ZEITLIN

7. Globalization 141

GEOFFREY JONES

PART II FORMS OF BUSINESS ORGANIZATION

8. Big Business

YOUSSEF CASSIS

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viii CONTENTS

9. Family Business

ANDREA COLLI AND MARY ROSE

10. Industrial Districts and Regional Clusters JONATHAN ZEITLIN

11. Business Groups and Interfirm Networks W.MARK FRUIN

12. Cartels JEFFREY FEAR

13. Business Interest Associations

LUCA LANZALACO

PART III FUNCTIONS OF ENTERPRISE

14. Banking and Finance

MICHEL LESCURE

15. Technology and Innovation

MARGARETB.W. GRAHAM 16. Design and Engineering

WOLFGANG KONIG

17. Marketing and Distribution

ROBERT FITZGERALD

18. The Management of Labor and Human Resources

HOWARD GOSPEL

19. Accounting, Information, and Communication Systems

TREVOR BOYNS

20. Corporate Governance GARY HERRIGEL

PART IV ENTERPRISE AND SOCIETY

21. Entrepreneurship

GEOFFREY JONES ANDR.DANIEL WADHWANI

194 219 244 268 293 319 347 374 396 420 447 470 5°1

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CONTENTS ix

22. Business and the State 529

ROBERT MILLWARD

23.Skill Formation and Training 558

KATHLEEN THELEN

24. Business Education 581

ROLV PETTER AM DAM

25. Business Culture 603

KENNETH LIPARTITO

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LIST OF FIGURES

4.1 Comparing the optimizing and innovating firm 72 4.2 US Old Economy and]apanese business models compared 80 7.1 Business enterprises and globalization waves 144 11.1 Complex organizational forms and levels of ownership,

control, and intragroup/internal transactions 246

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LIST OF TABLES

3.1 Use of economic theory and methods in articles published

in

Business History Review

41

3·2 Use of economic theory and methods in articles published

in

Business and Economic History

42

3·3 Use of economic theory and methods in articles published

in

Business History

45

9.1 Family business distribution in1995-2000 201

12.1 Number of domestic cartels 275

13.1 Forms of capitalist action 294

13.2 Historical processes of peak association formation: a typology 301 13·3 Formation, legitimation, and institutionalization of peak

associations 302

13-4 Foundation date of the first peak associations in certain

industrialized countries 305

13·5 Modes of interest intermediation during World War II 30 8 14.1 Financing patterns and financial systems around1990 321 14.2 Banking systems and thrift institutions(% of total assets) 328 14·3 Banking ratios of commercial banks(1913-14) 333

17·1 Levels of GDP per capita,1870-1973 404

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NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

Rolv Petter Arndam is Professor of Business History at BI Norwegian School of Management in Norway. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of Oslo. His research interests include the history of business education, and globalization since the 1980s, with a special focus on emerging economies and cross-cultural management. He is the author of several monographs as well as numerous articles. Trevor Boyns is Professor of Accounting and Business History at Cardiff Business School at Cardiff University,UK, where he is also Assistant Director of the Account-ing and Business History Research Unit and Director of Postgraduate Studies. A former President of the Association of Business Historians, he has a Ph.D. from the University of Wales. His research interests include the economic and business history of Wales and the history of the development of cost and management ac-counting in Europe (especially France, the UK, Italy, and Spain). He has published widely in journals and was the founding assistant editor and currently the joint editor ofAccounting, Business&Financial History.

Youssef Cassis is Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His publications includeCity Bankers1890-1914 (Cambridge, 1994), Big Business: The European Experience in the Twentieth Century (Oxford,

1997),andCapitals of Capital: A HistoryofInternationalFinancial Centres1780-2005

(Cambridge, 2006). He was the co-founder, in 1994,ofFinancial History Review,

which he co-edited until 2005. He is currently President of the European Business History Association.

Andrea Colli is Associate Professor in Economic History at Bocconi University, Italy, where he is the Director of the undergraduate studies program in Interna-tional Markets and New Technologies and Deputy Director of EntER, a research center on entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs. He has a Ph.D. in Economic and Social History from the same university. His research interests range from family firms to the history of multinationals. He has published several books and articles on the history of the Italian industrial enterprise, the history of family capitalism, and the dynamics of small and medium-sized enterprises. He is currently a member of the Board of the European Business History Association.

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NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS XlIl

Jeffrey Fear is an Associate Professor at the University of Redlands in the United States. He previously taught at Harvard Business School and the University of Pennsylvania. He has a Ph.D. in history from Stanford University. His research interests include the study of organizational capabilities and learning, German and European history, and specializes in German business history. His book, entitled

Organizing Control: August Thyssen and the Construction of German Management

(Cambridge, Mass.,2005)combines each of these interests. He has published widely in journals.

Robert Fitzgerald is Reader in Business History and International Management at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. He has a Ph.D. from the University of London. He is the author of books and numerous journal articles on labor management, business organization, and comparative and international business, as well as marketing.

Patrick Fridenson is Professor of International Business History at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France. He previously taught at the Uni-versity Paris X-Nanterre, and has been Visiting Professor at the UniUni-versity ofTokyo. He is the author, co-author, or editor of several boks, including The Automobile Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC, 1982), The French Home Front,1914-1918(Oxford, 1992), Thomson's First Century (Iouy-en-Iosas, 1995), Histoire des usines Renault,

vol. I (Paris, 1998), and the author of many articles. He is a former President of the Business History Conference of the United States and a former member of the Executive Committee of the International Economic History Association. He is editor of the journal Entreprises et Histoire.

W. Mark Fruin is Professor of Corporate and Global Strategy in the College of Busi-ness at San Jose State University in the United States. Currently, he is researching governance, functional and performance differences relating to hierarchical and scale-free network organizations. He is also interested in the emergence of orga-nizational and knowledge management practices in different industry and national environments, including China, Japan, and the United States.

Howard Gospel is Professor of Management at King's College, University of Lon-don; a Research Associate at the Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics; and a Fellow of the Said Business School, University of Oxford, all in the UK. His research interests include the development of employer labor policy, corporate governance and human resource management, forms of employee representation, and training and development. He has published widely on these topics in historical and contemporary contexts, often with an international and comparative perspective.

MargaretB. W. Graham is Associate Professor of Strategy and Organization at the Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University, Canada. She holds a Ph.D.

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XlV NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

in History and an MBA from Harvard University. She has published RCA and the VideoDisc: The Business of Research (1986), R&D for Industry: A Century of Technical Innovationat Alcoa(co-authored by Bettye H. Pruitt) (1990),andCorning and the Craft of Innovation(co-authored by Alec T. Shuldiner) (2001). She is a founding director of the Winthrop Group, Inc., a group of consulting historians and archivists, and for several years in the1990Sshe was an executive at Xerox PARC (The Palo Alto Research Center).

Gary Herrigel is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, United States. He received his Ph.D. from the Political Science Depart-ment and the Program in Science Technology and Society,MIT. His research inter-ests include comparative business history, comparative industrial analysis, political economy, economic sociology, and economic geography. Herrigel has published

Industrial Constructions: The Sources of German IndustrialPower(Cambridge,1996)

and co-editedAmericanizaiton and its Limits: Reworking US Technology and Man-agement in Postwar Europe and Japan (Oxford, 2000) with Jonathan Zeitlin, in addition to many scholarly articles dealing with business and industrial governance matters both historical and contemporary.

Geoffrey Jones is Isidor Straus Professor of Business History, Harvard Business School, United States. He previously taught at the universities of Cambridge and Reading, and at the London School of Economics, in the UK. He is the author and editor of many books and articles on the history of international business, includ-ingBritish Multinational Banking1830-1990(Oxford,1993),Merchants to Multina-tionals(Oxford, 2000),Multinationals and Global Capitalism (Oxford, 2005), and

Renewing Unilever (Oxford,2005). He is a former President of both the European Business History Association and the Business History Conference of the United States, and is co-editor of the journalBusiness HistoryReview.

Matthias Kipping is Professor of Strategic Management and Chair in Business History at the Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto, Canada. He has degrees in history and public administration from Germany, the United States, and France, and held previous appointments at the University of Reading, UK and Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain. His main research interest is the international transfer of management knowledge, in particular the evolution and role of management consultants and management education. He has published widely on these topics inbusiness history and management journals. A book on

The Management Consultancy Business in Historical and Comparative Perspectiveis forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

Wolfgang Konig is Professor of the History of Technology at the Technical Univer-sity of Berlin, Germany. He earned distinctions at the Verein Deutscher Ingenieure and the Verband der Elektrotechnik, Elektronik, Informationstechnik (VDE) for his contributions on the history of technology and electrical engineering and on

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NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS XV

technology assessment. His interests include the history of education, the engi-neering profession, and mechanical and electrical engiengi-neering, the historiography of technology, technology assessment, and the philosophy of technology. He is currently working on technology in consumer society and is finishing a book on the technical interests of Emperor Wilhelm II.

Naomi R. Lamoreaux is Professor of Economics and History at the University of California, Los Angeles in the United States and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. She received her Ph.D. in1979from the Johns Hopkins University. She has writtenThe GreatMerger Movement in American Business,1895-1904(Cambridge,1985)andInsider Lending: Banks, Personal Connec-tions and Economic Development in Industrial New England(Cambridge,1994), as well as a number of articles on various topics in business history, financial history, and the history of technology. Her current research interests include projects on the organization of invention in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States, corporate governance and business's choice of organizational form in the United States and France in the same period, and the emergence of the public/private distinction in American history.

Luca Lanzalaco teaches Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Macerata, Italy. He is the author of numerous books and articles in Italian and Eng-lish on political institutions and the organization of business interests, including

Dall'impresa all'associazione. Le organizzazioni degli imprenditori: La Confindustria in prospettiva comparata (Milan, 1990); Le politiche istituzionali (Bologna,1995); Istituzioni, organizzazioni, potere: Introduzione all'analisi istituzionale della politica

(Rome, 1995);and Istituzioni, amministrazioni, politica: Analisi delle istituzioni e ruolo degli apparati amministrativi(Naples, 2000).

William Lazonick is University Professor at the University of Massachusetts Low-ell, United States, and Distinguished Research Professor at INSEAD, France. His research seeks to understand how institutions and organizations support inno-vative enterprise, and the implications for income distribution and employment stability.

Michel Lescure is Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Paris X-Nanterre, France. His publications on business and financial history include

Les banques, l'Etat et le marche immobilieren France

a

l'epoque contemporaine(Paris, 1982),PME et croissance economique en France dans les annees 1920 (Paris, 1996), Banques locales et banques regionales en Europe au XXe siecle, edited with Alain Plessis (Paris,2004).He is currently the manager of the research center Institutions et Dynamiques Historiques de l'Economie.

Kenneth Lipartito is Professor of History at Florida International University, United States, and editor of Enterprise & Society: The International Journal of

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XVI NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS

Business History.A specialist on technology, business, and culture, he is the author or editor of five books, includingConstructing Corporate America: History, Politics, Culture (Oxford, 2004), Investing for Middle America: John Elliott Tappan and the Origins of American Express Financial Advisors (New York,2001), and The Bell System and Regional Business: The Telephone in the South,1877-1920 (Baltimore,

1989). His articles have appeared in numerous journals.

Robert Millward has been Professor of Economic History at the University of Manchester in the UK since1989,having previously held the Chair in Economics at the University of Salford. His research interests are in economic organization, including the history and economics of industry and the public sector. He has published widely in journals. His latest book is Private and Public Enterprise in Europe: Energy, Telecommunications and Transport: c1830-1990(Cambridge,2005).

Daniel M. G. Raff is Associate Professor ofManagement at the Wharton School and Associate Professor of History in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States. He is also a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He previously held teaching appointments at the business and law schools of Columbia University, the Harvard Business School, and Oxford University. He has published widely in journals such asAmericanEconomic Review, American Historical Review, Business History Review, Journal of Economic History, andJournal of Political Economy.

Mary Rose is Professor of Entrepreneurship in the Institute of Entrepreneurship and Enterprise Development in the Management School at Lancaster University, UK. She specializes in business history, especially international perspectives on family business and also the history of textiles. Throughout, her work has linked business history methodology with the study of entrepreneurship and her most recent work explores these links to the field of innovation. She has published nu-merous books, edited collections, and journal articles. She is Director of the Pasold Research Fund and was President of the European Business History Association

2003-5·

Peter Temin is Elisha Gray II Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), United States. He was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and has a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT. He was Head of the Economics Department and currently is its Director of Graduate Studies. His research interests include the development of American business and industryinthe nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has written books on the iron and steel and pharmaceutical industries, edited books on business history more generally, and written many articles on business and economic history.

Kathleen Thelen is the Payson S. Wild Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University in the United States, and a Permanent External Scientific Member of

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NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS XVll

the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany. Her most recent single-authored book, How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States and Japan (Cambridge,2004) was selected as winner of the2006Mattei Dogan Award of the Society for Comparative Research and co-winner of the 2005 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award of the American Political Science Association. Other recent publications includeBeyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies (co-edited with Wolfgang Streeck, Oxford,2005).

Behlul Usdiken is Professor of Management and Organization at Sabanci Univer-sity, Istanbul, Turkey. He has previously taught at Bogazici University and Koc University. His research has appeared in numerous journals. He was co-editor of

Organization Studies1996-2001.His research interests are in organization theory, history of managerial thought, and history of management education.

R. Daniel Wadhwani is Assistant Professor of Management and Fletcher Jones Professor of Entrepreneurship, University of the Pacific in the United States. He previously taught at Harvard Business School and the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include entrepreneurship and financial system development in historical perspective. His co-authored paper with Geoffrey Jones, "Schumpeter's Plea: Historical Approaches to the Study of Entrepreneurship': won the Best Con-ceptual Paper Prize from the American Academy of Management's Entrepreneur-ship Division in2006.

Jonathan Zeitlin is Professor of Sociology, Public Affairs, Political Science, and History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States where he is also Director of the Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy (WAGE) and the European Union Center of Excellence. He previously taught at Birkbeck College, London, and was Research Fellow at King's College, Cambridge, in the UK. He is the author and editor of numerous books and articles on the compar-ative and historical analysis of business organization, employment relations, and socia-economic governance, includingLocal Players in Global Games: The Strategic Constitution of a Multinational Corporation (Oxford, 2005), Governing Work and Welfare in a New Economy: European and American Experiments (Oxford, 2003),

Americanization and its Limits: Reworking US Technology and Management in Post-WarEurope and Japan(Oxford,2000),andWorld ofPossibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in Western Industrialization (Cambridge,1997). He is co-editor of the journal Socio-Economic Review, a member of the editorial board of Enterprise &

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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

GEOFFREY JONES

JONATHAN ZEITLIN

THIS Handbook provides a state-of-the-art survey of research in business history. Business historians study the historical evolution of business systems, entrepre-neurs, and firms, as well as their interaction with their political, economic, and social environment. They address issues of central concern to researchers in man-agement studies and business administration, as well as economics, sociology, and other social sciences, and to historians. They employ a range of qualitative and quantitative methodologies, but all share a belief in the importance of understand-ing change over time.

As the chapters in this Handbook show, this research domain is wide-ranging, dynamic, and has generated compelling empirical data, which sometimes confirms and sometimes contests widely held views in management and the social sciences. However, much of this research is presented in specialist journals and in books, a form of publication which business historians-like other historians-regard as essential for understanding complex issues, but which most management and social science researchers seldom read. As a result, business history research is often overlooked, even by scholars who assert that "history matters" or emphasize the importance of path dependencies. This Handbook seeks to liberate this research, by presenting it in a form that researchers in other disciplines can discover and access.

For many years by far the most recognized scholar in business history was Alfred D. Chandler Jr. Although business history had been written for several decades before Chandler began publishing in the late1950Sand1960s,he is rightly

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2 INTRODUCTION

regarded as the founder of the modern subject. Chandler was so influential not only because he undertook first-rate historical research, but also because he ad-vanced a number of general propositions which exercised enormous influence on a generation of management researchers. In three major studies, each dealing with the growth of big business in manufacturing since the nineteenth century and its role in the growth of the United States as the world's largest economy, Chandler identified the role of organization building and professional management in the performance of firms. Chandler(1962),in a study which considers the growth of the multidivisional organization during the first half of the twentieth century, argued that new organizational structures result from changes in the strategic direction of firms. Chandler (1977), which examined the rise of large-scale business in the United States before1940,explored why professional managers replaced markets in co-coordinating goods and services. Chandler (1990), which made a comparison between the United States, Great Britain, and Germany, showed how firms that made a three-pronged investment in production, distribution, and management were able to become first-movers in many industries.

The influence of Chandler's insights and research is acknowledged in many essays in this volume. Some essays are focused on the central themes in Chandler's work, such as the growth of big business (Cassis) and innovation (Graham). However the chapters in the Handbook also demonstrate how far contemporary business history has moved beyond the Chandlerian paradigm, with its focus on large manufactur-ing firms, mass production, mass distribution, and corporate R&D; its presentation of the US case as a normative, even teleological model of business development; and its explanation of the rise of the modern managerial enterprise as a functional response to the imperatives of markets and technologies.

The chapters in this Handbook demonstrate how research agendas have changed and broadened. There is much more research on forms of business enterprise beyond the large, vertically integrated, horizontally diversified, professionally man-aged corporation. These include industrial districts and clusters (Zeitlin), family enterprises (Colli and Rose), business groups (Fruin), and entrepreneurial start-ups (Jones and Wadhwani). There is also much more emphasis on the porous and variable boundaries of the firm (many of whose "core" functions such as finance, research, or hwnan resource management may be wholly or partially externalized) in different national, sectoral, and historical contexts, as well as on the reciprocal interactions between business enterprises and their cultural and political environment. There has also been a distinct shift in chronological focus. While the hundred years between1850and 1950were central to Chandler's work, the Handbook essays report extensive research conducted on the business history of the second half of the twentieth century. This was an era during which, for example, large diversified and integrated firms were replaced in part by markets or networks, while the global pre-eminence afUS-based firms was challenged in many sectors.

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INTRODUCTION 3

Even where the focus remains Chandlerian, addressing big business, mass dis-tribution, or corporate R&D, the Handbook chapters demonstrate how recent scholarship has greatly qualified if not overturned altogether some ofthe key claims of the Chandlerian paradigm, concerning the national and sectoral incidence of large managerial enterprises, the origins and effectiveness of the multidivisional form, and the centrality of internal "paths oflearning" to technological innovation. Business historians have not converged on a full-fledged alternative to the Chand-lerian paradigm, but the field has nonetheless evolved over the past generation in a much more open and pluralistic direction.

The Handbook shows that the growth of comparative research has been an important driver of changing scholarly agendas. While the prevalence of quanti-tative methodologies and the consequent need for large datasets has contributed to an overwhelming focus on the United States in many areas of management research, the chapters in this Handbook demonstrate how far business history has developed into a truly international and comparative field, and how much it has to gain by embracing a more fully global perspective. Most business historians still work primarily within their own national frameworks. This provides one impor-tant obstacle to accessing the literature, which is often written in languages other than English. However, as the following chapters show, the leading scholars in the field are increasingly capable of drawing sophisticated, fine-grained comparisons across different countries and regions, at least among the advanced industrialized economies of North America, Western Europe, and East Asia. A number of the contributors to this Handbook examine the cross-border activities and strategies of firms, states, business associations, cartels, entrepreneurial diaspora, and other transnational actors. Their international and comparative perspective raises new questions about national trajectories of business development, and enables busi-ness historians to contribute actively to current debates in adjacent fields such as comparative political economy and global history.

The wide-ranging topics and approaches covered by this Handbook reflect the fact that business history, as both a body of literature and a community of academic researchers, has both a narrow and a broad definition. The narrower definition includes researchers who conduct primary archival research, although using a plurality of sources and methods, on the history of business enterprises, who belong to the professional business history societies now established in many countries, and publish in the "core" business history journals, including

Busi-ness History, BusiBusi-ness History Review, Enterprises et Histoire, Enterprise & Society,

Japan Business History Review, and Zeitschrift fur Unternehmensgeschichte. The broader definition comprises scholars from a variety of social science disciplines (including management studies) who study the historical development of business (sometimes doing original archival research of their own, and sometimes bring-ing new theoretical perspectives and conceptual frameworks to bear on existbring-ing research).

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4 INTRODUCTION

These two circles interact and enrich the field, which remains open to mul-tiple methodologies and new questions, without falling under the spell of crip-pling orthodoxies which constrain research agendas. This is evident in the four opening chapters of the Handbook on the relationship between business his-tory and other adjacent disciplines (hishis-tory, neo-classical economics, evolution-ary/institutional economics, and management), as well as in many of the more thematic chapters that explore key issues in contemporary political economy and/or management debates, including corporate governance (Herrigel), entrepre-neurship (Jones and Wadhwani), industrial districts (Zeitlin), finance (Lescure), business interest associations (Lanzalaco), and skill formation and training (Thelen).

The "open architecture" of business history as a discipline means that it is un-usually well-placed to participate in vigorous two-way exchanges with scholars in adjacent fields. On the one hand, careful empirical research by business historians can effectively challenge or qualify many of the "stylized facts" on which influential theoretical analyses in the social sciences sometimes rest. Corporate governance and financial systems are particularly striking examples, as few if any of the typo-logical frameworks influential in the comparative literature (insiders vs. outsiders, stakeholders vs. stockholders, banks vs. capital markets, common vs. civil law) can account persuasively for the range of variation observed by historians over long time periods within and across countries. On the other hand, comparative social-scientific analyses suggest new questions for business historians, concerning the morphology and explanation of cross-national differences in the organization of business interest associations, the development of vocational education and train-ing systems, and other similar issues which have not hitherto figured prominently in national historiographies.

The organization of this volume reflects and embodies these broad trends in the field. Part I examines the central methodological approaches and theoretical debates within business history, while situating them in terms of its complex, overlapping relationship to other adjacent fields. Part II surveys a variety of forms of business organization and emphasizes the diversity of routes to economic efficiency and business success in different times and contexts. Part III focuses on a series of key functional activities of business enterprise (including some that are often neglected in the narrower business history literature such as design and engineer-ing and accountengineer-ing systems), analyzengineer-ing the variety of institutional mechanisms through which these have been performed inside and outside the firm itself. Part IV considers the changing relationship between firms and their wider social, cultural, and political contexts, stressing the reciprocal interactions between enterprise and society.

No single volume can be fully comprehensive. There are topics to which the editors would have liked to devote greater coverage. These include the regula-tory role of the state, for example through antitrust/competition, industrial, and

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INTRODUCTION 5

environmental policy, which is addressed in the chapters by Millward on business and the state and by Fear on cartels among others, but which merits more extensive comparative analysis.

There are two serious omissions caused by the inability of the commissioned authors to complete chapters due to other obligations. We had hoped to include a chapter on the role of gender in business by Mary Yeager. This is an important research area which is highlighted in a number of chapters, including Fridenson, Colli and Rose, Jones and Wadhwani, and Lipartito, but which deserves a full-scale chapter of its own in which the largely national studies to date could be placed in a systematic comparative context. Kwolek-Folland(1998) provides a pioneering historical overview of women in business in the United States, while Yeager(1999)

provides an edited collection of studies from around the world.

The editors had also hoped to include essays on business history in developing countries, but this goal was abandoned after C. K. Lai was unable to complete his essay on the business history of the Chinese-speaking world. The literature on the history of business beyond the United States, Western Europe, and Japan is not extensive, but it is growing. Both Canada and Australia have quite extensive business history literatures which are rarely incorporated into wider narratives (Taylor and Baskerville1994;Fleming et al.2004). The literature on developing countries is scarcer, and also overlooked. Monolingual English speakers are often simply unaware of the increasingly rich literature in Spanish on Latin America and in Chinese on East Asia. Family firms and business groups feature extensively in much of this literature, as do relations with governments and the historical impact of imperialism. A number of chapters in this Handbook, however, do extend their thematic analyses beyond the industrialized world to cover the colonial, post-colonial, and emerging markets in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. For further information, there are valuable surveys of the business history literature on China by Faure (2006), on India by Tripathi (2004), and on Latin America by Barbero

(2003).Tignor(2007)discusses the limited research undertaken as yet on the busi-ness history of Africa.

REFERENCES

BARBERO, MARfA INES (2003). "Business History in Latin America: Issues and Debates", in F.Amatori and G. Jones (eds.), Business Historyaround the World.New York: Cambridge University Press.

CHANDLER, A. D. (1962). Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American IndustrialEnterprise.Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

- - (1977).The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolutionin AmericanBusiness.Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

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6 INTRODUCTION

FAURE,D.(2006).China and Capitalism: A History of Business Enterprise in Modern China.

Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

FLEMING, G., MERRETT, D., and VILLE, S. (2004). TheBig End of Town: Big Business and Corporate Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

KWOLEK-FoLLAND, A. (1998).Incorporating Women: A Historyof Women and Business in the UnitedStates.New York: Twayne.

TAYLOR, G. D., and BASKERVILLE, P. A. (1994).A Concise History of Business in Canada.

Toronto: Oxford University Press.

TIGNOR, R. 1. (2007). «The Business Firm inAfrica". Business HistoryReview,81/1,p. 87-110. TRIPATHI, D. (2004). TheOxfordHistoryof Indian Business.New Delhi: Oxford University

Press.

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PA R T I

APPROACHES

AND DEBATES

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CHAPTER 2 BUSINESS HISTORY

AND HISTORY

PATRICK FRIDENSON

2.1 INTRODUCTION

BUSINESS history as a specific field was not born inside the historical profession.

Itappeared in the United States at Harvard Business School in 1927.N. S.B. Gras held the first chair in business history. There is no doubt that the funding for this position came in reaction to the "muckraking" critiques that had dominated public discourse since the turn of the century in order to promote a positive view of the business world (Tedlow 1985).Very early the new field attracted attention elsewhere. The new and innovative French historical journal the Annales,founded by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in 1929, carried an article by Gras as early as January

1931.Marc Bloch had been in contact with Gras in1929suggesting the foundation of an ''American Annales" (Harvey 2004). Under the modest title, "Business and Business History", the American historian suggested that the young subdiscipline should expand globally and enrich historical knowledge. However, these hopes of internationalization would be fulfilled only after World War II. Today business history has indeed become universal. For quite a while, however, and in spite of the initial support from the Annales,the value and methods of business history were questioned by many historians-first by economic historians and later by others. At the same time, the fact that business history could be taught in departments other than history, mostly business administration and economics, meant that its practitioners could come from these very disciplines and that research and teaching

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10 APPROACHES AND DEBATES

in business history brought them in contact with the trends at work in the historical profession.

The purpose of this chapter is to assess the results of this double process for a field which is thus steeped in two worlds: inside history and outside history. What has business history brought to historians? What have historians brought to business history? This will lead to a third question: how do business historians fare within the historical profession?

2.2 THE IMPACT OF BUSINESS HISTORY

2.2.1

An

Array

of New

Sources

The growth of business history has enriched the repertory of sources in three sig-nificant ways. From the 1950S business history has been one of the pioneering forces for oral history. The 150 life stories ofFord Motor Company managers and employ-ees gathered by the American historian Allan Nevins and his team as one of the foundations for their three-volume history of the firm was a path-breaking event (Nevins with Hill 1954-63). They helped to make oral history credible. Business history never fell into the religious wars that general history fought from the 1970S onward about the validity of such sources (Descamps 2001). Business historians have known from the start that they had to apply the same critical stance to oral evidence as to other sources. They began to think about the role of memory in shaping the recollections they gathered and about the role of the historian in the construction of oral testimony. At the same time they became conscious that the historian when doing oral history is not in the same position as in a library or in an archival depot. He or she is playing a social role and becomes involved in a web of expectations and relationships. Oral history has become a standard practice in business history for the study of the zoth and zist centuries to an extent that is still unrivaled in most other parts of the historical profession.

Business archives and those of related institutions (like chambers of commerce or trade associations) have gradually been visited by historians in pursuit of more gen-eral themes. For example, a French historian has shown that in the first half of the 19th century the Paris Chamber of Commerce was a major site for the elaboration and discussion of economic knowledge and in some cases more important than universities or engineering schools (Lemercier 2003).AnAmerican historian was able to analyze the rebuilding of continental "bourgeois Europe" in the aftermath ofWorld War I and in an age of inflation by tapping the resources ofleading Italian, German, and French companies' archives to check the actions and representations

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BUSINESS HISTORY AND HISTORY 11

of business leaders in relation to other leaders and to the masses (Maier1975).

A British historian changed the understanding of the French Popular Front by showing that the surprise expressed by the business and government negotiators after the Matignon Agreement on June 7,1936was a pure legend deliberately fab-ricated in order to justify their respective concessions and that the bargaining had been prepared by secret contacts (Rossiter1987).

Products, artifacts, machines, buildings-in short material culture-have been used quite early and extensively as sources by business historians. This interest in material culture was also motivated by a growing relationship between business history and history of technology. Gradually business historians have learned to act as antiquarian engineers and to carry out close studies of the three-dimensional objects themselves. In this manner, business historians have been part and parcel of the move that led from industrial archaeology to industrial heritage (Chapman and Chambers 1970). It should immediately be added that they were not the only ones. In Sweden the initiative came in the 1970Sfrom workers, with the movement "Dig where you stand". Ten thousand groups of "barefoot researchers" studied the history of their. own jobs and workplaces.It was the starting point for similar activitiesin other countries like Canada or Germany (Thompson and Burchardt1982).

2.2.2

The Return of the Actors

After the end of World War II, historical research became dominated by what could be termed anonymous forces. There was the spread of the economic history of prices and, in parallel, of crises, both of which had begun in the 1930Sand em-phasized the role of the conjuncture. There was Fernand Braudel's flamboyant geo-history, which focused on space, cultural areas, and climate. Marxism, influential not only in Eastern Europe but also in Japan, gave priority to macro-categories like capital, profit, rent, labor. and wages. Economics, fueled by macroeconomics, played a similar part with such concepts as growth, development, and take-off. In Latin America at the time, development and underdevelopment were the only questions raised by historians. On top of this came the impact of theoretical approaches which became influential in the 1960s such as modernization theory versus diometrics in the US and structuralism in Europe. In this context the works of business historians worldwide, even when they were centered on the firm and not the entrepreneur, helped to provide an alternative to the structuralist or macro approach which grew and came to dominate not only economic history, but most of the social sciences. Here actors never disappeared, even when they were usu-ally limited to three categories: owners, entrepreneurs, and managers. When the structuralist and macro approaches broke down at the end of the 1970S,business historians were ready for the new trend, often termed the return of the actors.

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But in fact what they had to offer to other historians was a qualified return of the actors. This can be shown by looking at two of their main concepts: decision and strategy. Decision in business was not a spasm of the free and voluntary actor, as in political, military, or religious history. It was a process-a continuum of reflections, projects, conflicts, and compromises. Such an approach is exemplified in the book of the Japanese business historian Akio Okochi,Management in Vi-sion. The Entrepreneurs: How they Make Decisions(approximate translation of the Japanese title; Okochi1979).A major qualification has been added by the historical alternatives approach jointly introduced20years ago by Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin (Zeitlin, this volume). In particular, it showed that for any given problem in business there was no automatic solution, or no "one best way" as American consultant Frederick W. Taylor would have put it, but always a choice between two or several possibilities. This was a major blow against historical determinism and functionalism. The time was gone when leading economic historians like Francois Crouzet could explain the First Industrial Revolution in Britain by the exhaustion of British forests as a source of energy. This approach even cautioned business his-torians against the seductions of the models of irreversibility and path-dependence later successfully devised by economist W. Brian Arthur and economic historian Paul David (Arthur1994;David1997).Actors and organizations were not trapped for eternity within their walls. There could be periods and conditions when viable alternatives could be designed and tested. Later,in a second step, business historians showed that, even with the emphasis on the possibility of choice just hinted at, such deliberation about alternatives could not always explain the outcome. There were major cases where a gap could be identified between the available options as presented in written and oral sources and the final decision (Lamoreaux2001).Itis arguable that, in conjunction with the works of political scientists, these approaches have modified to a certain extent the view of decision making in other fields of history.

Even more influential was the concept of strategy. Reinvented in 1962by the American business historian AlfredD.Chandler (Chandler1962), a strategy char-acterized "the determination of fundamental long term goals for an enterprise, the adoption of action goals and the allocation of the necessary resources". The long-term vision was defined by a leading group of entrepreneurs, managers, and owners to select technology, markets, and institutional adaptations in order to improve performance. It was inscribed in organizational structures. Companies were institutions with goals.Itmeant that companies were not simply opportunistic or adapting to external change. They would be rational actors, behaving func-tionally in relation to their resources, previous experiences, and competitors, by mobilizing their current or potential assets and assessing their short-term results in connection with their view of the future. In other words, organizations were ruled by inertia and a change in strategy would appear only when the environment modified itself, including the eruption of crises. In European history, the concept

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of strategy became all the more popular as the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu defined it in1972in rather similar terms for both individuals and social groups, to the point that he lauded Chandler's analyses in one of his last books (Bourdieu 2005).But historical sociology (Freeland2001)has recently challenged some major bases of this approach, as it mobilized first-hand material on "furious conflicts" between owners and top management of corporations and stressed the dangers of "overlooking the social and nonrational bases of corporate governance': a scholarly result that historians of non-economic types of organizations should bear in mind.

2.2.3

From Economic to Political

Crises

The analysis of decision and ofstrategy by business historians brought nothing new to historians in terms of the different dimensions and scales of time, compared to Braudel's conceptualization ranging from market time to longueduree,which has still to be replaced. Nor did it alter historians' established understanding of crises. Accordingly, although regularly confronted with the manifestations of various types of crises in the firms that they research, business historians interpreted them either as accidents or as effects of the conjuncture and the external environment or as consequences of "erroneous strategic choices". Indeed, there is no entry for crisis in the index of the recent survey edited by Amatori and Jones(2003).

Yet it should be immediately observed that in studying one type of crisis-wars-business historians, often after a period of hesitation, finally did remarkably well. Just as a French Prime Minister observed in World War I that war is too serious a business to be left to generals, it is also too serious to be left to military historians. The history of armament firms-such as Putilov in Russia, Vickers in Britain, Krupp in Germany, Schneider in France, and Ansaldo in Italy-has at-tracted many business historians. One now classical approach deals with how these firms pioneer technologies that then become civilian and thus dual (Fridenson

2004a). For the United States, David Hounshell, building on the earlier work of historians of technology (Smith 1977), has argued that the fountainhead of mass production was US government armories, driven by the "technological enthusiasm" of engineers "heedless of cost" (Hounshell1984).But one of his colleagues, Donald Hoke, has replied that the American system of manufactures had also another origin, via cost-conscious private entrepreneurs (Hoke1990). A similar argument to Hounshell's has been presented for France: the search for interchangeable parts began there, in the lateisthcentury, with military engineers (Alder1997).As the Italian case in particular shows (Segreto1997),armament companies establish webs of connections with government and public agencies as wellas with political parties. Their engineers and workers often enjoy a specific status. They playa specific part in national economic development and in international relations. The taxation of war profits is a highly contentious issue which may take many years to settle.

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The regulation of the international arms trade since the end of World War II is of major importance in scientific, economic, and political terms, as recent works on COCOM have begun to show. To quote Luciano Segreto, business historians are tracking the affairs of no less than two Roman gods, Mars and Mercury. Beyond firms specializing in armament, the outbreak of war extends this orientation to formerly civilian firms. This is a particularly complex task for multinationals. Here the work of the American historian of multinationals Mira Wilkins should be mentioned. In her pioneering history of Ford as a multinational (Wilkins and Hill

1964),she was the first to show what could happen in the subsidiaries of the same multinational situated in enemy nations. More generally, business historians were able to show that wars could not be dealt with as simple parentheses in economic growth or as periods of destruction of lives, infrastructures, and capital. They are major episodes in the learning of people and organizations, in the modifications of their representations, in the change of their products, markets, and performances, and in networks and trade associations. They also matter in the renewal of business elites. In Japan and Germany a number of family dynasties were replaced by salaried managers, and this shift influenced the postwar boom (Morikawa1992;[oly1996).

The reconversion of war industries to peace production is often a source of crises. But it also creates incentives to transfer experts and skilled workers with advanced knowledge, like the Japanese military aircraft engineers whose capabilities have been revealed by business historians to have been key to the modernization of the postwar Japanese automobile industry. On a more dramatic issue, research on the expropriation of Jewish business property during World War II initiated by Swiss historians (Bergier 2002), soon followed by historians of other nations, greatly extended our understanding of the genocide as well as showing the dispersion of the size of such enterprises and also the courage of persecuted Jews.

Similarly, the significance of periods of dictatorship has become much better appreciated since business historians contributed to their approach. This includes China, Japan, Latin America, as well as Germany, Austria, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Greece.Italso includes Eastern Europe and Russia. The old question of financial support of authoritarian regimes by parts of business elites has found new exam-ples, but such studies generally showed that after the seizure of power, tensions and contradictions were inevitable between former partners because of the difference of agendas and horizons. They also indicated that authoritarian regimes nevertheless promoted state-owned enterprises and in some cases welcomed subsidiaries of multinational enterprises (Chick and Lanthier2004).In the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China, on the contrary, business historians demonstrated the perme-ability and subordination of state-appointed management to political representa-tives inside and outside (Cohen2004).

Another area where business history has illuminated major questions has been its contribution to understanding decolonization. The role of business enterprises in colonial and postcolonial English-speaking Africa has been upgraded, showing

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competition and conflict between colonial firms and local enterprises (Tignor

1998). In India, indigenous entrepreneurs were able to take over British firms long before the end of the British Empire and rapidly thereafter (Misra 1999).

In the French Empire large colonial firms struggled first against independence, but were flexible enough to anticipate decolonization and managed to stage their reconversion,i.e,stay afterwards and integrate the independent economies into the European economic space (Hodeir2003). But we do not yet have researches on the former French colonies' business people comparable to those already available on India or Nigeria.

2.2.4

The Dynamics of Change

But more generally history is par excellencefocused on the interpretation of change. I would like to sketch out various ways in which business historians have at-tempted to make a contribution to history in that perspective. Of course, this is an oversimplification as business history is never pure, but always impregnated by business administration, economics, sociology, political science, and today tempted by constructivist models.

Business history's input is rich and varied. First, no longer limiting itself to the study of headquarters devising strategies, products, and services top down and experiencing turning points, it highlights firms as organizations within which change takes place (Hounshell1984;Freeland2001;Tones2005b).Second, while of course most enterprises have not persisted, and many have split (as in India during the 20years after the 1947independence: Tripathi2004), business history depicts some enterprises as islands of relative stability on a sea of economic fluctuations and continuous market evolution.

Stability is presented as having two external sources. The first are national cul-tures, as reflected inside companies and in their relations with the outside world. In India the central role of families in society accounts for the predominance of family businesses and their remarkable durability (Dutta1997;Lachaier1999). In the Netherlands there is an emphasis on managers possessing an engineering or technical background and logic of mutual trust (Blanken1999). German business historians have been busy for30years investigating whether their society followed a specific path (Sonderweg) leading to a "Rhenish capitalism" connecting business, labor, and government. This approach may have some limitations in hiding intra-national contrasts and the multiple ways in which firms interpret the intra-national culture, as well as obscuring the openness of most national cultures to international influences and collaborations (Herrigel icco). However, its immediate effects are quite positive. It puts business historians on the path of comparative history. This is no small result. In 1928the French medieval historian Marc Bloch launched the first major call for comparative history. Its development was much slower than

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expected. Yet we should recognize that this is one of the areas in history where at least a fraction of business historians have been in the foreground. In Europe, America, and Japan during the past20 years more and more cross-national com-parisons and studies of national differences have been launched by single authors (see for instance Chandler1990; Welskopp1994; Cassis1997; or Jacoby2005) or by international teams. Binational firms (Jones2005b) or joint ventures have also attracted business historians' attention. A related issue is that of "collaborative cap-italism" (Sabel and Zeitlin2004). Such initiatives also find echoes among political economists, with the Varieties of Capitalism school (Hall and Soskice2001).

Another source of stability is, since the late ioth century, the growing use of management tools, from accounting ratios to communication systems, from mar-ket surveys to motivation studies and from operational research to total quality management (Yates1989; Shiomi and Wada1995).These invisible instruments are produced by engineers, accountants, consultants, and even academics. They are on the market. They embody knowledge. They crystallize information, experience, and innovation. They interlock managerial beliefs, technologies, and document types. Their introduction by companies with or without consultants, in their original form or in a modified version, is usually quite lengthy and complex and sometimes difficult (McKenna 2006). Their efficiency has an often unforeseen price: they solidify practices, relations, structures. They are initially loaded with meaning and contribute to motivate executives and employees, but gradually lose some of their significance and hence the institutions have to be recalibrated. Business history adds two caveats.These tools may be used as tricks to win the cooperation of managers to corporate policies (Freeland2001).Their stability may lead to obsolescence and thus to inaccurate information and misleading targets (Johnson and Kaplan1987).This approach has received interest on behalf of historians interested in regulation and who are looking to understand how rules come to be adopted and to be abandoned. It also draws the attention of historians of technology who focus more on visible instruments.

Stability is also ascribed by business historians to two types of internal causes. Firms, just like most other human organizations, are at one level physical and tech-nical spaces which ingrain their logic, their architecture and techtech-nical solutions, and their procedures and constraints. Historiansseethe competition between greenfield and brownfield plants. On another, more abstract level, business historians are all sensitive to the inertia of organizational systems. This approach puts them in contact with historians of political parties, bureaucracies, and churches. Together they disagree, however, with the sociology of organizations which believes that in such systems the initiative of the actors is marginal or peripheral.

Also, when business history depicts firms as agents of change, it produces three areas of possible encounters with other historians. One is the relation of tradition and change. Whereas previously business history just extolled innovation, new products, and services, if not new industries, in a quite Schumpeterian way, in

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recent yearsithas moved to a much greater consideration of tradition. "Traditional" industries have continued for a relatively long time. They can bring the profits necessary for investments in other fields and broaden markets. They can be carried on side by side with modern production for quite a while. Here Japanese business historians have been highly innovative by describing the potential of such neglected firms producing pottery, soy sauce, or refined sake thanks either to cottage industry or to modern manufacturing (Kasuya2004). Similarly, Swiss and French histori-ans have rehabilitated the potential of mountain-based traditional industries, like clock-making, founded upon agricultural solidarity and demand (Judet 2004). In the United States between the Civil War and World War I, specialty firms making goods to order or in batches-i.e. not featuring stadardized production-created regional synergies and economies of scope and diversity; they had a crucial impact on the development of the second industrial revolution (Scranton1997).Tradition in a specific firm may not necessarily be an obstacle to progress, but can be a point of departure for gradual change and for organizational learning. Here the pioneering three-volume work by Japanese historian You Nakanishi, which explores in great detail the shift in Nagasaki shipyards from traditional works to modern, presents a model study (Nakanishi1982-2003).

A further area where business history has stimulated interest among histori-ans is, by contrast, a negative vision of change-processes leading to the closing (or relocation) of companies, plants, offices and the discontinuation of products and services, even to the destruction of capital or know-how. Social, cultural, and political historians see their impact on employment, welfare, age structures, housing, education, votes, and cultural activities and explore the ways in which local communities in relation to local and national governments struggle between renewal and decay. Business historians who were previously seen by other historians as preaching the stability of the large corporation have become messengers of the importance of uncertainty and risk, hence of flexibility, in human actions. I have therefore recently argued that business failure has become a necessary dimension of the future of business history (Fridenson 2004b).

A third area is a positive view of change. This was already true of the picture of proto-industrialization that emerged from the works of economic historians. Business historians analyzing industrialization have either continued it by applying their lens to industrial districts past and present (Zeitlin, this volume) or have qualified it by emphasizing the role of the merchant economy in the first indus-trial revolution itself (Gervais2004).Furthermore innovation, usually building on the works of the economists and in particular a neo-Schumpeterian perspective, has been their leitmotiv. Business historians have shown the gaps and processes between projects and achievements and the many pitfalls that separate invention from marketable and profitable innovation, including innovation failures. They have stressed the available options: continuous improvement, repeated innova-tion, and breakthrough. They have related them to external institutions and to

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regulation. For instance, Akio Okochi (1992)focused on the invention of activities and connected their development to the patent system. Business historians readily extended the concept of innovation to human resource management, marketing, finance, and now sustainable development (see Graham, this volume). However, a few major points should be emphasized. What business history offers to other historians are patterns of how institutions overcome zones of tensions by ques-tioning prevailing schemes and by reconsidering initial, established knowledge. Change appears neither smooth nor quick nor entirely predictable. Learning is neither uniform nor memorized once for all, and relevant cognitive mechanisms are paramount. But change is more than a process of adaptation or of selection between available methods. When it is fulfilled, it amounts to no less than a process of creation. How much of such creations can be repeated, transferred, imitated, or hybridized remains one of the major topics of discussion in business history. Americanization of companies and nations or their Iapanization have given birth to a vast flow of literature (Harp 2001;Kleinschmidt 2002;Zeitlin and Herrigel zooo). Far from the unilateral views of either economists or political historians, business history has avoided the dual pitfalls of an analysis in terms of either progress or hegemony and exploitation. Keeping in mind the theme of unequal exchange, it has stressed the limits of foreign influence, the selectiveness of the transfers, the creativity of the adaptations, and even the existence of "crossings", i.e. transfers from the borrower to the other nation. Fruitful comparisons or connections are thus made possible with history of science and technology or with history of culture.

2.2.5 Society and Politics

Business history has opened research domains which were not really covered by other types of history. For instance, history of education, which has greatly ex-panded worldwide since World War II, had usually neglected the history of tech-nical and vocational training. In most countries this task was taken up by business historians in search of an understanding of labor markets and human resource management. Their position helped them to avoid two classical pitfalls, which would have been to underestimate the importance of self-taught people and of on the job training or to deduce from the contents taught what was the actual practice at work. Byilluminating the schools created by companies or by chambers of commerce at different levels of curricula, business historians showed companies as transmitters of knowledge and could cast new light on the competition or collab-oration between the business world and the education system, an alternative oflin-gering consequences which also helps historians to understand the shifting frontiers between private and public in industrial societies. In addition, business historians have been some of the prominent students in the history of business schools and

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BUSINESS HISTORY AND HISTORY 19 ---.---.----_.

of engineering schools. Their aim has been to understand the professionalization of managerial activities, thus giving rise to a dialogue with the social historians (and sociologists) interested in the genesis of professions and of professionalization in general. They were able to trace the development of new contents, like the entire field of marketing in business administration, and of new methods, like case studies, which the US exported globally. They shed light on the changes in comparative advantage such as France taking the lead in engineering schools and commerce schools in the early 19th century and then losing ground to German and American universities at the end of the same century. Or, to cite another example, smaller countries like Belgium or Norway pioneering relations between university and industry in the interwar years or after World War II (Bertrams 2006; Thelen, this volume; Amdam, this volume). In this respect business history, partly stimulated by Michael Porter's research on the "competitive advantage of nations" (Porter 1990), has made a distinctive contribution to the growing body of literature written by historians on the growth and decline of national power.

Similarly, the development of the history of medicine and health often ignored the history of work injuries and occupational illnesses. Although a few social his-torians and historical sociologists ventured into this area, it was mostly explored by a number of business historians. They highlighted the continuing importance of the problem for both individuals and families and even its contemporary re-crudescence. They also showed that the very idea of the ability to work was socially constructed between the stakeholders and how people could be excluded. They documented the difficult position of company physicians and the growth of er-gonomics. They underlined the spread of intermediate zones between activity and retirement: illness, invalidity, unemployment, and early retirement (Omnes and Bruno 2003). Thus business history stresses the importance of the history of the body, just like gender history or the history of medicine.

Along the same lines, the history of housing and architecture has benefited in recent years from the new interest of business historians who moved from the earlier study of company towns to national assessment of the importance of employers' housing efforts. Such works showed that the resources allocated were much higher than had been thought previously. They also depicted the specificities of migrant workers' housing policies and their consequences on their relationship with host countries' citizens. Finally,they suggested that any attempts by employers to keep workers' stability or even trust by providing housing seduced only a limited proportion of wage-earners. The majority preserved their autonomy.

If we now move from human capital to broader issues, business historians have been instrumental in delineating how companies contribute to the production of society. The work of the German historian Iurgen Kocka on the engineering company Siemens between 1847 and 1914 is particularly relevant here (Kocka 1969). It highlights the interaction of bourgeois society and the creation of the "modern" business organization. Contrary to flexible production systems, the family firm