Business History in The United States At The End Of The Twentieth Century
The History of Business history
Business history in the united states at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first is simultaneously thriving and strungling with itsidentity.There are clear signs of vigor, including a rising membership in the major professional organization in the field, BHC (Business History Conference).
The organization recently launched a new quarterly professional journals;
• Enterprise & Society
• Economic and Business Historical Society.
There are also some signs of stress, including a growing debate among business historians over the future direction of the field.
Business history has grown tremendously in recent years, not only in terms of the number of scholar interested in the subject but also in academic structure
Alfred D. Chandler has dominated the field over the past several decades.But, business history, of course, is more than Chandler.But thought business historians are doing exciting new work, there is no consensus about which way the field should be headed in the twenty-first century.
The Economic History Association (EHA) lists 1,242 members, over twice the membership of the BHC.
To examine the state of business history in the United States at the end of the twentieth century, we must get down to basics and ask a few questions about business history.These are;
• Where have we come from?
• What are its practitioners saying about the future of business history?
• Who is currently doing business history, and what are they doing ?
The ebating the future of business history, can perhaps best be expressed as questions;
• What þs relationship between economic history and business history?
• Should a particular theory from the basis of analysis in business history?
Although both economic and business history trace their roots to German and English scholarship in the ninetennth century, business history as a distinct area of study was born at the Harward Business Scholl in the mid 1920s. From the beginning, the economic historian Edwin F. Gray and his student, Gras, the first Straus professor of Business History at the school. Gay and other economic historians at the time believed that business history should contribute to the synthetic view of economic history.
After strating discussing in World War II, historians were an obvious source of potential support because they are always looking for new themes and new sources of study. Business can be put alongside politics, religion, education, and recreation as component parts of life.
Economic historians, of course, were not much better than economist, because the economic historian often takes his clue from the economist and therefore has no clear vision of the importance of the busines man.
Ýn 1948, Henrita Larson published the Guide Business History, and than she said : to many persons it is not yet clear how business history differs from economic history. After that , she argued that Gras viewed business history as a new and separate field, descended from economic history but not a branch of economic history.
She continued in this very rich vein, arguing that the business historian recognizes the business man as more then an economic man: all sþdes of his nature have a bearing on business and should be considered by the historian.
According to Arthur Johnson, it was agreed that business history was not just companu history, although it was essential that the institutions, instrument and processes of business, the firm or the businessman, defined in broad terms and many relationships remain a focal point. Cochran commented that in order to recruit first-class business historians, it was necessary to make the history of business an integral part of general history.
By 1967, Louis Galambos noted, ,n the first of several historiographical essays, that Chandler was pursuing another new approach to research in the field.
By Galambos, the visible Hand was published in 1977, and he wrote that this book had revitalized business history, in part by generatin fruitful intersections between the subdisciplines and the history of technology, the analsis of economic growth, and the economics of the firm.After that, Chandler's reputation continued to grow, to the extent that "non-Chandlerian approaches to the history of American business came to seem out-of-date.
Nobody familiar with the field would challenge Galambos' recent and straitforward statement that the dominant paradigm in business history has for many years been the synthesþs developed by Alfred Chandler. John' s purpose was to assess the impact of Chandler' s The Visible Hand on scholarship in American history, but he actually went well beyond this.
Chandler has prodeced a large body of work that has developed and elaborated a consistent theme. These are;
• Visible Hand (1977)
• Strategy and Structure (1962)
• Scale and Scope (1990)
William Lazonick and Leslie Hannah, both critics of the neoclasical model but with training in economics, tend to have their work cited in a blend of history, economics, and, to a lesser extent, sociology and business journals.
Even business historians less explicitly indebted to Chandler, like Philip Scranton and Roger Horowitz in their summation of trends at the Hagley's future of business history conference, implicitly use his work as a point of departure.
Richard John focuses his attention on the many imaginative historians who have adopted revised or rejected Chandler' smanagerial thesis. He devises these into 3 categories :
• Champions : who elaborate on and share Chandler' s basic approach
• Critics: who probe anomalies between Chandler' s framework and their own
• Skeptics: who challenge Chandler' s basic assumptions and reject his argument
Althought Jhon and Galambos use different categories and employ different criteria to determine whose work fallls into those categories, both measure the work of business historians in relatioan to Chandler's paradigm, whether their work uses the paradigm, tries to modify it, or attemps to shift business history away from it.
Philip Scranton and Roger .horowitz detected four broad themes, these are:
• Entreprencurial dynamics
• Culture
• The exploration of the boundaries of the firm
• Intense
Mansel Blackford, Wayne Brachl, Thomas Mccraw propose relatively conservative modifications to the Chandlerian tradition.
William Lazonick who was president BHC in 1991 argued that business historians can help economists understand how the economy works, but said that if business history is to have an impact on economics, our comprehension of history needs to be diffused to economists.
However, publications in major journals and presentations at major conferences suggest that the field may be more unified than some of its practitioners perceive it to be. Despite business historians' diverse attitudes toward Chandler's work whether to use Jhon's categories, they are champ,ons, critics, or skeptics that work continues to provide a focus and, just as important, an appeal and a usefulness to very broad audience.
As business historians respond to the specific trends in their constituent fields, they must be aware that if they respond only to those fields, they risk narrowing their audience and stifling the open, challenging, and broad based cross-disciplinary discussions that kept the field vital, expanding, and responsive at the end of the twentieth century.
