Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-r6qrq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T12:33:35.534Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

From Firm to Networked Systems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Thomas P. Hughes
Thomas P. Hughes
Affiliation:
THOMAS P. HUGHES is Mellon Professor of the History and Sociology of Science, Emeritus, at theUniversity of Pennsylvaniaand Distinguished Visiting Professor at MIT.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Because of Alfred D. Chandler Jr.'s widely influential books and articles, historians of management and of business have often taken a firm, especially a manufacturing firm, as their unit of analysis. Despite its usefulness as an organizing concept, the firm-based approach does not take into consideration the management of networked systems, which have spread widely and posed major managerial challenges in recent decades. In the following essay, I shall compare the firm and the networked-systems approaches, but first I should stress that I am not dealing with networked systems in general, which are numerous and vary greatly in form. My attention, instead, is focused upon networked electric-power systems.

Type
Articles
Information
Business History Review , Volume 79 , Issue 3 , Autumn 2005 , pp. 587 - 593
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Based on a discussion with Richard John, who is working on a history of telephony in the United States.

2 Hughes, Thomas P., Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore, 1983, 1993), 201–26Google Scholar.

3 See my essay in The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, eds. Bijker, Wiebe E., Hughes, Thomas P., and Pinch, Trevor J. (Cambridge, Mass., 1987)Google Scholar.

4 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977)Google Scholar; and Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1990)Google Scholar.

5 Lamoreaux, Naomi R., Raff, Daniel M. G., and Temin, Peter, “Beyond Markets and Hierarchies: Toward a New Synthesis of American Business History,” American Historical Review 106 (April 2003): 404–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Hughes, Networks of Power, 201–26.

7 Singer, Bayla, “Power to the People: The Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland Interconnection, 1925–1970” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1983)Google Scholar.

8 Hughes, Networks of Power, 331–34.

9 For more on the complicated history of EBASCO, see Networks of Power, 395–400.

10 Kessler, Harry Graf, Walther Rathenau: His Life and Work (New York, 1969), 96Google Scholar.

11 Rathenau, Walther, Zur Kritik der Zeit (Berlin, 1919), 58Google Scholar.

12 Ibid, [translated from the German], 13.