Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-995ml Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-19T03:52:43.389Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Purposes and Practices in Firm-level History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2015

Abstract

Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2013. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved.

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. McPherson, James, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.Google Scholar

2. Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977 Google Scholar; 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 108, no. 2 (2003): 404–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Scranton, Philip, “Diversity in Diversity: Flexible Specialization and American Industrialization, 1880-1930,” Business History Review 65 (1991): 27–90 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865-1925, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997; Langlois, Richard N., “Modularity in Technology and Organization,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 49, no. 1 (2002): 19–37 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lazonick, William, Sustainable Prosperity in the New Economy?: Business Organization and High-Tech Employment in the United States, Kalamazoo: W. J. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For an exchange among Chandler, Langlois, and Lamoreaux, Raff, and Temin, see Enterprise and Society 5, no. 3 (2004): 355–403 and 6, no. 1 (2005): 134–37.

3. Galambos, Louis, “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History,” Business History Review 44, no. 3 (1970): 279–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Technology, Political Economy, and Professionalization: Central Themes of the Organizational Synthesis,” Business History Review 57, no. 4 (1983): 471–93; and “Recasting the Organizational Synthesis: Structure and Process in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries,” Business History Review 79, no. 1 (2005): 1–38.

4. Except maybe for Steven Klepper, the most radical evolutionist and indefatigable researcher among us, who has authored a pathbreaking series of authoritative studies on firm entry and exit in automobiles and other industrial sectors; cf. his “Entry, Exit, Growth, and Innovation over the Product Life Cycle,” The American Economic Review 86, no. 3 (June 1996): 562–83.

5. Lipartito, Kenneth, “Rethinking the Invention Factory: Bell Laboratories in Perspective,” in The Challenge of Remaining Innovative: Insights from Twentieth-Century American Business, eds. Clarke, Sally H., Lamoreaux, Naomi R., and Usselman, Steven W., Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009, 132–59.Google Scholar

6. McKenna, Christopher, “Mementos: Looking Backward at the Honda Motorcycle Case, 2003–1973,” in Clark, Lamoreaux, and Usselman, , The Challenge of Remaining Innovative, 219–39.Google Scholar See also his, The World’s Newest Profession: Management Consulting in the Twentieth Century, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

7. The anecdotes and observations that follow draw primarily upon Usselman, Steven W., “Learning the Hard Way: IBM and the Sources of Innovation in Early Computing,” in Financing Innovation in the United States, 1870 to the Present, eds. Lamoreaux, Naomi R. and Sokoloff, Kenneth L., Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2007, 317–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Unbundling IBM: Antitrust and the Incentives to Innovation in American Computing,” in The Challenge of Remaining Innovative, eds Clark, Lamoreaux, and Usselman, 249–79.

8. Usselman, Steven W., “IBM and Its Imitators: Organizational Capabilities and the Emergence of the International Computer Industry,” Business and Economic History 22, no. 2 (1993): 1–35.Google Scholar

9. Norberg, Arthur Lawrence, Computers and Commerce: A Study of Technology and Commerce at Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company, Engineering Research Associates, and Remington Rand, 1946–1957, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.Google Scholar

10. McCraw, Thomas K, American Business Since 1920: How It Worked, 2d ed., Wheeling, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, 2009.Google Scholar

11. For a recent synthesis focused explicitly on this theme, see “Introduction,” in The Challenge of Remaining Innovative, eds. Clark, Lamoreaux, and Usselman, 1–35.