Towards a new business history?

Abstract

This article calls for a discussion about business history research. We advocate that the current typical approach in business history – dominantly case study analysis – maintains its prominent position, but the purpose and relevance of this type of research in the scientific method for business history is made more explicit. Moreover, the article proposes the application of additional approaches in business history, which specifically aim to develop theory and test hypotheses. These approaches are well established in the social sciences, but require adaptation to the particular needs of business history. The purpose of this article is to argue that opportunities for scientific explanations in business history are enhanced by engagement with the circle of knowledge creation where theory is confronted with empirical evidence and empirical observations feed back into theory formation.

Keywords::

• history
• business

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge comments by Andrea Colli, Joost Jonker, Jeroen Kuilman, Keetie Sluyterman, an anonymous referee, and participants of the workshop on alternative business historical research (York, May 2012) and of the session on new business history of the EBHA meeting (Paris, August 2012). We claim full responsibility for the contents of the article.

Notes

^1.Jones and Zeitlin, “Introduction,” 1.

^2. See Moore and Reid, “The Birth”; and the special issue of Business History 53 no. 1, 2011, on European Business Models.

^3. See http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show = aimsScope&journalCode = fbsh20; http://www.hbs.edu/businesshistory/publications-business-history-review.html, and http://es.oxfordjournals.org/, visited on October 23, 2013.

^4.Wilson and Toms, “Business History.”

^5.Friedman and Jones, “Business History,” 2.

^6. Ibid.

^7. See Hidy, “Business History”; Jones, van Leeuwen, and Broadberry, “The Future”; Rowlinson and Hassard, “Historical Neo-institutionalism;” Rowlinson, Hassard and Decker, “Research Strategies”; and several contributions to Bucheli and Wadhwani (eds.), Organizations in Time. Furthermore, Raff, “How to do Things” discusses issues concerning sample selection in business history and proposes a forward-looking perspective. His suggestion is a very specific methodological contribution to the debate on business history methods.

^8. See Jones and Khanna, “Bringing History”; O'Sullivan and Graham, “Moving Forward”; Wilson and Toms, “Business History”; Toms and Wilson, “Economic History”; Friedman and Jones, “Business History”; Rowlinson and Hassard, “Historical Neo-institutionalism.”

^9. See e.g. de Goey, “Ondernemersgeschiedenis.”

^10.Ashton, An Eighteenth Century Industrialist, ix.

^11. , Courtaulds Vol. 1 and 2; Payne, Colvilles; Wilson, A History of Unilever.

^12.Aldcroft, The Development; McCloskey and Sandberg, “From Damnation.”

^13.Payne, British Entrepreneurship, 48.

^14. , Strategy and Structure and The Visible Hand.

^15.Elbaum and Lazonick, The Decline.

^16.Toms and Wilson, “Scale, Scope, and Accountability.”

^17. Hidy, “Business History,” 494.

^18.Jones et al., “The Future,” 230.

^19. The reason for including two years for the period around 1970 was the limited number of articles published annually by the two journals combined at the time. For the sake of convenience we will speak of two reference years in the text, 1970 and 2012, with ‘1970’ referring to 1970/1971.

^20. The complete data set with the coding of the 127 articles is available upon request from the corresponding author.

^21.Eloranta, Jari, and Valtonen, “Are Business Historians Quantitatively Illiterate?,” 88.

^22. Rowlinson and Hassard, “Historical Neo-institutionalism,” 118–119.

^23. In other words, these statistics did no involve econometric analyses of time series.

^24. This excludes unpublished serials such as annual reports and balance sheets.

^25. Of course, as a rule, only authors studying the recent past will be able to draw upon oral sources.

^26. See e.g. Bedeian, “Exploring the Past.”

^27.Hannah, “New Issues,” 167.

^28.Popp, “History,” 834.

^29.Byrne and Ragin, The Sage Handbook

^30.Morck and Yeung, “History in Perspective” and “Economics, History and Causation.”

^31.Landes, The Unbound Prometheus; Payne, Colvilles. We are using ‘failed’ in a strictly economic sense – i.e, for example, that the British economy ‘failed’ to grow as fast as its resources permitted.

^32.Habakkuk, American and British Technology.

^33.Freeland, The Struggle for Control.

^34.Drucker, Concept of the Corporation; Chandler, Strategy and Structure.

^35. Freeland, The Struggle for Control, 322.

^36. Ibid., 323.

^37. , Markets and Hierarchies (quotation on 145) and The Economic Institutions.

^38. Freeland, The Struggle for Control, 321.

^39. Ibid.

^40. Byrne and Ragin, The Sage Handbook.

^41.Fiss, “A Set-theoretic Approach.”

^42.Mahoney, Kimball, and Koivu, “The Logic”; Dul and Hak, Case Study Methodology, Chapter 5.

^43.Homburg and Bucerius, “Is Speed.”

^44. Regulatory asymmetry refers to regulation which applies differently to new or foreign firms, versus established or local enterprises. Kock and Guillén, “Strategy and Structure,” 94.

^45. Kock and Guillén, “Strategy and Structure,” 97.

^46. Ibid., 96.

^47. See Byrne and Ragin, The Sage Handbook; Ragin, The Comparative Method; Rihoux and Ragin (eds.), Configurational Comparative Methods.

^48. Kogut and Ragin, “Exploring Complexity.”

^49. Ibid., 49.

^50. A reduced form equation expresses an endogenous variable solely in terms of predetermined variables and stochastic disturbances. Generally, endogenous variables are the equivalent of the dependent variable in single equation regression models, and exogenous variables are the regressors in such models (Gujarati, Basic Econometrics, 737–738).

^51. See, for example, Gujarati, Basic Econometrics for a general discussion of econometric modeling. Morck and Yeung, “Economics, History and Causation” explicitly discuss the shortcomings in econometric analysis in history.

^52. See Hulland, “Use of Partial Least Squares” for examples.

^53.Wold, “Partial Least Squares”; Vinzi, Chin, Henseler, and Wang, Handbook of Partial Least Squares.

^54. Jonsson and Lindbergh investigate the effects of institutional impediments – a concept building on Fligstein's work – on investments using LISREL. Two questions in a survey measure these impediments and two other questions measure investments. A LISREL model is estimated on a sample of 233 small Swedish firms in order to describe the validity of the two questions for each variable as well as the relation between the variables. See Jonsson and Lindbergh, “The Impact.”

^55.Marquis, “The Pressure of the Past.”

^56. Ibid., 660.

^57. Ibid.

^58. Ibid., 661.

^59. Ibid., 665.

^60. Ibid., 674.

^61.Carroll and Hannan, The Demography; Baum and Shipilov, “Ecological Approaches.”

^62. Baum and Shipilov, “Ecological Approaches,” 55–56.

^63.Hannan and Freeman, “Structural Inertia.”

^64. Carroll and Hannan, The Demography, 6.

^65. Baum and Shipilov, “Ecological Approaches,” 100.

^66. Carroll and Hannan, The Demography, 245.

^67. Baum and Shipilov, “Ecological Approaches,” 100.

^68.Hannan and Baron, “Organizational Blueprints.”

^69. Ibid., 32.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Abe de Jong

Abe de Jong is a Professor of Corporate Finance and Corporate Governance at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and a Professor of Financial Reporting at the University of Groningen.

David Michael Higgins

David Higgins is a Professor of Finance and Accounting in the Accounting and Finance group at Newcastle University Business School.

Hugo van Driel

Hugo van Driel is an Assistant Professor of Business History at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University.