Josiah Wedgwood, business history, and our modes of enquiry

Abstract

Taking its departure in the correspondence of eighteenth-century entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood, focusing on his development and use of two field-based metaphors or heuristics, this article explores two modes of enquiry employed in business history and argues for the maintenance and strengthening of ties to humanistic modes of historical enquiry. In doing so, the essay identifies a loose genre of agenda-setting books and articles within business history, to which it seeks to add a modest proposal.

Keywords:

• Josiah Wedgwood
• boundaries
• metaphors
• business history
• social sciences
• humanities

Prologue

I wish briefly to explain the purpose of this essay, which has its origins in a keynote address given at the 2023 annual meeting of the Association of Business Historians.¹ Like that keynote, it takes its point of departure in the conference’s call for papers, which advocated for business history to push its boundaries and to consider the possibility of business history beyond the discipline, urging us ‘assess the extent to which the discipline ought to be more ambitious in developing its research agendas’, and to extend the ‘barriers that have limited business history’s potential to influence the world around us’. The call, as calls so often do, sought to be agenda-setting, looking to the future to map and select – or recommend, at least – between various possible paths available to the discipline of business history. As is probably true for all disciplines, business history has seen numerous attempts at agenda-setting over the years. Each has occurred at a particular disciplinary and contextual juncture. This one occurs as the bifurcation between business history as practiced in history departments and as practiced in business schools continues, perhaps approaching the point at which it will become unbridgeable. It also occurs in a moment in which history (and the humanities more generally) appears to be in existential crisis.

How did I respond to the call? The emphasis on boundaries, barriers, and fields in the call immediately resonated with work I am pursuing on potter Josiah Wedgwood’s thought as it related to nature and natural resources. As a self-taught ‘natural philosopher’ and entrepreneur who worked with a wide, varied, and sometimes fickle selection of natural resources, particularly clays, coal, and minerals, brought together in unstable processes that were yet only partially understood, Wedgwood thought and wrote a great deal about the natural world and what it offered in the pursuit of human flourishing.

My interest in this topic was originally kindled by a fascination with a set of images of fields and boundaries that Wedgwood developed and used in correspondence with his friend and partner Thomas Bentley. From what were they derived and how were they used? Repeated reading in the correspondence has led me to divide these field images into two sub-sets. These sub-sets are, I believe, best thought of as representing two contrasting field-based metaphors. I will introduce and explain these field-based metaphors shortly. I believe that Wedgwood used these metaphors as tools or heuristic devices for thinking about and making sense of the challenging experiences of being an entrepreneur and innovator. I cannot here do full justice to the richness of these tools for thinking and how they related to the wider contexts – intellectual, scientific, technological, cultural, or socio-economic – within which they developed.

In this essay, I build on Wedgwood’s contrasting field metaphors to think about the field of business history, its boundaries, and its practices. Specifically, I want to transpose and apply Wedgwood’s field metaphors to ways of thinking about two basic modes of enquiry at this moment of potential bifurcation in the discipline of business history. To foreshadow the argument, I see one of these modes of enquiry as social scientific in orientation, and the other as humanistic. Which we choose may not alter the problems that we select to study but will shape our fundamental orientation towards those problems, with implications for epistemology, sources, methods, and conclusions. I will illustrate by considering a key problematic of urgent currency, business and sustainability, through a lens suggested by Wedgwood’s field metaphors, asking how the contrasting modes of enquiry suggest varying approaches to the issue. This essay thus originates in a sympathetic response to the agenda-­setting appeal of the call that formed my first point of departure. Its purpose is to identify and appraise two modes of inquiry available to the field, considering also the implications of the choices we make between them. I do not seek to set yet another agenda myself, but to propose tools or instruments with which we might navigate some of the choices facing us.

Before continuing I wish to very briefly address two issues: subject and structure. My subject, Josiah Wedgwood, was one of the most prominent actors in the British industrial revolution of the eighteenth century. He was a polymath of enormous abilities and achievements who had a dramatic impact on the pottery industry of his native Staffordshire. His appeal is great, and he has been the subject of many business histories and biographies. In his very extensive correspondence, he also left an almost unmatched testament to the process and historical experience of entrepreneurship. It is this that recommends him to me for the task I have set myself.

As we shall see, the second of Wedgwood’s two field-based metaphors drew on images of unboundedness in which experiences of discovery were inherent. Without overclaiming, I want discovery to be inherent to the experience of reading. Neither the path nor the destination is always in sight, least of all at the beginning. Nonetheless, I have given careful consideration to the structure of my developing argument.

I

On the 7 March 1774, Josiah Wedgwood wrote to his partner, Thomas Bentley, to relate how he had:

for some time past been reviewing my experiments, & I find such Roots, such Seeds as would open & branch out wonderfully if I could nail myself down to the cultivation of them for a year or two … These are a few of the Roots which have been selected, & put into a state of cultivation. (2011b, p. 65)

This theme of cultivation was not new in Wedgwood’s correspondence with Bentley. In early 1865, he had written to thank Bentley him for his:

goodness in lead^g me into the improvmts of the manufacture I am engaged in, and [in] patronizing those improvem^ts you have encouraged me to attempt, … With such inducemts to industry in my calling, if [I] do not outstrip my fellows, it must be oweing either to great want of Genius, or application. (2011a, p. 30)

And again, in August 1767, Josiah wrote to report that:

Many of my experiments turn out to my wishes, & convince me more & more of the extensive Capability of our Manufacture for further improvements. It is at present (comparatively) in a rude, uncultivated state, & may easily be polished and brot. to much greater perfection. Such a revolution, I believe, is at hand, & you must assist in … [and] proffitt by it. (2011a, p. 165)

These letters speak directly to perennial, almost timeless business concerns: competition, choice and action, profit. In so writing, Wedgwoods also expressed his ambitions, drives, and motivations, as well as strong and unabashed belief in his character and capabilities. He was not afraid to admit to genius.

But in writing of these perennial topics, he also wrote from deep within his own place in the world; from a particular society, culture, and economy, precisely located in time and space. In writing to make sense of his experience of being an inventor, innovator, and entrepreneur, he made use of metaphors and analogies drawn from the mental maps available to him in that place and time. Time and again he chooses imagery and terms derived from agriculture and, particularly the drive for ‘improvements’ that impelled both the enclosure movement and the agricultural revolution, almost a compulsion to extract more from nature’s previously latent, uncultivated potential. Of course, enclosure and improvement were deeply implicated in each other; improvement and cultivation demanded first enclosure. Enclosure within boundaries, within fields.

Images and metaphors of fields abound in Wedgwood’s writings, both in his correspondence with Bentley and elsewhere. Here is one characteristic example, chosen for its representativeness and its succinctness, written at the opening of one of the books in which he recorded his experiments:

I saw the [industrial] field was spacious, and the soil so good, as to promise an ample recompense to any who should labour diligently in its cultivation. (Uglow, 2011, p. 78)

Let us listen carefully to his words and how they position him vis-à-vis this industrial field that awaits his labour, his cultivation, his extraction and exploitation, that will deliver his recompense, his profit. He imagines himself seeing the field, looking down and out across it, up to it to its edges. He surveys it.

Across eighteenth-century England, surveyors were busy. In 1700, much of the country was still farmed under the ancient open field system. By 1800 or 1850 most of that system had been erased, written over by a dense scribble of boundaries marked by fences, hedges, and walls and rendered legible by lines on maps and deeds and other legal documents (the agricultural revolution was matched by a cartographical revolution in the second half of the eighteenth-century. Harley, 1965). Above all, the work of surveyors renders land as property, alienable and saleable. Such demarcations and effects even extended below the surface, carving up mineral rights rendered infinitely more valuable by encroaching industrialisation. All were to be recruited into a virtuous circle of improvement and growing wealth, whereby:

Trade, by bartering manufactures for food, the labour of the hand for the fruits of earth, will to an inconceivable degree superadd population to a well cultivated country. An increase of opulence as well as of people attends an increase of trade; as our own, & every other commercial nation evinces; and therefore whatever facilitates our trade, & has a tendency to increase it, deserves universal encouragement, as it is essentially beneficial to the public. (Wedgwood, 2011c, p. 276)

All was to the public good (even if, from time to time, ‘much of the advantage is ultimately derived to the landed gentleman. Wedgwood, 2011c, p. 279). Surveyors were also busy, of course, establishing not only boundaries but also passages between, rights of way.² The greatest of the canal builders, James Brindley, was one such, deeply engaged on prospects projected by Josiah.

Deirdre McCloskey has called the enclosures ‘a mere rearrangement of legal rights to land’ (1972, p. 16). Those legal rights depended, of course, on identifiable, bounded parcels of land. It was surveyors who constructed those parcels on the ground and how they fitted together and related to one another. Wedgwood, from his elevated position surveyed the rich industrial landscape spread before him, laid out in his mind its boundaries, and set to work, diligently labouring in its cultivation. Such metaphorical ways of thinking about his work must have been obvious to Wedgwood, as he observed the real-world transformation of the English landscape taking place all around him. Indeed, he himself aspired to the status of landed gentleman farmer, if not for himself then for his eldest son, Jack. Thus, in December 1779, he described to Bentley how ‘You observe, very justly, that we should know as near as we can what the young men are intended for which we are about to educate, & to clear the ground [and] so far we will suppose that Jack is to be settled as a gentleman farmer in some desirable situation, with as many acres for himself, & his tenants to improve as I can spare him’ (2011b, p. 442). Wedgwood’s own contribution to an industrial revolution was nested within earlier but still ongoing agricultural and scientific revolutions.

II

When I first stepped foot into the field of business history almost three decades ago its boundaries were as clear as those written across the English landscape by the enclosure movement and the mania for improvement. The boundaries were clear, and they were close. They overlapped almost perfectly with the field’s principal object of study: the business firm. We laboured diligently in understanding what went on within that boundary: asking how the firm set policy and conducted itself; how it operated and how it planned; how it won and how it sometimes failed; how it and others like it formed an industry; and how it interacted with other institutions, most obviously other firms, but also the government, the state, and other forms of non-enterprise organisations. Thus, beyond the boundary of the firm itself lay a second larger but still bounded field, an arena of competition called the market – or even the marketplace, to render this otherwise abstract domain more material through spatial analogy. Here, on a field of play or battle, highly discrete units contended with one another (Wedgwood also made occasional use of metaphors of the field of play and the field of battle alongside the agricultural or topographical ones on which I am focused here). Business history, in turn, was nested within a wider set of fields. Beyond the well fenced boundaries of the discipline were other, friendly cultivators, at least in some directions. Alliances were formed with the neighbouring estate of economics, which promised to lend tools and perhaps even manpower, even if the relationship was never one of equals. They were the landed gentry, the nabobs.

Initially, I stayed within these boundaries, careful not to step outside the lines. I had a lot to learn and when I look back now that shows. One of my earliest papers, published in Business History in 2002, was called (appropriately enough) ‘Barriers to Innovation in Marketing in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Merchant–Manufacturer Relationships’ (Popp, 2002). It was an extremely focused study of a single, discrete firm, utilising a fragmentary and largely random archival survival: some 330 letters the pottery manufacturing firm of Cork, Edge, and Malkin received from merchants and travellers between 1864 and 1868. The article promised to address ‘firstly, the transaction costs associated with the institutional modes deployed by the firm in export markets, before turning to the potential constraints on opportunities for innovation in institutional modes’ (Popp, 2002, p. 20). I proposed to contribute to debates on the ‘long-run development of British business’. I took my point of departure in John Wilson’s argument that in critiquing British business ‘Chandler failed to take account of the differing ‘market-cum-technological’ environments to be found in Britain and the US’ (Popp, 2002, p. 19). I concluded by asserting that ‘it has been demonstrated that high information costs potentially represented a more potent constraint on institutional innovation than low transaction costs’. In terms of theory, I argued that the article had shown the value in ‘drawing a finer distinction between transaction costs and information costs … [enabling] greater insights into institutional ­dynamics’ (Popp, 2002, p. 35).

Rereading the article now,³ I am struck by how it is simultaneously both incredibly ambitious and incredibly cautious. Those were big debates I sought to enter – and on very spindly archival supports. The ‘un-ambition’, as I see it now, lay in the conventionality of the cramped and crabbed theoretical framing. Did I believe then in the explanatory power of transaction cost economics as a tool of historical analysis? I do not know. But I do know that I do not now.

III

In the more than two decades since my entry into the field, business history has seen considerable progress in pursuing an expanded agenda. New boundaries have been drawn, leases taken out on new plots, fresh crops planted and harvested. We have laboured diligently and with fruitful results. New boundaries mean new neighbours, particularly the social scientists living in business schools. Some of us have found ourselves invited in and have taken up residence. To paraphrase colleagues, Clio finds herself quite at home in the business school. The exchanges have been mutual, and business, management, and organisation studies have, to varying degrees experienced a so-called ‘historic turn’. I have sometimes harboured doubts and scepticism about the depth and nature of this historic turn. Progressively, those doubts are being proved wrong or erased. In 2016, Stephanie Decker, after mapping research paradigms within management and organisational history, argued that ‘supplementarist’ positions were being superseded by ‘integrationist’ approaches in which history and historians were more equal partners with contributions to make that go far beyond illustrative empirical case studies (2016). I detect everywhere increasing reasons to believe this is true.

At the same time, and I take myself as an example here, others have explored connections to history beyond economic history, introducing to the field topics such as emotions and the everyday (Popp 2020; Cooper & Popp, 2023). Certainly, it is a very long time since I’ve written about a firm, or even longer since I have thought it a good idea to employ transaction cost economics in my analyses. This path has often been obscure and has led to more than one dead end. Let us remember the old cartographical warning: Here be dragons! Maps, routes, roads, and signs may all have their uses. Borders too!

IV

Business history has seen repeated calls to find new directions and to reflect on its role, contribution, and worth, and has continued to transform by virtue of the reflexive efforts of its community.⁴ At times however, business history has seemed as if it has a certain level of insecurity, often revolving around issues of sources, method, and theory: we are not as smart as the economists; not as theoretically fluent as the social scientists; unsure who we (should) speak to or who we matter to. Legitimacy has been sought time and time again, but typically by looking for buttressing support from outside the field. To provide illustration, take this example from de Jong et al. in their article setting out the possibilities for a ‘new business history’, in which they identify an ‘enduring problematic relation between business history and other, more theoretically oriented, social sciences’ (2015, p. 11. Emphasis added). How this relationship is problematic is not fully explained. Likewise, progress towards the ‘systematic use of formal concepts, theories and methodologies’ is described as plagued by ‘inertia’ (2015, p. 11). The suggested cure is clear, testable hypotheses, for the ‘ultimate goal of scientific research is to build generalisations and to understand and explain causal mechanisms: we can only enhance our understanding of reality by building theories that explain it’ (2015, p. 12).

Such programmatic calls naturally meet with counterpoints. In this case from Decker et al. who argued for plurality in business history research in the belief that it is ‘neither possible nor desirable to choose a single methodological framework for business history, and that it is more appropriate to speak of and foster the development of a variety of reflective methodologies in business historical research’ (2015, p. 31).

A paper from Mairi Maclean, Charles Harvey, and Stewart Clegg, published in 2016, likewise made the case for a duality of research methods. This essay is ripe with field, mapping, and boundary images, brimming over with them like an analogical cornucopia. Thus, the authors argue that the ‘purpose of producing a typology or road map is to help researchers find their way in the future. Mapping the territory is valuable, since new concepts often develop on the perimeter of a field through the juxtaposition of antinomous perspectives’ (2016, p. 626). Boundaries add stimulation, for ‘bridging [them] allows new vistas to emerge, revealing contradictory yet overlapping logics’. Ultimately, ‘Pushing the boundaries of existing fields implies their redrawing to admit unorthodoxy, introducing the possibility of theorising more directly about intersections between fields’. The final truth is that ‘Change to a scholarly field more likely originates from the periphery, where disciplinary boundaries are stretched’ (2016, p. 627). Wedgwood would have ­understood – and approved – one feels.

Still, if we wish to move through and past borders (disciplinary and otherwise) we would do well to stop and consider the implications. How are we to move beyond and in which directions? Do we still need a sense of our destination? Many possibilities suggest themselves, or have been suggested.

Here, in exploring that array of possibilities, I want, for a moment, to pay more sustained attention to the call for papers to which my original talk was a response, engaging with it as a recent and representative example of a genre with much longer pedigree; a genre of manifestos, or rallying-cries, aimed at setting agendas. Seminal is John Wilson’s British Business History: 1720–1994 (1995). Other textbooks and handbooks have followed, including Jones and Zeitlin (2008), Amatori and Colli (2011), Scranton and Fridenson (2013), Bucheli and Wadhwani (2014), and Wilson et al. (2016). In terms of articles, we have already encountered the highly programmatic intervention of de Jong et al. (2015), as well as the reply from Decker et al. (2015), and significant essays from Maclean et al. (2016), Decker (2016), and Perchard et al. (2017). We might also point to Larsson et al. (2014), Quinn (2015), Foreman-Peck et al. (2019), Lamberg et al. (2022), or Wilson and Tilba (2023). This is not to mention the numerous introductions to special issues focused on historical topics and methods in various sub-disciplinary journals in business, management, and organisation studies. Thus, I do not respond to the call as something unique, but rather as something rather representative, even if occurring at a specific juncture, about which it is revealing.

Like many other contributions to this genre, it opens buoyantly, noting that the discipline is in an ‘inventive mood’, having ‘moved on from the twentieth century preoccupation with large corporations, business historians now engage with a multiplicity of themes and topics’. But there is also a concern that our subject remains largely absent from the curricula of both history departments and business schools. There are some searching questions: ‘Are we merely preaching to ourselves? Have we [failed to] engage with society’s biggest issues, and thereby limited the opportunities of influencing practice in an effective way?’ The hope of the authors of the call was that in exploring these questions we will, collectively, be able to explore how we might develop a more ambitious research agenda. In so doing we might venture to advance our discipline’s intellectual, pedagogical, and applied relevance. Regarding the latter, in particular, our impact is currently limited.

The call proposed a non-exhaustive list of six directions or strategies for advancing the discipline. Four of these might be thought of as focused on thematic or content areas, namely: emerging markets; sustainability; corporate ethics and governance; and race and gender. The remaining two are much more what we might call orientations. The directions in which we face. The first suggestion is that we face towards the world of practice, starting from a ‘recognition of the ways in which ‘uses of the past’ have infiltrated disciplines such as strategy, corporate identity and human resource management’, it is argued that ‘we need to investigate how business historians can work more extensively with practitioners, whether they be policymakers, corporate executives or archivists’. Such an engagement is to be strongly encouraged, not least in a world in which history and the deployment of history are becoming ever more politicised, often with dangerous effect.

The second suggested orientation is a turn towards social science theory, an orientation that builds the ‘historic turn’ in organisation studies and a strong uptick in attention to history amongst scholars in strategy, international business, entrepreneurship, and other related fields. Again, this is a reorientation that is well underway. Business historians and various fellow travellers have been making real headway in forging alliances and claiming space, evidenced by a gathering wave of historically oriented special issues and papers in an increasingly impressive roster of top journals in various domains of business, management, and organisation studies. True, the call notes that such a shift raises ‘methodological issues … [that] have yet to be resolved’ but there is growing confidence that these issues can be overcome, and not always to our disadvantage.⁵ Nonetheless, there is also considerable stress on the importance of business history and business historians strengthening their theoretical sophistication, an imperative that has been previously expressed in numerous fora. Ultimately, the outcome should be to demonstrate ‘our credibility and relevance to the major debates of our time’. This is one set of hints towards living beyond borders.

But where we are not directed is towards history. We are our own cartographers. Where do we draw the boundaries? We have already seen how Decker et al. responded to the manifesto for a quantitative ‘new business history’ by recommending a programme of methodological plurality. And yet in suggesting ‘alternatives to the hypothesis-testing methodology advanced by de Jong et al’. one avenue they identify is ‘in the scholarship of business historians engaged in dialogue with mainstream historians’ (2015, p. 33. Emphasis added). Perchard et al. use almost identical language in pursuit of very similar disciplinary goals, arguing that it will only be possible to establish effective relationships with the social sciences if we begin to be clear ‘about what are the features of good historical research practice, whether that is business history or mainstream history’ (2017, p. 919. Emphasis added). Why this curious and artificial distinction between business history and ‘mainstream’ history? Where did this border come from?

V

Wedgwood also thought about what it would be like to live in a world without boundaries or maps, in which distances were immense, and such boundaries as might exist were immeasurably distant.

If his letters to Bentley abound with images of neatly enclosed fields ripe for improvement and cultivation, as well as of descriptions of beautified parklands, rustic cottages, and bowls brimming over with strawberries and cream, images of domestication, then Wedgwood also deployed a second, very different set of field metaphors. These were characterised by extreme unboundedness, by their vast scale and scope, their ‘untameableness’, their resistance to being surveyed. For example, in March 1768 he described to Bentley the possible permutations contained in the combination and manipulation of clays, minerals, and metals as ‘a field, to the farther end of which we shall never be able to travel’ (2011a, p. 209). On another occasion, he was moved to exclaim, practically bursting out onto the page: ‘But oh! time – time – There is no time to bring to maturity a thousandth part of the possibillitys in our engaging & prolific business, I see, at a single glance, immensely farther than I shall every be able to travel’ (2011b, p. 287). Desire for the possibility of calculable returns on patient and diligent cultivation seems almost hopeless – vain – in the face of such daunting prospects. But Wedgwood remained resolutely undaunted. Instead, in an extraordinary passage, he asserted to Bentley that:

And the Foxhunter does not enjoy more pleasure from the chace [sic], than I do from the prosecution of my experiments when I am fairly enter’d into the field, & the farther I go, the wider this field extends before me. (Wedgwood, 2011b, p. 65)

Time and motion – speed and distance – are prominent in all three of these excerpts. The static image of Wedgwood’s first field metaphor, its boundaries fixed, is replaced here with something much more dynamic. But I find this final passage particularly remarkable. Partly it is simply because of Wedgwood’s unquenchable pleasure in the doing, the thrill he gets, his refusal to be intimidated. It speaks to all that I admire in this man. But even more, I find it extraordinary for how it places Wedgwood in relation to the field and whatever boundaries might still exist, far over the horizon.

In the first field metaphor Wedgwood stands outside a pre-demarcated space. He is a detached and external observer. It is this position that enables him to act as surveyor. Beyond the diligent labour of cultivation, which merely realises existing latent possibility, his role is almost passive. In the second field metaphor (and it is worth noting these two field metaphors overlapped in the correspondence, sometimes even appearing together in a single letter) he has been transfigured into an inherently active agent. He has stepped down from the elevated position of the surveyor to stride boldly into the field. And that very act, and every subsequent step he takes, causes the field to expand. I feel like I can see or sense it, as of a shudder or a ripple passing through the landscape, a groan from the earth as it stretches out further. Whether or not the field is bounded hardly matters when the slightest movement causes whatever borders still exist to recede yet further into the unviewable distance, over the far horizon.

Wedgwood’s two field metaphors are sense-making devices that I think he used to understand his experiences of invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Seemingly simple, they open up to examination a complex range of issues that are still central to the study of entrepreneurship today: uncertainty and risk; choice, decision, and action; resources; incentives and rewards.

But just as his first, bounded field metaphor found vital contemporary correlates in notions of enclosure, improvement, and cultivation, so his second, unbounded field metaphor also had its own vital historical specificity tying it, I would argue, to Enlightenment thought on the relationship between humans, their economy and the natural world, with its apparently unimaginably bounteous, unimproved, uncultivated resources. A world rank with fecundity. Malthus be damned.

The explorer replaces the farmer, the cartographer the surveyor. Conquest over cultivation. Expansion, not enclosure. To historically situate this strand of Wedgwood’s thought we must lift our eyes from the furrowed fields of England under the agricultural revolution that we might take in a wider view, one encompassing Imperialism, exploration, colonisation, natural philosophy, aesthetics, the sublime, a foretelling of Romanticism. Also folded into this emergent world view were the seeds of a faith in the possibility of continuous growth, of escape from finitude, that continues to be central to our understanding of the function and purpose of the economy to this day, even as we face multiple crises of growth (crises of in terms of both causes and consequences). At the same time, I detect in Wedgwood’s thought in these passages a strange, almost contradictory modesty, a yielding to incompleteness that foreshadows Keats’ definition of negative capability: ‘that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason … [capable] of remaining content with half-knowledge’ (Keats, 1899, p. 277).

VI

I think it is obvious that in his second metaphor Wedgwood is proposing a radically different relationship with borders and boundaries from that which prevails in the first. It is a relationship with topography and time that is characterised by its unboundedness. Yes, Wedgwood was a businessman before he was anything else, with his feet firmly planted in the clay, and in these letters from which I have quoted, he was speaking very directly of his experiences of being in business, of the choices and decisions he faced, the actions he might take, and the expectations he had for the outcomes of those choices and actions: which of his many new creations should be put into production; when and how should they be introduced into the market; at what price? But that was not all he was, in either action or thought, and to understand him as fully as possible through his words we will have to stray far beyond even the recently extended boundaries of the field of business history. Greater engagement with environmental history is already happening, but this task will also demand the insights of the intellectual historian, among others. Fences will have to be scaled along the way.

But we need to pause for a moment. Even if we accept a world of far distant boundaries, a world without maps, we still must make choices about the directions in which we will head, as I have already stressed. Not only where, but also how should we proceed? Wedgwood can guide us here too, helping lead us to our own answers.

So, I want to propose that his two field metaphors also describe two modes of enquiry, modes that we can map, however roughly, on to the social scientific and the humanistic. Like surveyors, social scientific enquiry’s first task is the creation of discrete and distinct categories or entities that can be isolated as variables, independent or otherwise. These variables are clearly positioned or understood to be in relationship to one another. That relationship is one of cause and effect. As a mode of enquiry, it is experimental. The role of the experimenter is that of deus ex machina: a manipulator; one who operates from outside, from a distance, not intimately, messily, not an active, maybe even unpredictable element in the very basis of the experiment itself. An observer, not a participant.⁶

Wedgwood was an avid experimentalist, famously so. He spent long hours in minute manipulation of the composition of potential new ceramic bodies and glazes, painstakingly adjusting the precise mix and proportion of an array of clays and minerals and the temperatures at which they were fired. Naturally, as a manufacturer intensely interested in making and selling to a mass market, Wedgwood had an overriding concern for replicability, another term central to the social scientific mode of enquiry. To that end every one of the many thousands of experiments Wedgwood conducted across his career was meticulously recorded in notebooks and cross-referenced experimental tiles. Big data! He proceeded by way of trials, as he often referred to them, perhaps meaning that word to have a double-meaning, for he always acknowledged his very many failures, which were so much more numerous than the successes. Of course, Wedgwood was largely untutored in the scientific method, a true empiricist who placed himself (metaphorically) in communion with the beasts and the soil, proclaiming: ‘but alas I must be content with fashioning my clay at an humble distance from such compy & live, breathe, and dye, amongst animals but one remove from the Earth they are teazing’ (2011a, p. 36). And yet in this guise or mode he fully deserves the title of scientist, and sometimes so positioned himself, albeit one (in his view) of modest means and abilities. For example, in discussing the coal seams of his native Staffordshire he despaired that ‘I am got beyond my depth. These wonderful works of Nature are too vast for my narrow, microscopic comprehension’ (2011a, p. 181). Still, this method of going forward, painstaking and incremental as it was, was embedded in a wider set of concerns and preoccupations, enthusiasms and curiosities, expressed and pursued both through direct experience (at one point he developed a mania for collecting and classifying seashells) and in correspondence with friends and acquaintances.

As it was for Josiah, engaging with (social) scientific modes of enquiry has been fruitful for business historians. To an extent, this first mode was for Wedgwood (and for us) strategic – certainly it was intentful, even as it was beset by the unpredicted and the unintentional, both positive and negative. It was controlled and aimed at control. Social science aims at simplification. Data is scrubbed clean to remove extraneous noise. But, as Wedgwood repeatedly discovered, control was always threatened by profusion, by the relentlessness of infinitude, by the fast-receding horizon (‘I never think of it but new improvements Crowd in upon me, & almost overwhelm my patience’ 2011a, p. 137). To navigate these crosscurrents, he had to find a means of loosening his grip, without entirely letting go. How was he to choose? He wrote frequently of visions, imagination, portents, and forebodings. How to delineate and categorise when confronted with ‘Ten thousand other substantial forms, that neither you, nor I, nor anybody else know anything of at the present’ (2011a, p. 188). Ultimately, he recognised that ‘I cannot so easily obviate, this being a matter of Calculation, in which there is no data to proceed upon, but probabilities of future contingencies, which we cannot investigate, or command with the certainty that I could wish my friend to have in a matter of so much important to his interest’ (2011a, p. 185). The future was a world of mysteries, a void full of noise and confusion. The social sciences give us little guidance on how to proceed in not merely the absence of data, but in the face of its very impossibility.

In his second metaphor, that of the far, infinitely extending field, Wedgwood was searching for a form of knowledge or understanding or a mode of enquiry – perhaps even a critical subjectivity – in which noise is integral, not extraneous, one rooted in resonances not relationships, correspondence not causation, unity not distinction (Wedgwood was, of course, a practicing Unitarian and grandson of a Unitarian minister). It proposes a vision of the world, and of being in the world (intricately implicated in the very composition of the experience), in which boundaries are erased, or so distant as to be meaningless. I believe this mode, which we may think of as exploratory rather than experimental, was a heuristic that he used as a method of coping with what economist Frank Knight called true uncertainty (1921), and what G.L.S. Shackle termed ‘unknowledge;’ an attempt to form a disposition that would render him ‘capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason … of remaining content with half-knowledge’.

I believe that this is a disposition most effectively accessed and explored through humanistic modes of inquiry in which it is accepted that human life and experience is so often ‘a matter of Calculation, in which there is no data to proceed upon, but probabilities of future contingencies, which we cannot investigate, or command with … certainty’. I define a mode of enquiry not by its methods but by its point of origination. Personally, the point of origin or departure for all my work is the maxim that there is an irreducible core of the unknowable to human life and experience, just as there was an irreducible distance, in time and space, to the edge of the field in Wedgwood’s second metaphor. That irreducible unknowable exists not because we have not yet discovered methods of sufficient precision or refinement, or because we have not thus far collected enough data. It exists because it inheres in the ambiguous, unstable, always emerging qualities of human life and experience. Call it an ontology if you will, and from it an epistemology.⁷ I am speaking only for myself, but I do not think this is point from which most social scientific modes of enquiry begin. Social science does many things very well, but it contends less effectively with this irreducibility. For me, history has always been a humanistic endeavour such as I have just attempted to describe, and one that confronts this challenge.

VII

Much of business history’s search for connection reflects a concern for our relevance and impact, including the ability to exert an influence in the world of practice. But how is this best done, if at all, through history? History – particularly in its most humanistic form, alive to indeterminacy – rarely generates actionable lessons and strategies, its explications and analyses of causation typically too subtle, conditional, and context dependent for any truly meaningful translation. True, Wedgwood has been written about as someone who can lend to us updatable lessons on, for example, innovation processes (Dodgson, 2011). I believe he found the field metaphors he developed to be useful heuristics that helped him with the challenge of practical coping in the face of the uncertainty inherent to his entrepreneurship and that from that insight it would be possible to write something about the importance of analogy and metaphor to entrepreneurial reasoning today. Still, we must, I always feel, hedge ourselves about to derive such extrapolations from the historical record. We can only see so far in this mode. Perhaps, then, we should adopt more prospective views, at least sometimes.

I will try to illustrate. Sustainability has been identified as a critical issue for which business history can generate knowledge and insight into what Geoff Jones has labelled ‘deeply responsible business’ in a recent study of the global history of values-driven leadership (2023). Wedgwood wrote very often of the natural world and his relationship to it, but – alas – cannot teach us about the next practical steps we should take in navigating a green transition as we finally face up to a climate crisis that is no longer impending but is now upon us. He had no environmental agenda as we understand it today, no sense of deep responsibility, not in that direction at least. His kilns devoured coal to fire clay and minerals dug where they might be found. He tore up gentle, pastoral Cheshire (where some of his relations had been wealthy cheese factors) to forge a straight, smooth path for his canal to the sea and global markets. His commercial ambitions, as he himself admitted, and not without pride, were almost without bounds. Profit he aspired to. Of course he had no environmental agenda, for the world appeared to him as almost impossibly bounteous, inexhaustible. But here is the point, and the way in.

It is historical work carried out in the humanistic mode I described above that will allow us to fully apprehend how Wedgwood’s business strategies and decision-making were framed within a particular understanding of nature, its resources, their plenitude and latency, their relationship to humankind and its needs and desires, to its economy. He occupied and contributed to a much wider, societal mindset collectively formed of, yes, practice and science, but also theology, philosophy, exploration and Empire, conquest and appropriation, aesthetics and emotions. Here we are concerned with that mindset as it comprehended growth and scarcity as twin contending poles (Albritton Jonsson & Wennerlind, 2023). If we want to use history to derive lessons on the role business has played, and might today play, in accommodating the environmental agenda into corporate strategy and performance then Wedgwood is useless to us, as are most historical businesses, for environmental concerns have only meaningfully been incorporated into corporate strategy for a very short period of time thus far.

At the same time, it is true that I have also so far entirely neglected the incredibly rich and vibrant cross fertilisation between business and environmental history that has been germinating in recent years, a field too rapidly expansive to fully map here, from pioneering special issues in Enterprise and Society (Rosen, 2007) and Business History Review (Bergquist, 2019), to groundbreaking monographs, such as those by Jones (2017) and Elmore (2016). These and many other works have done much to reveal a changing relationship between business and the environment, developments that:

have involved corporate leaders growing their environmental awareness, entrepreneurs creating new markets, government policies shifting in scope and direction, consumers and investors changing their preferences, and big business shifting from being seen solely as profit-seeking polluters to being regarded as agents capable of meeting the world’s needs, including creating sustainable development on a voluntary basis. (Bergquist, 2019, p. 7)

Simultaneously, however, scholars working on these topics have been relentlessly confronted with the paradox that even as the developments described above accelerate:

environmental fundamentals have continued to deteriorate. The question of why business actions have not kept pace with global environmental degradation is among the most critical topics debated by scholars today. (Bergquist, 2019, p. 7)

Better understanding of firm strategy alone will never help us solve this riddle. As Albritton Jonsson says, perhaps the ‘best bet we have is to exorcise the cornucopian promise of technology’ and, we should add, of economics as it has been practiced (2012, p. 696).

In such a reorientation, studying Wedgwood from the most expansive historical perspective possible, one that embraces the unbounded openness that characterises his second field metaphor, may help impress upon us the absolute necessity and urgency of understanding our own mindset of growth and scarcity: a mindset al.so societal and collective and shaped by just the same factors as shaped Wedgwood’s: theology, philosophy, science, exploration and Empire, conquest and appropriation, aesthetics and emotions. And history. It is only from such an unpicking that we can begin to create the entirely new mindset now necessary and vital to confronting climate crisis. Approaching Wedgwood in this way reveals how business (and business history) is always undertaken in a field of values. Acknowledging such opens up the possibility of developing what might be called a critical business history.⁸

Thus, as historian Fredrik Albritton Jonsson has written ‘In this transition towards sustainability, there is work to be done for historians. A genuine reorientation of the economy must include a systematic historical critique of consumer society and the ideology of growth that underpins modern politics and economics’ (2014, p. 153). We need to lift our eyes from the furrows. There is relatively restricted value in understanding a specific firm’s business model absent the fullest possible comprehension of the greater societal growth model within which it is set and operates. This approach also demands recognition that we are implicated participants, not ‘mere’ observers. Each step we take shifts the parameters, however minutely. The knowledge we generate should be deeply contextual, as expansive as Wedgwood’s vision, full of movement as much as mechanics. Thus, as I am sure will be clear by now, I associate all that I am trying to describe here, as a mode of enquiry, with the second of Wedgwood’s two field metaphors. The one I position as in its essence, humanistic and historical.

VIII

This essay should not be taken as an ultimatum that we must all choose sides (even as I know which territories I believe to have the richest and most fertile soils). Famously, the Roman god Janus has two faces, turned in opposing directions. Two-faced, in modern usage, denotes the deceitful and duplicitous. But Janus was the god of all beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, and endings. He allows us to travel across boundaries, not least those between past, present, and future. Thus, the figure of Janus captures complementarities, not contradictions. The two faces depend on and exist through each other. That is true also of the two modes of enquiry within business history that I have sketched out here. In recent years, in Europe at least, it is the more social scientific mode that has made most of the running, but as a mode of enquiry it is diminished by any abandonment of a more humanistic mode that allows us to map the field of values that both our subjects and we inhabit. That is why we need to work towards a critical business history. If we return for a final time to Wedgwood, adopting a humanistic stance alive to and in sympathy with his doubts, uncertainties, enthusiasms, and excitements, we can see that he too depended on the complementarities between two constrasting modes of thought. It is those complementarities within him through which he, Janus-like, permits us enlivening passage, free now of boundaries, back and forth between past and future, a transition that illuminates just as it disorientates.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This essay began as a keynote talk to the 2023 annual conference of the Association of Business Historians, held at Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University, 29 June–1 July. In framing my talk I took my point of departure in the conferences theme: ‘Pushing the Boundaries: Business History beyond the Discipline’, and associated call for papers. The call is therefore quoted quite extensively in what follows. The original call can be found here: https://www.theabh.org/conferences. The text is also reproduced here as an appendix. As originally written to be spoken and not read, this essay was sometimes quite colloquial and often deliberately personal. In rewriting it for publication I have removed some of the informal, but less of the personal in order that I maintain the perspective I wish to ­advance.

2 Wedgwood was, of course, an enthusiastic and effective advocate for canal building. Bentley’s pamphlet in support of the proposed Trent and Mersey, to which Wedgwood no doubt contributed many ideas, explicitly endorsed the beneficent role of the surveyor, not how ‘these surveyors concurred in opinion that no tract of land in the kingdom was naturally better adapted for the purpose of an inland navigation, that none stood in more need of it, or was so convenient for a union of the east and west seas’ (Wedgwood, 2011c, p. 287).

3 Google Scholar tells me the article has been cited thirteen times in the intervening twenty-­one years, five times by myself. If published, this article will add a sixth self-citation.

4 I wish to thank one of two anonymous reviewers for the language used here.

5 Though it seems we can also still suffer from an inferiority complex. Perchard et al., for example, stressing that ‘It is important to recognise that the valuable exchange between historians and business scholars requires the former to understand the standards of business disciplines and articulate how historical approaches could further their research agenda’ (p. 906).

6 I acknowledge a (perhaps unavoidable) degree of reductiveness in my description of social sciences. I am grateful to one of my reviewers for directing my attention to the humanistic elements to be detected in the origins of the historic turn in management and organization studies (sometimes designated as historical organization studies), elements which have not been without influence over the development of business history in recent years. See, among others, Zald (1993) and Kieser (1994).

7 See Lipartito (2020) for one the very few considerations of ontology in business history.

8 I wish to acknowledge my debt to one of the two anonymous reviewers of this essay for the insights expressed here, including for some of the terminology and phrasing.