Business failure and the agenda of business history

Enterprise and Society

Volumn 5, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 562-582

  Fridenson, Patrick ^a  

^a ÉCOLE DES HAUTES ÉTUDES EN SCIENCES SOCIALES   (France)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 25844513217     PISSN: 14672227     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/es/khh077     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (70)

1. I have deliberately retained the conversational tone of my presentation at the 2004 Business History Conference in Le Creusot, but have extensively revised its text.
2. Leslie Hannah, "Marshall's 'Trees' and the Global 'Forest': Were 'Giant Redwoods' Different?," in Learning by Doing in Markets, Firms and Countries, ed. Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Daniel M. G. Raff, and Peter Temin (Chicago, 1999), 253-93.
3. David Dodd, The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics; first posted in 1995, last revised in 2003. URL: http://www.ucsc.edu.
4. James C. Collins and Jerry J. Porras, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (New York, 1999).
5. Robert Boyer, Une théorie du capitalisme est-elle possible? (Paris, 2004).
6. Quoted in Martha Legace, "Enron's Lessons for Managers," Harvard Business School Working Knowledge (12 July 2004). URL: http://hbswk.hbs.edu.
7. Let me seize this opportunity to mention here two remarkable French books on the Challenger disaster: Christian Morel, Les décisions absurdes. Sociologie des erreurs radicales et persistantes (Paris, 2002);
8. and Paul Mayer, Challenger, les ratages de la décision. La gestion manquée d'un risque majeur (Paris, 2003).
9. Giulio Sapelli, Giochi proibiti. Enron e Pannalat: capitalismi a confronto (Milan, 2004).
10. For another view on the Italian dimensions of the problem, see Massimo Ferrari, "Tra gestione e controllo, dopo i casi Cirio e Parmalat," Il Mulino 53 (March-April 2004): 254-65.
11. Margaret B. W. Graham, RCA and the Videodisk: The Business of Research (New York, 1986).
12. See, for example, Michael Moss and Philippe Jobert, eds., The Birth and Death of Companies: An Historical Perspective (Carnforth, England, 1990);
13. and Moss and Jobert, eds., Naissance et mort des entreprises en Europe XIXe-XXe siècles (Dijon, 1995).
14. Maurice Lévy-Leboyer, "Le patronat franc̃ais a-t-il échappé à la loi des trois générations?, " Le Mouvement Social 26 (Oct.-Dec. 1985): 3-7.
15. Edward J. Balleisen, Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001);
16. Bruce H. Mann, Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of Independence (Cambridge, Mass., 2002). My thanks to William M. Reddy for bringing the former book to my knowledge.
17. P. T. Hoffman, Gilles Postel-Vinay, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, "What Do Notaries Do? Overcoming Asymmetric Information in Financial Markets: The Case of Paris, 1751," Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 154 (July 1998): 499-530;
18. and their essay, "No Exit: Notarial Bankruptcies and the Evolution of Financial Intermediation in Nineteenth-Century Paris," in Finance, Intermediaries and Economic Development, ed. Stanley L. Engerman et al. (Cambridge, U.K., 2003).
19. Jean-Clément Martin, "Hiérarchie et structure de la société commerçante: les listes d'électeurs au tribunal de commerce de Niort en 1864-1874," Le Mouvement Social 21 (fuly-Sept. 1980): 57-79.
20. Claire Lemercier, "Business Networks in Nineteenth-Century Paris," Business and Economic History On Une, forthcoming.
21. Marc Stern, "The Social Utility of Failure: The Long Island Rubber Industry and the Setauket Shtetle, 1876-1911," Long Island Historical Journal 4 (Fall 1991): 15-34.
22. David Vandermullen, "Second Chances in American History," (Ph.D. diss. in progress, University of Virginia).
23. Lévy-Leboyer, "Le patronat français"; and Olivier Zunz, written remarks to the author, 1 July 2004.
24. I owe the idea of this parallel to William M. Reddy.
25. Fraud and counterfeiting are the themes of the triennial congress of the French Economic History Association in November 2004.
26. In English, see Jean-Baptiste Say, An Economist in Troubled Times: Writings (Princeton, N.J., 1997). My thanks to French sociologists Philippe Steiner, François Vatin, and Michel Villette for drawing my attention to this often forgotten analysis.
27. In this vein, compare the remarkable works by Jean-Clément Martin, Commerce et commerçants à Niort au XIXe siècle: les faillites (Niort, France, 1980);
28. and "Le commerçant, la faillite et l'historien," Annales E.S.C. 52 (Nov.-Dec. 1980): 1251-68.
29. The following section on Honda, and quotations, are from the unpublished work of Christopher McKenna, "Mementos: Looking Back at the Honda Motorcycle Case, 2003-1973," forthcoming in a collected volume, Cambridge University Press.
30. Jim Otahara, "An Evolutionary Phase of Honda Motor: The Establishment and Success of American Honda Motor," Japanese Yearbook on Business History 17 (2000): 109-35.
31. Kenneth Lipartito, "Picturephone and the Information Age: The Social Meaning of Failure," Technology and Cultured (Jan. 2003): 50-81.
32. Peer Hull Kristensen and Jonathan Zeitlin, Local Players in Global Games: The Strategic Constitution of a Multinational Corporation (Oxford, U.K., forthcoming), XII-XXII.
33. Ibid., 304-9.
34. Ibid., 303.
35. Ibid., 303, 309-12; to be fair, one of the five scenarios for the future of this firm that the authors imagine (312-314) is quite the opposite: "producing disasters through passivity."
36. Olivier Zunz is researching a history of philanthropy in the United States since the 1860s. He presented a first paper at the BHC in Le Creusot.
37. OECD Statistics, 1975-2000 (Paris, 2001).
38. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York, 1942).
39. On the former, see Rachid L'Aoufir, La Prusse de 1815 à 1848: L'industrialisation comme processus de communication (Paris, 2004).
40. Claire Lemercier, Un si discret pouvoir. Aux origines de la chambre de commerce de Paris, 1803-1853 (Paris, 2003);
41. Monika Rosengarten, Die internationale Handelskammer. Wirtschaftliche Empfehlungen in der Zeit der Weltwirtschaftskrise, 1929-1939 (Berlin, 2001).
42. Kazuo Wada, "The Development of Tiered Inter-Finn Relationship in the Automobile Industry: A Case Study of the Toyota Motor Corporation," Japanese Yearbook on Business History 8 (1991): 23-47;
43. René Chilin, Aimée Moutet, and Martine Muller, Histoire de l'ANACT: vingt ans au service de l'amélioration des conditions de travail (Paris, 1994).
44. Quoted by Ferrari in "Tra gestione," 264.
45. Michael Jensen and William Meckling, "Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs, and Ownership Structure," Journal of Financial Economics 3 (Oct. 1976): 305-60.
46. Robert E. Wright et al., History of Corporate Governance: The Importance of Stakeholder Activism (London, 2004).
47. William Lazonick and Mary O'Sullivan, "Maximizing Shareholder Value: A New Ideology for Corporate Governance," Economy and Society 29 (2000): 13-35;
48. Marie Carpenter, William Lazonick, and Mary O'Sullivan, "The Stock Market and Innovative Capability in the New Economy: The Optical Networking Industry," Industrial and Corporate Change, 12 (2003): 963-1034.
49. This point that I stressed in my oral address is now covered by Ernie Englander and Allen Kaufman, "The End of Managerial Ideology: From Corporate Social Responsibility to Corporate Social Indifference," Enterprise & Society 5 (Sept. 2004): 404-50.
50. For a path-breaking article, see Richard Tilly, "Moral Standards and Business Behaviour in Nineteenth-Century Germany and Britain," in Bourgeois Society in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Jürgen Kocka and Allan Mitchell (New York, 1993), 179-206.
51. Kristensen and Zeitlin, Local Players in Global Games. The authors actually draw a list of such proposals for today.
52. Helmut K. Anheier and Lynne Moulton, "Studying Organizational Failures," in When Things Go Wrong: Organizational Failures and Breakdowns, ed. Helmut K. Anheier (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 1999), 273-90. My thanks to Leslie Hannah for drawing my attention to this book.
53. Richard Powers, Gain (New York, 1998), 350.
54. Helmut K. Anheier and Lynne Moulton, "Organizational Failures, Breakdowns, and Bankruptcies," in Anheier, ed., When Things Go Wrong, 3, 3-14.
55. Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, 2nd ed. (New York, 1999), 3-14, 353-87.
56. Edward Tenner, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (New York, 1996), 5-7, 8, 9-11, 354.
57. Lipartito, "Picturephone and the Information Age," 57.
58. Mark Hager, Joseph Galaskiewicz, Wolfgang Bielefeld, and Joseph Pins, "Tales from the Grave: Organizations' Accounts of Their Own Demise," in Anheier, ed., When Things Go Wrong, 51-70.
59. Lipartito, "Picturephone and the Information Age," 57-58.
60. In Japan, for instance, an association called Shippai Gakkai, a nonprofit organization with the English name "Association for the Study of Failure," was established in Nov. 2002. Its purpose is stated as follows: "The human act of production is always accompanied with accidents and failures. These events include tedious ones to those that lead to economic loss, injury, or even large catastrophic ones that include even death. The Study of Failure identifies the cause of these accidents and failures; it further offers ways to prevent such accidents and failures that cause economic loss and fatality." URL: http://www.shippai.org/eshippai/html/.
61. McKenna, "Mementos."
62. Christophe Midler, L'auto qui n'existait pas (Paris, 1993).
63. See also Clayton Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Boston, 1997).
64. For a striking example of such a tendency, see Claude Beaud, "Le drame de Creusot-Loire: échec industriel ou fiasco politico-financier, " Entreprises et Histoire 10 (June 2001): 7-23;
65. continued in "Heurs et malheurs de Creusot-Loire (1985-2001)," Entreprises et Histoire 12 (June 2003): 152-62.
66. Graham, RCA and the Videodisk;
67. Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents.
68. Andréa Colli, The History of Family Business, 1850-2000 (Cambridge, U.K., 2003);
69. Lipartito, "Picturephone and the Information Age," 80n95.
70. Lene Bomann-Larsen and Oddny Wiggen, eds., Responsibility in World Business: Managing Harmful Side Effects of Corporate Activity (Washington, D.C., 2004).