The teaching of business history in the United States

Entreprises et Histoire

Volumn 55, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 48-66

  Raff, Daniel ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 77958454918     PISSN: 11612770     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3917/eh.055.0048     Document Type: Article

References (86)

1. On the writing of it - quite a distinct subject - see n. R. Lamoreaux, D. M. G. Raff, and P. Temin, "Introduction", in n. R. Lamoreaux, D. M. G. Raff, and P. Temin (eds.), Learning by Doing in Organizations, Markets, and nations, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999, p. 1-17.
2. This distinction was not always so sharply drawn. Peter Temin, who began his professorial career in the mid-1960s at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, reports his impression that in the 1950s and early 1960s, and perhaps before, business history was understood to include the study of industries and technologies (and of course the industrial revolution in particular).
3. The text in the course he was assigned to teach in his first year at the Sloan School in 1965 was the recently published W. Letwin (ed.), A Documentary History of American Economic Policy since 1789, Garden City, NY, Doubleday, 1961.
4. S. Kuznets, "Statistics and Economic History", Journal of Economic History, 1(1), 1941, p. 25-41.
5. This was Daniel Creamer. For some biographical traces, see "Daniel Creamer, Pioneer in Statistics on Income", New York Times, April 3, 1980, p. 83.
6. Altogether it was a distinguished group. One - the economist in spirit - was not the least amongst them: in the fullness of time, he won a nobel Prize.
7. The key transitional works in terms of empirical methods were J. Tinbergen, Statistical testing of business cycle theories I. A Method and its Application to Investment Activity II. Business Cycles in the United States of America 1919-1932, Geneva, League of nations Economic Intelligence Service, 1939
8. W. C. Hood and T. C. Koopmans (eds.), Studies in Econometric Method, New York, Wiley, 1953
9. In terms of theory, the watershed started with P. A. Samuelson, Foundations of Economic Analysis, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 1947.
10. Work continued to be published in a less abstract vein, but after the profundity and clarity of K. J. Arrow and G. Debreu, "The existence of an equilibrium for a competitive economy", Econometrica, 22 (3), July 1954, p. 265-290
11. Debreu's subsequent Theory of Value, New York, Wiley, 1959, there was, it seems, no going back. (Certainly there would be no more general theories reading like Keynes's.)
12. There were exceptions, of course. Two related and famous ones were F. V. Waugh, "Quality Factors Influencing Vegetable Prices", Journal of Farm Economics, 10 (2), April 1928, p. 185-196
13. A. T. Court, "Hedonic Price Indices with Automotive Examples", in General Motors Corporation, Dynamics of Automobile Demand, Detroit, General Motors Corporation, 1939.
14. But the spirit of S. H. Slichter, "The Current Labor Policies of American Industries", Quarterly Journal of Economics, 43 (2), February 1929, p. 393-435
15. E. B. Alderfer and H. E. Michl, The Economics of American Industry, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1942, was more dominant.
16. See e.g. R. B. Tennant, The American Cigarette Industry: A Study in Economic Analysis and Public Policy, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1950
17. W. H. nicholls, Price Policies in the Cigarette Industry: A Study of "Concerted Action" and its Social Control 1911-1950, nashville, Vanderbilt University Press, 1951
18. M. A. Adelman, A&P: A Study in Price-Cost Behavior and Public Policy
19. C. Kaysen, United States v. United Shoe Machinery Company, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 1956.
20. Thus the subtitle of the economic historian W. W. Rostow's book, The Stages of Economic Growth: A non- Communist Manifesto, London, Cambridge University Press, 1960.
21. The balance of authorship in the Journal of Economic History shifted at this point and has never changed back.
22. See A. J. Field, "The Future of Economic History", in A. J. Field (ed.), The Future of Economic History, Boston, Kluwer nijhoff, 1987, p. 1-41 for an interesting commentary.
23. F. Redlich, "New and Traditional Approaches to Economic History and their Independence", Journal of Economic History, 25, 1965, p. 480-495.
24. For more on the schism, see n. R. Lamoreaux, D. M. G. Raff, and P. Temin, "Introduction", art. cit.
25. See G. A. Akerlof, "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism", Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84 (3), August 1970, p. 488-500
26. M. Spence, "Job Market Signaling", Quarterly Journal of Economics, 87(3), August 1973, p. 355-375
27. J. E. Stiglitz, "Incentives and Risk Sharing in Sharecropping", Review of Economic Studies, 41(2), April 1974, p. 219-255
28. M. Rothschild and J. E. Stiglitz, "Equilibrium in Competitive Insurance Markets: An Essay on the Economics of Imperfect Information", Quarterly Journal of Economics, 90 (4), november 1976, p. 629-649.
29. O. E. Williamson, Markets and Hierarchies: Analysis and Antitrust Implications, New York, The Free Press, 1975
30. The Economic Institutions of Capitalism: Firms, Markets, Relational Contracting, New York, The Free Press, 1985.
31. R. H. Coase, "The nature of the Firm", Economica, 2 n.S., 1937, p. 386-405, had finally begun to be considered by economists.
32. J. Higham (with L. Krieger and F. Gilbert), History, Englewood Cliffs (n. J.), Prentice-Hall, 1965, p. 213.
33. The inspiration was E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, London, Gollancz, 1963.
34. For the American masterpiece of this, also a sort of retrospect, see D. Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism 1865-1926, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1988.
35. Other major works included D. Brody, Steelworkers in America: The nonunion Era, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 1960
36. H. G. Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society: Essays in American Working Class and Social History , New York, Vintage Books, 1977.
37. Total annual enrollments at Harvard do not appear to have broken double digits before the 1980s and did not reach their later proportions for perhaps another decade. See T. K. McCraw, "Teaching History Courses to Harvard MBA Students: Building Enrollment from 21 to 1,300", Business and Economic History, 28 (2), Winter 1999, p. 155.
38. R. Kurana's From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2007 gives a brief overview early on (see in particular p. 88-89) in his interesting and sophisticated discussion of the development of business schools and the idea of business as a profession in America on which the following several paragraphs also draw. There are several monographs giving institutional histories of individual university-affiliated business schools (and written to some extent in the style of commissioned company histories).
39. The best of these are M. T. Copeland, And Mark an Era: The Story of the Harvard Business School, Boston, Little, Brown, 1958
40. S. A. Sass, The Pragmatic Imagination: A History of the Wharton School 1991-1981, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982
41. M. W. Sedlak and H. F. Williamson, The Evolution of Management Education: A History of the northwestern University J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management 1908-1983, Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1983.
42. On these see in particular J. H. S. Bossard and J. F. Dewhurst, University Education for Business A Study of Existing needs and Practices, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1931, p. 247-250.
43. R. C. McCrea, "The Basic Elements and their Proper Balance in the Curriculum of a Collegiate Business School: Discussion", Journal of Political Economy, 28 (2), March 1920, p. 108-109. He also speaks (p. 109) of "minutely ramified vocational training devices suggested by the workday world".
44. Tertiary education was not at all widespread in America during this period. In the 1879 Census of Population, only 1,6% of the population between the ages of 18 and 24 (inclusive) were enrolled in institutions of higher education. (By comparison, the figure in the mid-1990s was about 14,3.) See Series Bc523, Historical Statistics of the United States Millennium Edition, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006.
45. M. T. Copeland, And Mark..., op. cit., p. 151.
46. A functional scheme of internal organization for firms was of course commonplace in the period. H. S. Person, "The Basic Elements and their Proper Balance in the Curriculum of a Collegiate Business School: Discussion", Journal of Political Economy 28 (2), March 1920, p. 109-112, suggests that something similar had been in place at Tuck from somewhat earlier, though it was not in place from the beginning
47. see W. G. Broehl, Tuck and Tucker. The Origin of the Graduate Business School , Hanover (n. H.), University Press of new England, 1999, p. 40-41 and 56-57
48. For more on the functional approach to curricula, see F. C. Pierson and others, The Education of American Businessmen: A Study of University-College Programs in Business Administration, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1959, p. 47-48.
49. The first casebook was published in the summer of 1920. See M. T. Copeland (the author of it), And Mark.., op. cit., p. 75-76.
50. The reports were published as R. A. Gordon and J. E. Howell, Higher Education for Business, New York, Columbia University Press, 1959
51. F. C. Pierson and others, The Education. , op. cit.
52. R. A. Gordon and J. E. Howell, Higher Education. , op. cit., p. 4.
53. M. T. Copeland, And Mark. , op. cit., p. 315.
54. M. T. Copeland, And Mark., Ibid., p. 314.
55. Compare n. S. B. Gras and H. M. Larson, Casebook in American Business History, New York, Appleton-Century Crofts, 1939
56. Harvard Business Reports compiled by and published for the Graduate School of Business Administration, George F. Baker Foundation, Harvard University, Chicago, A. W. Shaw, 1925.
57. The cases in the latter are of about one-third the length of the business history cases and are conspicuously more problem-oriented. On the origins of the problem orientation, and the role of Shaw himself in it, see M. T. Copeland, And Mark. , op. cit., p. 255.
58. n. S. B. Gras and H. M. Larson, Casebook..,, op. cit.,p. V.
59. S. B. Gras and H. M. Larson, Casebook.., Ibid.
60. A. D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 1977.
61. T. K. McCraw, "Teaching History Courses...", art. cit.
62. A. D. Chandler, Jr., and R. S. Tedlow, The Coming of Managerial Capitalism, Homewood (Il.), Richard Irwin, 1985.
63. For more on the Whig aspect, see n. R. Lamoreaux, D. M. G. Raff, and P. Temin, "Beyond Markets and Hierarchies: Towards a new Synthesis of American Business History", American Historical Review, April 2003, p. 404-433
64. "Against Whig History", Enterprise and Society, 5 (3), September 2004, p. 376-387.
65. For a brief overview, see T. K. McCraw and J. L. Cruikshank, The Intellectual Venture Capitalist: John H. McArthur and the Work of the Harvard Business School 1980-1995, Boston, Harvard Business School Press, 1999, p. 101-104.
66. A. D. Chandler, Jr., Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise, Cambridge (Mass.), MIT Press, 1962.
67. M. E. Porter, Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors, New York, The Free Press, 1980
68. Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance, New York, The Free Press, 1985.
69. Thus the form of the analysis was not much like the economics of economics departments, even though the concepts were quite familiar.
70. On the style of theorizing ("frameworks"), see "An Interview with Michael Porter", Academy of Management Executive, 16 (2), May 2002, p. 45-46.
71. At Harvard in the 1990s, it was the only central MBA course taught at the end of the school year, when the first- year students had summer jobs arranged, were less concerned about their grades, etc., and when instructors in other courses thought the students the most difficult to motivate. The strategy faculty did not complain. Their course's material was apparently motivation enough.
72. Interestingly, it was very clearly not the first. See P. Tufano, Three Essays on Financial Innovation, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1989.
73. There was at that time also widespread experimentation with courses treating material from various functional courses in a self-consciously cross-functional fashion, but good materials were felt to be scarce and the faculty seem to have found high-quality execution difficult. For the most part, such efforts faded away.
74. These changes were surely encouraged by the increasing numbers of faculty members with formal training in economics, often to the Ph.D. level, teaching strategy courses.
75. The papers that really set it off were B. Wernerfelt, "A resource-based view of the firm", Strategic Management Journal, 5 (2), April-June 1984, p. 171-180
76. I. Dierckx and K. Cool, "Asset stock accumulation and sustainability of competitive advantage", Management Science, 35 (12), December 1989, p. 1504-1511
77. J. Barney, "Firm resources and sustained competitive advantage", Journal of Management, 17 (1), March 1991, p. 99-120.
78. For a seed of the time only now beginning to grow up and bear fruit, see A. Brandenburger and H. Stuart, "Value-based Business Strategy", Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, 5 (1), Spring 1996, p. 5-24.
79. It thus made an easy and increasingly productive liaison with research stemming from R. R. nelson and S. G. Winter, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 1982.
80. I taught a general management overview course along precisely these lines, synthesizing the functional courses of the curriculum and deploying a substantial quantum of business history, to Wharton undergraduates for most of a decade from 1996.
81. This may be less well-known than the other changes. For particulars of the proposed settlement, see www.googlebooksettlement.com.
82. On access and the Republic of Letters, see R. Darnton, "Google and the Future of Books", New York Review of Books, 56 (2), February 12, 2009.
83. See C. W. Calomiris, "The Subprime Turmoil: What's Old, What's new, and What's next", Columbia University, typescript, October 2008.
84. On management by the numbers and its potential pitfalls, see H. T. Johnson, "Managing by Remote Control: Recent Management Accounting Practice in Historical Perspective", in P. Temin (ed.), Inside the Business Enterprise: Historical Perspectives on the Use of Information, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991, p. 41-66.
85. On incentives writ large, see (the more hortatory) M. C. Jensen, "The Eclipse of the Public Corporation", Harvard Business Review, 67 (5), September-October 1989, p. 61-74.
86. See inter alia P. Fridenson, "Business Failure and the Agenda of Business History", Enterprise and Society, 5 (4), December 2004, p. 562-582.