Inside the Business Enterprise: Historical Perspectives on the Use of Information ed. by Peter Temin

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 707 but also to expose the hidden operations of gender in the writing of history. It is this feminist task that will call forth a “new history” of American labor. Ardis Cameron Dr. Cameron is associate professor of American and New England studies at the University of Southern Maine. Inside the Business Enterprise: Historical Perspectives on the Use ofInforma­ tion. Edited by Peter Temin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Pp. vii + 260; tables, notes, references, indexes. $43.00 (cloth); $14.95 (paper). With the business firm increasingly the major actor in technological development and dissemination since the late 19th century, it be­ hooves the historian of technology to learn about the operation of businesses. The main theme of this book is to describe some of the many ways in which information is a valued resource in the operation of a business enterprise—for example, in communicating across the firm, providing grounds for managerial decisions, and securing external funding. All six studies make extensive use of historical examples, and as a group they sketch out the development of large, complex businesses in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These historical examples include many major technological businesses: AT&T, Dow, Du Pont, General Motors, International Harvester, and several railroads, among others. The readership is not, however, intended to be historians of technology but instead business historians and economists specializing in organizational management. The objective is to seek a common scholarly ground for these two professions by finding a way to apply economic theory within the business firm, given that most economic theory has treated the business firm as an irreducible element of analysis. This task is not made any easier by the contributing economists’ disdain for and misunderstanding of what (business) historians do— portraying them as mere storytellers or scholars unable to generalize on singularities of individual case studies. Historians of technology will probably find new material in the essays by Thomas Johnson (historical development of accounting), Margaret Levenstein (use of accounting cost measures), Naomi Lamoreaux (reasons for short-term lending by commercial banks), and Bradford DeLong (investment financing in the Gilded Age). But in each of these studies it is hard to see how as historians of technology we can apply this newfound knowledge in our work. Although Daniel Raff and Peter Temin’s introductory essay provides an overview of the role of information in the business enterprise, I agree with David Hounshell’s commentary in which he criticizes Raff and Temin for 708 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE not providing a historiographic survey of this new economic theory as it applies to business history. Perhaps the essay most useful to historians of technology is the one by JoAnne Yates, which describes information supply and demand factors inside the business firm in the period 1850—1920 through a case study of Scovill Manufacturing Company. However, this example has already been given thorough analysis in her book, Control through Communication (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). The papers, which resulted from a conference organized by the (U.S.) National Bureau of Economic Research, were not refereed. As the telling comments in the published commentaries, especially those of Hounshell and Charles Sabel, make clear, the essays would have profited from rewriting. All in all, these studies give at best an emblem­ atic vision of what economic theory might contribute to business history, and they leave me wondering whether economists have the will to pursue this goal. William Aspray Dr. Aspray writes on the history of information and is the editor of Technological Competitiveness: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on the Electrical, Electronics, and Computer Industries (IEEE Press). In the Servitude of Power: Energy and Civilisation through the Ages. By Jean-Claude Debeir, Jean-Paul Deléage, and Daniel Hémery. Lon­ don: Zed Books, 1991; distributed by Humanities Press Interna­ tional, Atlantic Highlands, N.J. Pp. xv + 286; tables, notes, glossary, appendix, index. $55.00/£32.95 (cloth); $19.95/£12.95 (paper). First published in 1986 in France and recently revised and translated into English, this collaborative effort between two French historians and a French physicist seeks to provide an alternative perspective on the energy crisis by moving...