Prosopographic studies of business leaders for understanding industrial and corporate change

Abstract

One of the classical topics of business history is the studies of business leaders and entrepreneurs. The approaches, the material and the goals of these studies have varied over time, due to contemporary scholarly debates and methodological ‘fashions’, but this topic has been on the agenda as long as we can talk about a business history field. This article uses previous research to discuss prosopographic studies of business leaders and how these investigations have enabled us to reach a deeper understanding of managerial recruitment, professionalisation of management and (business) elite formation in a historical perspective. Furthermore, it shows that prosopographic studies of the business elite can also provide insights into other types of problems and questions in the field of business history, especially in relation to corporate and industrial transformations.