Business History Research Articles

The American Reaper: Harvesting Networks and Technology, 1830–1910 by Gordon M. Winder

Reviewed by: The American Reaper: Harvesting Networks and Technology, 1830–1910 by Gordon M. Winder Peter A. Coclanis (bio) The American Reaper: Harvesting Networks and Technology, 1830–1910. By Gordon M. Winder. Aldershot, Hants, and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2012. Pp. xiv+ 257. $119.95. Arguably, over the last twenty years the biggest development in the field of business history has been the polite but insistent challenge to the so-called Chandlerian synthesis regarding the rise of “Big Business.” Similarly, one can just as plausibly argue that in the history of technology the biggest development over the same time period has been the shift from the study of individual inventors, or even individual firms, to the study of technological networks, which are increasingly seen as central to the innovation process in many industries. Business history and the history of technology are closely interrelated, often overlapping like Venn diagrams. The connection between the two fields is demonstrated vividly in Gordon Winder’s study of the early development of the harvesting and mowing industry, as are the scholarly shifts mentioned above. [End Page 267] In conventional accounts, the history of the modern harvesting/mowing industry—grains are harvested, hay is mowed—is viewed in Chandlerian terms. That is to say, the rise in the industry of large, powerful corporations characterized by multiple-operating units, professional managers, and external/internal integration is seen as a relatively straightforward, economically rational business response to new opportunities and challenges posed by changing economic conditions (e.g., the rise of a national market) and technological possibilities (e.g., mass production) in nineteenth-century America. The spread of the rail and telegraph system in the United States in the 1850s is said to have allowed for small producers to expand their markets dramatically. Such expansion, along with the technical requirements involved in marketing/financing/servicing relatively expensive harvesting/mowing equipment posed all kinds of organizational problems to companies in the industry, leading them increasingly to integrate production and sales operations. By the 1880s, the possibilities of mass production were opening up, which allowed—some Chandlerians would use more insistent verbs here—for higher volume production and greater scale, mandated greater capital requirements, and sparked problems relating to coordination and control. This led some of the largest and most successful companies in the industry—the McCormick Harvesting Machinery Company, obviously, but also William Deering & Company—to pursue greater and greater integration both internally and externally. Such integration reached its zenith in 1902 with the merger of the McCormick and Deering companies (and three smaller firms), forming the International Harvester Company, which upon formation controlled 85 percent of the U.S. market for harvesters and reapers. So what is wrong with this picture? A lot, according to Winder, whose study—first published in 2012 and recently released in a new ebook edition by Routledge—immediately became the most detailed we have on the harvesting/mowing industry qua industry. Bluntly put, Winder believes that the Chandlerian view of the industry is fundamentally and irredeemably flawed. For example, it misses the fact that the modern industry was characterized not by stand-alone companies, but by complex networks involving licensing agreements, patent pools, and relational contracting almost from the start. From the 1850s on, moreover, these networks were transnational, involving companies in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Europe. Nor should the industry be seen as the story of McCormick writ large, as is often implied by Chandlerians; there were other very important companies and networks in North America in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s, not just McCormick or even McCormick and Deering. Finally, in Winder’s political economy approach, there was nothing natural or inevitable about the way business developed in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. There were alternatives to what Chandler calls “modern business form”—various network models, [End Page 268] most notably—but these alternatives lost out in the 1880s and 1890s to a few companies (McCormick and Deering in particular), which were increasingly able to take advantage of mass-production possibilities to build scale, increase their market power, and ultimately crush their competition. Thus, the creation of the International Harvester Company in 1902 should be...

The Rise and Fall of African Indigenous Entrepreneurs' Economic Solidarity in Lesotho, 1966–1975

This article examines the rise and fall of African indigenous entrepreneurs' economic solidarity in Lesotho between 1966 (independence) and 1975. It rebuts the historical metanarrative that the black African indigenous entrepreneurs (the Basotho) lacked adequate entrepreneurial spirit, business acumen and economic solidarity. Using historical records and oral histories, this article demonstrates that there is sufficient historical evidence to argue otherwise. Rather, Basotho traders became victims of sinister political and economic interests of the first postcolonial government, which acted to protect interests of minority European traders—a common phenomenon in postcolonial Africa. Furthermore, the article makes two significant contributions—first to the growing literature on the history of African business and entrepreneurship, and secondly, it uses the constructed economic history of Basotho entrepreneurs to critique the dominant nationalistic and geo-political view that Lesotho's position as landlocked by South Africa is predominantly responsible for the country's sluggish economic growth, poverty and lack of economic independence.

“The Rag Race”: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire by Adam D. Mendelsohn

Reviewed by: “The Rag Race”: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire by Adam D. Mendelsohn R. William Weisberger “The Rag Race”: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in America and the British Empire. By Adam D. Mendelsohn. (New York: New York Univ. Press, 2015. 296pp. Cloth $35.00, ISBN 978-1-4798-4718-1.) This comparative history of the clothing business in America and in London is a detailed and a stimulating one. Adam D. Mendelsohn, who has also coedited Transnational Traditions: New Perspectives on American Jewish History (2014) with Ava Kahn, lucidly presents an encompassing and absorbing study about American and British groups and institutions intimately associated with the clothing world. Chronologically and topically arranged into eight chapters, this suggestive monograph revolves around two theses: Jews occupied a dominant status in the manufacturing and marketing of garments in the Atlantic world and other places during the nineteenth century. His second thesis is that Jews filled an economic niche, greatly fostered merchant capitalism, and in many instances achieved social mobility. The participation of Jews in the clothing trade is extensively investigated in London and then in New York in the first two chapters. Mendelsohn shows that immigrants from central and eastern Europe did much to promote the garment business in both cities between 1840 and 1880. In London, they were purveyors of old clothes, working at clothes exchanges and street markets in Houndsditch and Rosemary Lane and selling, especially as peddlers and as a few wholesalers, such goods as used pants, shirts, sweaters, and jackets. They were involved also with the transatlantic secondhand clothing business; New York City evolved into a used clothing hub. Many peddlers, some wholesalers, and a few retailers sold castoffs or used clothes in Chatham Street, thus transforming this city into a mecca of used clothing distribution and a locus of a specific kind of merchant capitalism. These groups in New York, like those in London, succeeded in establishing firm relations with both suppliers and creditors. Chapter 3 astutely demonstrates the growth of the American rag trade as a result of the marketing revolution and Western expansionism. Mendelsohn incisively explains that American peddlers especially benefited from developing cordial credit relationships with retailers, wholesalers, and a few manufacturers. [End Page 98] As an essential group, American peddlers also profited in purveying old and used clothes and other needed products to customers both in remote places and in booming regions. There is a fine section on Cincinnati as a major clothing distribution and marketing hub: Mendelsohn maintains that many itinerant salesmen flocked to the Queen City between 1830 and 1860, traveled throughout the midwestern and southern states, and accrued sizable profits in their dealings. As a result of their lucrative activities, peddlers transformed Cincinnati, which had 222 clothing factories and workshops, into a major garment center that was exemplified by the manufacturing firm operated by Jacob Seasongood and Phillip Heidelbach. Moreover, Mendelsohn believes that the success of these Jewish peddlers, as well as wholesalers and manufacturers, enabled the marketing revolution in Cincinnati, New York, and other American cities to flourish by 1860. Chapters 4 and 5 explain significant developments in the rag trade in Great Britain and in the British Empire. Mendelsohn describes how peddlers continued to accrue profits in east London. As well, he persuasively shows how Elias and Henry Moses, who were two wealthy Jewish peddlers, envisioned enormous potential in manufacturing and retailing clothing; they consequently became successful in manufacturing shirts, pants, and jackets and in selling these garments in their retail stores in London, other cities in Britain, and throughout the empire. Mendelson also explains that as fewer immigrants came to London during the 1870s, the British clothing business began to decline by the 1880s. The book’s last three chapters and conclusion reveal that expansion arose in the American garment business between 1860 and 1880. Mendelsohn explains that the Civil War produced an immense demand for military clothing and enabled numerous American Jews in the clothing world to become wealthy. He also believes that during the industrial era of the 1870s, American Jewish retailers and wholesalers prospered and that during the 1880s, Jewish manufacturers involved with...

Ética empresarial e a postura dos colaboradores na era digital

Este caso de ensino apresenta o histórico de uma indústria metalúrgica familiar no ramo de válvulas industriais, a formação de seu quadro societário e sua trajetória ao longo de 48 anos de atividade. A empresa é referida neste estudo sob o nome fictício de ACDC. O caso é verídico e a privacidade dos envolvidos foi preservada. Aborda-se o progresso de um colaborador da companhia, expondo-se sua evolução, de office-boy a gerente industrial da empresa, resultado do desenvolvimento de competências pessoais e do engajamento do sujeito para atingir os resultados empresariais de forma ética. O objetivo deste estudo foi trazer reflexões sobre os desafios que as empresas enfrentam para manter o comportamento ético dos colaboradores, especialmente, daqueles da área de vendas, aliado aos esforços para obter um alto desempenho de mercado e financeiro.

Support method of consulting service by analyzing business history

Support method of consulting service by analyzing business history

Transfer of Economic Power in Corporate Calcutta, 1950–1970

Between 1950 and 1970, the ownership of some of the largest business conglomerates in India changed from British to Indian hands. Almost without exception, the firms formerly under the management of British conglomerates saw bankruptcy, nationalization, relative decline in corporate ranking, and on rare occasions, reinvention of identity. In Indian business history scholarship, this episode is underresearched, even though hypotheses on the transfer-cum-decline exist. Combining a new source, legal documents, with conventional ones, this article revisits the episode and suggests revisions to current hypotheses.

Whither the Arc of the Moral Universe?

Whither the Arc of the Moral Universe? Robert H. Churchill (bio) Pamela Haag. The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture. New York: Basic Books, 2016. xxv + 496 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $29.99. Pamela Haag has taken on a very ambitious project. She sets out to trace the influence of gun manufacturers on U.S. gun culture. What emerges from that quest is at once a business history of arms manufacturing, a cultural analysis of the figure of the “lone gunman” as a heroic figure, and an exploration of an early countercultural outcry against the moral toxicity of the gun trade. All three aspects of the book are provocative, but they are not equally successful. Moreover, the book raises the question of whether there are limits to the creative imagining that should be employed in a work that purports to be a nonfiction history. In the first section of the book, Haag argues that the concept of interchangeability better describes the place of guns in America than celebrations of the gun as the exceptional icon of an exceptional people. She maintains that, prior to the Civil War, guns were treated largely as tools, one consumer product of many, and held no special significance in culture, law, or social identity. In other words, in this period, America had no gun culture. She notes that early gun manufacturers got their start producing guns for the U.S. Government and that there was next to no civilian market. In this era of craft production, symbolized by Eli Whitney’s operations at the Springfield armory, gun manufacturing represented a public-private partnership, and government armories served as incubators of technological innovation. After 1840, this era gave way to entrepreneurs who separated their operations from government facilities and focused on precision machining, the division of labor, and the protection of intellectual property. These private corporations found markets hard to come by, as there was still little civilian demand for guns, and government contracts were awarded through a labyrinthine process of lobbying and corrupt influence peddling. Early entrepreneurs such as Samuel Colt turned to foreign markets in desperation. The exhibition of the American system of manufacturing at London’s Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851 marked a breakthrough moment. The display of their technical [End Page 83] prowess allowed Colt and other entrepreneurs to crack the European market and reverse what had been a long-standing pattern of American imports of European arms. The second section of the book follows the trajectory of the Winchester Company between 1868 and 1925 and the family fortune that it spawned. This section constitutes a densely interwoven elaboration of several themes. The first is the influence of industrial capitalism on the manufacturing of guns. Capitalist ideology, particularly in the antebellum period and the Gilded Age, encouraged arms manufacturers to disregard the social costs of their trade, to think of their products as unexceptional and of no more moral freight than any other. The structure of the marketplace required these industrialists to build consumer demand for their products, as steady consumer demand was an absolute necessity for business survival. Companies that over-relied on military demand were repeatedly destroyed by the inevitable collapse of demand at the end of wars, just at the time the debts the companies had accumulated to increase production to meet war demand came due. Foreign sales might help stave off disaster, but these too could vanish in the blink of an eye. Only those companies that successfully stimulated consumer demand for guns remained solvent through these boom-and-bust cycles. A second theme is the gun industry’s role in propagating the cultural icon of the lone gunman, which Haag argues is at the core of contemporary U.S. gun culture. She traces the industry’s influence across three periods: 1868–90, 1890–1914, and 1917–21. In the first period, Winchester envisioned a civilian market segmented into farmers, hunters, frontiersmen, and urbanites concerned with self-protection. Extolling the speed and accuracy of his 1873-model repeating rifle, Winchester described the power it gave to the individual faced with numerous targets, both animal and human. In Haag’s words, “it would...

From Main Street to Mall: The Rise and Fall of the American Department Store by Vicki Howard

Reviewed by: From Main Street to Mall: The Rise and Fall of the American Department Store by Vicki Howard Ellis W. Hawley Vicki Howard, From Main Street to Mall: The Rise and Fall of the American Department Store. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 304pp. $34.95. Clearly, the rise and fall of the locally oriented Main Street department store has been a significant development affecting the urban landscape and consumer experience of the Middle West. And while Vicki Howard’s new account of this seeks primarily to delineate and explain national developments, several of her illustrative stories are located in the Midwest, and her revised and expanded framework can do much to help midwestern historians understand the larger economic, political, and social contexts within which the midwestern phenomenon took place. The framework, moreover, rests on a strong research base and insightful analysis leading to persuasive arguments concerning how and why older and previously accepted accounts are in need of revision. Her notes reflect a deep and fruitful immersion not only in the published scholarship on the subject but also in governmental investigations, media accounts, the relevant trade press, business history archives, and a number of department store collections. In the latter category, she makes particularly good use of the private Bresee’s Department Store collection in Oneonta, New York, the Rudge and Guenzel collection at the Nebraska Historical Society, and the Foley’s Department Store Records at the University of Houston. Previous accounts of Howard’s subject have stressed the causative role of changing markets, and for her these remain important. As in earlier works, the story she tells moves from the late nineteenth century “Palaces of Consumption” through the development of a defensive industrial consciousness [End Page 120] to the effects of trying to meet the market challenges posed by depression, war, technological change, and the rise of suburban shopping centers, standardized chains, discount houses, internet shopping, and the “world of Wal-Mart.” In significant respects, however, she moves beyond this market-oriented view. The outcomes, she contends, were also tied to and shaped by the actions and inactions of federal, state, and local policy makers, regulators, judges, and legislators. And at several points she delves deeply into the political battles, regulatory laws, and court decisions that were involved. In addition, she focuses more on smaller stores outside the major urban centers and examines in detail their role as social and community institutions, cultural symbols, and articulators and defenders of local loyalties and traditions. The story, she insists, was “messier” than is commonly assumed, and an understanding of it requires excursions into political, social, and cultural as well as economic history. In Howard’s view, moreover, the eventual outcome was neither natural nor inevitable. As local institutions, she argues, Main Street department stores really had much in common with the smaller retailers fighting other forms of mass distributors. And at several points, their embrace of such movements might have produced regulatory, tax, social subsidy, and urban development structures that would have moved the story onto different paths. One such possibility was the anti-chain movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Another was the agitation for retaining more of the controls associated with World War II. And a third was the movement for new regulatory measures that was eventually turned back by the Consumer Goods Pricing Act of 1975. In each instance a case could be made for eager support. But the industry’s leaders chose instead to side with the other mass distributors, try to compete by copying them, and fight any new forms of governmental intervention. In doing so, Howard concludes, they contributed to their own demise. In an epilogue, Howard also discusses the current nostalgia for the kind of department stores that have now largely disappeared, a nostalgia that she seems to some extent to share. Yet this nostalgia, as she sees it, seems unlikely to produce much in the way of resuscitation. She sees little hope in the current agitations for “buy local” campaigns, pedestrian malls, consumer cooperatives, and tourist-leisure revitalizations. And while the nostalgia is often intertwined with critiques of suburbanization, deindustrialization, and globalization, it has at the same time embraced metaphors of...

Media Business Transformation in the Workplace: Creating a Culture of Innovation

The lessons of business history have taught us that there is no such thing as a static market. Global competition and the power of intelligent networking have engendered a new competitive spirit that cuts across countries and companies alike. This is particularly true in the field of media and telecommunications where once great companies fall victim to creative destruction;supplanted by the next communication start-up company with a good idea. From the original AT&T Bell Labs to the modern-day Googleplex, the history of innovative discovery is really the study of how organizations set out to problem solve. One of the goals of highly successful companies is to make innovation a sustainable, repeatable process. In order to accomplish this, innovative companies create the right kind of culture in which to do good work. This article will look at the challenges associated with new product development and how good companies go about creating a culture of innovation and discovery. The second part of this article looks at the qualities and characteristics that make innovation a sustainable, repeatable process. Special attention is given to such ideas as the importance of risk and experimentation, creating the proper workspace, mobility and virtual communication, serendipitous connections and the value of external partnerships and collaboration.

Books on Japanese Business History Published in 2016

Books on Japanese Business History Published in 2016

What is a Family Business?

Defining the concept of family business is an ongoing challenge. The debate around it is here discussed from the point of view of business history and family business theories as developed in the last fifteen years. Historians are interested in reflecting changes in family businesses at different periods and within different societies, and focus their research work on ownership and control within family firms. For their part, family business theorists still understand the concept as a compound or a circular scheme consisting of elements such as business, family and owners or power (governance and management participation), experience (generation in charge) and culture (family and business values).

Columbus, Ohio: Two Centuries of Business and Environmental Change by Mansel G. Blackford

Reviewed by: Columbus, Ohio: Two Centuries of Business and Environmental Change by Mansel G. Blackford Brian Bonhomme Columbus, Ohio: Two Centuries of Business and Environmental Change. By Mansel G. Blackford. (Columbus: The Ohio State Univ. Press, 2016. 232pp. Cloth $69.95, ISBN 978-0-8142-1314-8.) Mansel G. Blackford is professor emeritus of The Ohio State University and has a prodigious record of scholarship in business history stretching back over forty years. In this well-crafted study he argues that Columbus’s basic urban development can be understood as the result of two centuries of “tension . . . between business growth and environmental change” (2) and the role played by city government in mediating this tension. Put more abstractly, in Blackford’s model, business acts upon and alters the natural environment to create value; environmental resources subsequently prove to be scarce or are harmed; public policy is crafted in response. The result is the unique and ever-changing urban fabric of the Ohio state capital, founded in 1812 in largely untouched forest. [End Page 90] Overall, Blackford reckons water resources the most critical factor. Scarcer than developable land (whose area on the flat wooded plain, and in the absence of natural boundaries, could always be increased), water was from the start an important limiting factor. Although “there was never a period of laissez-faire in the history of the city” (2) for a little over a half-century, the private sector nonetheless dominated Columbus’s affairs, fueling impressive economic growth, population expansion, and the relentless growth of the city itself. But by the end of the Civil War, success had created its own problems: insufficient access to clean water for both residential and industrial use, and the spread of waterborne diseases such as typhoid threatened public health and economic expansion. At this point, city government began to assume a greater role in addressing these issues, such that henceforth an uneasy private-public interaction would drive the city’s physical development. Lacking the financial resources of a New York or Boston, Columbus policy makers, Blackford argues, proved especially innovative in water-use issues, for example, in the engineering design of sewer and drinking water infrastructure from the 1870s and further improvements in the Progressive Era (209). Improved infrastructure, in turn, underlay renewed economic vigor and especially the northward expansion of the city thereafter. From the late 1960s, environmental NGOs became important new players in conflicts over natural resource use, especially regarding Big Darby Creek, which after an acrimonious ten-year battle was given legal protection as a state scenic river. Regarding land issues, Blackford emphasizes that the ease of incremental outward expansion often led to inefficient use of space, rampant sprawl, and the relatively late adoption of zoning laws. Public policy here, unlike with water issues, was typically less a counterweight to private interests than a “rubber-stamping” of what these demanded or had “already done,” especially regarding the routing and construction of roads, highways, bridges, tunnels, and water and power lines (210). Relatively unconstrained by natural or legal challenges, innovation similarly lagged. Blackford also treats Columbus’s evolving social and economic heterogeneity. Inequalities across different communities’ political and economic influence meant that environmental benefits, such as clean water and convenient access to parks and recreation, accrued more often to wealthier, whiter sections of the city, while environmental burdens fell disproportionately on poor, immigrant, and minority communities. The positioning of sewage plants and waste dumps, for example, sometimes left these latter neighborhoods at the mercy of unpleasant odors and dangerous pollutants; and the [End Page 91] placement of highways often blighted or cut up minority communities, reducing property values, discouraging investment, and helping drive a vicious cycle of poverty. The choice of Columbus was probably personal for Blackford, but he is no doubt correct in pointing out its ample qualifications as a case study in U.S. urban environmental history (beyond the mere fact that comparable studies have disproportionately focused on East or West Coast cities). Unlike many of these cities, which grew somewhat organically, Columbus has been subject to a greater amount of deliberate urban planning, and it has learned from the experiences of its older siblings. Columbus, in other words...

Методологія дослідження історії видавничого підприємства

This article is devoted to analysis of the modern methods and methodology of research of publishing business history. The urgency of research is that the printed word is crucial in development of the independent Ukraine. It forms a socio-political thought, affects the mentality of the Ukrainian people, its spiritual life and revival of historical traditions and development of economy. The necessity of developing the chosen theme is also amplified due to the absence of a special study in the national science, which would include comprehensive system analysis of publishing business, combining all the interrelated components of publishing process. The methodological basis of the proposed research is the main principles of historicism and scientific objectivity, the main methods of scientific and historical knowledge, modern conceptual approaches to study phenomenon of small business in the context of publishing activities. This means the whole of general scientific and special methods and approaches, which can be divided into three main groups: methods of obtaining and accumulation of information; methods of generalization; methods that can explain the results and draw conclusions.The study of the object of analysis is impossible without a digression into the past and clarifying its roots. Consequently the author made an attempt to generalize methodological basis of research based on the main principles of historicism and scientific objectivity, the fundamental provisions of both domestic and individual foreign historical, philosophical and political concepts on the laws and certain specific features of formation and development of publishing. It is concluded that applying general scientific and special methods and approaches makes it possible to trace the main stages and trends in development of publishing business, to clarify its specificity, its role and place at different stages of its development. It is possible to carry out the research tasks as to a systematic and complex analysis of the state of small publishing business, its impact on development of civil society through formation of middle class and comprehensive democratization of all public and state institutions based on empirical and theoretical methods of research.

Selected Abstracts from International Business History Journals

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International Business and the Development of British Electrical Manufacturing, 1886–1929

British electrical manufacturing provides important insights into international business history and demonstrates the key role of cross-border networks and agreements in its emergence. This article analyzes the factors that shaped phases in the industry's development and international operations. In doing so, the article reappraises electrical manufacturing's early decades in Britain; it shows how a changing political landscape transformed the strategies and ownership of firms, and reevaluates the industry's restructuring during World War I and its immediate aftermath. Further, the article questions accounts of British electrical manufacturing's failure in the 1920s and discusses the return to strategies of cross-border networks and agreements. Finally, it considers the lessons of British electrical manufacturing's emergence and subsequent consolidation, weighing the influences of firm-level, national, and international factors.

The Business of War: Reflections on Recent Contributions to the Economic and Business Histories of the First World War

As a means of complementing the articles that form the main basis of this special issue of Œconomia, this short review essay considers the economic and business history of the First World War in the light of two recent contributions to the historiography. The first of these—Arming the Western Front by Roger Lloyd-Jones and Myrddin John Lewis—focuses on military procurement systems in Britain during the war and the distribution of resources in the face of constantly evolving military circumsta...

How business historians can save the world – from the fallacy of self-made success

Narratives about ‘self-made’ success form a pillar of Anglo-American lore, but the concept’s meanings and applications no longer reflect either its origins or how people actually succeed. Ideological competition has reshaped the Calvinists’ admiration for community-serving self-improvement into a Social Darwinian glorification of individual ambition and wealth. American and British business and political leaders now invoke this newer narrative to assail progressive policies and to advocate the funnelling of resources and authority toward the wealthy – purportedly worthy – few. Because business historians understand the contexts and mechanisms behind business success, they are well situated to balance competing stories about prosperity’s sources and obligations.

United we stand, divided we fall: historical trajectory of strategic renewal activities at the Scandinavian Airlines System, 1946–2012

Although the second half of the twentieth century saw the rise and fall of ‘multi-flag companies’ (MFCs) in the civil aviation industry, our understanding of how some managed to buck the trend and achieve longevity remains limited. This article advances business history and strategic management research by examining the strategic renewal activities of Scandinavian Airlines (formerly Scandinavian Airlines System [SAS]) during the period 1946–2012. The study sheds light on the key roles of private and state owners, rivals as well as banks, in critical financial phases are discussed in terms of longevity in the company. The longevity of the business stems from the leaders’ ability to develop as anticipated and respond to change in their competitive arena in close interaction with the owners. Thus, incumbent firms that strategically renew themselves prior to or during market reform, such as deregulation, enhance their chances of developing the size of their networks and revenue streams. Our main contribution to business history and strategic management literatures is the development of context-specific stages, which shed light on the evolution of strategic renewal activities and shifts from older processes and routines towards customer service and efficiency.

Writing business history: Creating narratives

In this article we examine business history’s relationship to narrative history writing. In so doing we respond to the Call for Paper’s question: ‘storytelling vs business history: do business historians create narratives and in what ways?’ We survey attitudes in business history to narrative history writing, the relationship between archive, narrative, and historical knowledge claims, and the importance of writing practices and qualities. We report the results of interviews with practicing business historians and conclude that whilst the discipline has an ambiguous relationship with narratives and narrative history writing, there is a recognition that all historians are to an extent engaged in the construction of narratives, whenever they write. We argue that a re-engagement with narrative history writing might provide a way of resolving a current epistemological impasse between realist and interpretivist positions. Ultimately, any narrative turn in business history will be incomplete without an examination of the status of narrative history writing within the field.

Reassembling the archives: business history knowledge production from an actor-network perspective

This paper addresses the dearth of methodological analysis in business history. Questioning the sources of women’s marginality in Israeli business history, I integrate a feminist standpoint epistemology with a historically nuanced actor–network theory (ANTi-History) into a critically reflexive methodological account. I claim that this valuable analytical tool elaborates on business historians’ craft and offers three main contributions. First, it bolsters the disciplinary rigor of business history and its potential advantages for management and organizational scholarship. Second, the material semiotics of this approach highlights the extent to which nonhuman objects affect power relations in the course of producing a singular historical representation. Third, by tracing the performance of analytical categories such as gender in the course of knowledge production, it delineates the operation of mechanisms of marginality in the past and within the archive. These insights contribute to a better understanding of how business history was rendered masculine.