The essays published in this Enterprise & Society Symposium trace their origins to a 2017 Wharton School conference, Multiple Futures for Business History. It has been an honor and a pleasure to have been involved in their publication process by providing editorial suggestions to the authors.Footnote ¹ Now I’ve been tasked to assess these essays’ individual and collective usefulness to our field. This cluster of work is far from the first attempt to offer forward-looking suggestions to colleagues; nor was the “little book” that Patrick Fridenson and I completed in 2013, Reimagining Business History, entirely a novelty. After all, business history has dramatically reconfigured its orientation from the late twentieth-century decades—the era of the organizational synthesis (“Do it like Al, Lou and Mira!”)Footnote ²—focusing on giant national and multinational enterprises, their strategies, structures, investment flows, and regulatory adventures. Along the road to this reshaping, multiple interventions urged us to think critically and creatively about theory and methods, alternative approaches, and fresh concepts. Hence, to introduce these remarks, I will offer first a brief, idiosyncratic review of what strikes me as key initiatives over the last generation that enlarged the discipline’s foundations and thematic trajectories. Then, using the Business History Conference’s (BHC) annual programs for the last twenty years as a “database,” I will revisit particular moments when “foundations and futures” anchored conference discussions, occasionally in the first decade and more often in the second. After contextualizing these panels amid History’s contemporary encounters with theory and method, I will suggest the contributions each of these articles is making to the many streams of business history discourse now filling a much larger intellectual “space” than a generation ago.

A short tale of an encounter some thirty-five years ago with a leading business historian may help set the stage. Not long after the publication of my first monograph, Proprietary Capitalism (1983), I boarded a bus dedicated to taking registrants to a BHC conference hotel or to an excursion site—I no longer remember which. I sat beside a colleague who turned out to be Mira Wilkins, and we soon chatted about our current projects. Aware of my research on Philadelphia’s nineteenth-century textile industry, Mira observed that, although my work was certainly interesting, equally certainly it was not business history. Like a proper junior scholar, I did not contest this judgment, instead mumbling some words of appreciation for her pioneering work on multinationals. To be sure, Proprietary Capitalism was not centered on the textile sector’s big businesses (although some did employ 2,000 to 5,000 workers, like the much-studied New England mill corporations), but rather documented an ecology of enterprises sharing regional spaces and seeking growth through diversity (in products, styles, markets), flexibility, and specialization. In the mid-1980s, such research was outside the discipline’s boundaries; but no longer.

In the 1980s, thanks to Mary Yeager, whose initial contribution to the field addressed refrigerated railway cars,Footnote ³ questions about gender and business began to percolate through conferences and seminars, and in time, publications.Footnote ⁴ Franco Amatori and Andrea Colli persistently reminded us about the continuing significance of family firms worldwide,Footnote ⁵ even as U.S. colleagues debated M-form versus U-form corporate structures. Before long, Juliet E. K. Walker and Walter Johnson signaled that race, like gender, was a “useful category of historical analysis”;Footnote ⁶ whereas Joanne Yates and Chris McKenna fostered recognition that both standard setting and professional services played major and ongoing roles in structuring enterprises and shaping their initiatives.Footnote ⁷ Each of these thematic emphases has penetrated deeply into business history practice, as research has struck out in fresh directions unimagined decades ago.

There have been many more. Over the last generation, at least a dozen other research vectors have surfaced and thrived (some for just a little while). Consider entrepreneurship, the Schumpeterian partner to bureaucratized management, or businesses’ environmental practices,Footnote ⁸ both of which have sustained long arcs of inquiry. Other themes burst onto the scene then faded, so far as I can tell: Americanization, national systems of innovation, performance, and perhaps state-owned enterprises.Footnote ⁹ Meanwhile, the history of “business groups” has blossomed outside the Anglo-American orbit,Footnote ¹⁰ and networks bid fair to displace systems as an anchor concept; perhaps present disjunctures are leading us to reimagine a past less organized than we once judged.Footnote ¹¹ Following two recent market crashes (U.S. IT startups at the century’s turn and the global Great Recession, triggered by U.S. real estate), timely historical studies of failure and fraud have abounded,Footnote ¹² reinforced by renewed attention to corporate governance (not just structure), risk (not just insurance),Footnote ¹³ finance (beyond conventional banking research), and the sources and uses of knowledge, including information technology and intellectual property (morphing from patent studies). Given the cross-disciplinary explosion of globalization analyses, business historians have reached back to identify and analyze long-distance trade networks and logistics, and conjecture earlier episodes of global linkage.Footnote ¹⁴ And yes, we have recently returned to, or rediscovered, the workings of capitalism (and with some of my recent work, perhaps communism also) as providing platforms for business history projects.Footnote ¹⁵

Surely there are other elements in the diversification of business history that I have overlooked or failed to register, but this array suggests at a minimum why a cluster of colleagues have commenced discussing the discipline’s foundations and futures, its methods and theories. By my count, during the last twenty BHC meetings, a dozen panels engaged such issues. (This, however, is an infinitesimal segment of the many hundreds of sessions presented, suggesting how seldom we reflect on first principles.) Two appeared in this century’s first decade: “Alternative Pathways” in 2001, with an all-star cast, including Naomi Lamoreaux, Dan Raff, Peter Temin, Tom McCraw (on Schumpeter), and Mary Yeager, with Patrick Fridenson commenting; and a “Networks” plenary session in 2004, featuring Thomas Hughes, Bruno Latour, Robert Boyer, and JoAnne Yates. The other ten were presented between 2011 and 2019, under headings both straightforward (“The Role of History at Business Schools” and “Business History in Theory”) and provocative (“Method or Madness: Does Business History Have a Methodology?” and “The Peculiarities of Alfred Chandler’s Business History”). As these inquiries deployed, in other domains of the profession, widespread theory and method struggles created “a zone of fierce contention” between advocates of cultural and postmodern theory and more traditional historians.Footnote ¹⁶ Little of this seems to me to have deeply influenced business history, as its debates have more commonly addressed economic, organizational, and management theories rather than drawing on Foucault, Derrida, Latour, Beck, or Baumann. That said, the UK’s Ludmilla Jordanova has extracted what I believe to be a profoundly relevant conclusion from those years of controversy, which likely restates a sentiment familiar to many from their graduate studies/graduate teaching:

With this crisp sentiment in mind, it’s time to consider the three articles at hand.

Dan Raff escorts readers on a carefully conducted tour of key concepts for business history (action, agency, structure) as explored by philosophical, economic, and sociological theorists, critically documenting the advantages and shortcomings of diverse configurations along the road. Among the many useful implications of this work, the most salient to research and writing practice are his invocations to adopt a “perspective less oriented to outcomes and more so to actors, processes, and the progress of sense-making”; to recognize that “an organization’s whole range of activities and resources [are] a potentially intrinsic part of what must be studied”; and to appreciate the centrality of routines and decision-making to both (including wrong decisions and decisions not made). Such an approach posits the rational as continuously being made through organizational/social practice, not as a reliable, given, and self-sustaining foundation for deciding and acting. It also “leads directly to a concern with actors’ intentions” and to focusing on “their understandings in the moment of both what the facts were and what the consequences of potential courses of action … might be.” Doing this resists teleological accounts, while gently echoing Bruno Latour’s insistence both on “following the actors” and on constituting the social as an ongoing, contingent, urgent project.Footnote ¹⁸ The challenge Raff acknowledges (a challenge that we should accept) lies in unearthing sources of sufficient depth and detail to enable the reconstitution of actors’ paths, detours, adjustments, and errors. Indeed, as he suggests, failure is immensely instructive, as is improvisation in crisis, or the reworking of routines in response to shifting environmental conditions. However, neither the brute fact of failure nor its statistical incidence tells us much of value. What fascinates are the desperate struggles of the drowning firm, even of a firm nearly drowning in unanticipated success, as was the case in Raff’s Book-of-the-Month Club case study.Footnote ¹⁹ These are precisely the sorts of narratives that could “speak powerfully to business people and … to people studying to be business people.”

Comparably engaging narratives are also envisioned by Andrew Popp, who invites colleagues to probe the intersections between business and everyday life. Rather than retain our customary concentration on firms or groups of them, as Raff does, he urges researchers to “address an important empirical lacuna”—business’s impact on our (and our forebears’) daily experiences “in ways that are profound and extend far beyond the economic or the organizational.” Though this reorientation in part derives from chiefly European ventures into “microhistory,” or “history from below,” it builds on, rather than mirrors that approach, considering elites as well as masses, public actions as well as private matters. As Popp stresses, “it is not possible to comprehend the everyday, even at the most granular level, without attention to meso- and macro-levels.” Even so, revaluing the everyday involves “sharply reducing historical scale,” destabilizing “macro-level structures,” disassembling meso-level institutions as reliable anchors for research (here, the firm or the corporation), and problematizing the taken-for-granted (markets, systems, progress, modernity). Doing this democratizes agency, as no longer “the property of a small elite cadre” or of the peak institutions they inhabit and animate.Footnote ²⁰ Moreover, it potentiates a critical dimension of research, arming business historians with tools to peel away the self-congratulatory facades of managerialism and entrepreneurship, and assess the pervasive personal and societal consequences of prioritizing control and disruption. Very much in tune with Giddens in Raff’s presentation, “as organizations, business enterprises need to be reassembled every day through the coming together of a myriad of people performing their roles.” To persist, a firm requires the “ongoing replication of its microfoundations in the everyday, a process … deeply enmeshed or entangled in other everydays located ‘outside’ the enterprise itself.” Its routine instantiation by actors can of course come suddenly to an end, both, as Raff notes, with fiscal collapse or as with high-tech startups badly managed or captured by takeover artists when “the brains of the firm walk out the door.”Footnote ²¹ Attention to the everyday preserves this contingency as an essential counterparty to routine, repositioning the enterprise as more fluid, “a locus for the initiation and organization of that thickening web of social affiliations and day-to-day transactions.” This research mode seems apposite for granular studies of entrepreneurship, innovation, maintenance and repair, mergers and acquisitions, and framing/executing projects or joint ventures, especially transnational—to identify just a few plausible targets. However, a salient problem remains, it seems to me—identifying and gaining access to sources sufficiently robust to allow historical reconstitution of the everyday within and surrounding enterprises or projects. For articles on family, business, and emotion, Popp was able to rely on a remarkable husband-and-wife letter collection; and in my work thirty years ago on a family-based Philadelphia carpet firm, I drew heavily (and gratefully) on comparable father-and-son correspondence.Footnote ²² Such treasures have been, in my experience, unusual; so we ought to inquire about what varieties and quantities of sources can be identified and “mobilized” for linking business practice and the everyday.

Ken Lipartito’s contribution to this symposium marks, so far as I can recollect, the first appearance of the term “ontology” in this journal. His essay represents something of an extension of a memorable article published in the American Historical Review several years ago, a literature review that also referenced ontology and agency:

Here, as there, Lipartito employs Latour’s effort to fashion “a new social ontology,” which displaces fundamentalist individualism, rejects reductionism and essentialism, and, most radically, refuses “to make any categorical distinction between subject and object, rejecting modern western thought at least as far back as Descartes.” For Latour, “the social was built up by the interactions of actants of all sorts [which] form strategies and make connections gathering force to support one or another version of what the social should be.” Reiterating “one or another version,” here the social is multiply assembled and construed, contested, and constantly in motion; it bears no resemblance to the parsimonious addition that accompanies methodological individualism’s impoverished notion of society. As with Giddens, we, each and all, are daily “reassembling the social” through instantiating routines, sharing views, space, and food, taking turns, and creating proposals, plans, and projects. Who we are as people is not given by our DNA, but “made in time and in relation,” both to other humans and to our highly differentiated, in part shared, experiences with materiality (books) and immateriality (gravity).

Trouble starts immediately, though in my view it’s beneficial trouble, and perhaps overdue. In this framework, agency extends beyond humans to objects and phenomena that “can make things happen.” (Think tornadoes, viruses, pets, or climate change, as here, agency does not presume consciousness or intentionality.) Hence, as Lipartito explains, enterprises can have agency that is not the sum of individual capabilities. Moreover, in this neighborhood, causality becomes multifarious, complex, and qualitatitive, not reducible to or captured by indicators, proxies, or regressions. Explanation as a goal fades away—we can no longer explain one thing by and through another thing, “as social structures might be reduced to microeconomic actions.” Outcomes are contingent, unstable, and temporary, and as all three contributors contend, they are also plainly the wrong place to start an inquiry. It thus becomes crucial to ask questions that locate actors at the outset (or in the middle) of emergent processes whose trajectory is only partly understood and whose success or failure is hardly within their span of control. Such positioning eliminates retrospective rationalization by placing actors and organizations fully within the environment they confront when moving forward in time and space with incomplete knowledge and substantial uncertainty. Research thus emplotted may well have just the magnetism necessary, as Raff has urged, to reach readers themselves doing business (or preparing to do so). Such work may also exemplify the specificity and nuance—the human texture—that Popp underscores, all the more so when informed by a deep appreciation of the theoretical frameworks Lipartito has so compellingly reviewed. Taken together, the three articles gathered here offer not only food for thought, but a feast for the imagination.