Abstract

"What Do (Business) Historians Do?"

Daniel Raff, The Wharton School (raff@wharton.upenn.edu)

It has become conventional for business historians working in business schools to explain to their colleagues that their work involves not just different sorts of evidence but a method which while different from that of the quantitative social sciences is equally legitimate and productive of genuine knowledge. Quantitative social scientific methods give an appearance of precision, quantifiable degrees of certainty, and at least a patina of causal interpretability. Historians’ methods are usually less decisive. They are often said to comprise a reliance on primary sources, triangulation (between sources), and a hermeneutic perspective. The first two are usually described crisply, the third rather more vaguely. This paper argues that once the third is expounded with sufficient care and probing, it emerges as far more fundamental than the first two and renders the methods on the one hand a valuable alternative to the quantitative social science procedures, in most cases distinct and when not superior then at least complementary, and on the other an approach to analysis which bears on the study of the enormously wide range of decision-making and action situations in which the challenge isn’t doing a calculation in any simple sense, still less comparing calculable incremental benefits and costs, but rather assessing possible but uncertain consequences. Whether the settings are confined to the far-distant or even relatively recent past bears more on the characterization as history than on what the working historian actually does. Much of the history literature concerns the exercise of agency. Thinking historically about situations in which agency might matter is making sense critically of events (and, implicitly, action and, as it may be, actual decision-making) intrinsically embedded in time and understanding why these events emerged and evolved as they did. Our stock-in-trade in business history may be less knowledge than how we approach getting it.