Abstract

"Is There Still Life in the Internalist View? Agency, Routines, and the History of Business Organizations"

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

It is a commonplace in some business history circles that the so-called internalist view of business history had its heyday with the career of Alfred Chandler but really ground to a halt with his passing. This may be correct insofar as the content of papers at the BHC and in Enterprise and Society have been concerned—it might be said that the focus of attention shifted, so to speak, from enterprise and society to enterprise in society. I argue in this paper that those trends may well be real but that they more likely represent a shift in the orientation of the membership towards the wider historical community than the depletion of intellectual opportunity. The American membership of the BHC may be increasingly employed in History departments but this trend does not appear to obtain overseas; and intellectual developments in the management academia world in which those business historians are employed offer rich opportunities for a deeper understanding of the life course of businesses and industries. I contrast Chandlerian structural functionalism with an evolutionary perspective, bringing into that an analysis of agency at both the individual level (in the background of Tarbell’s epigraph from Emerson that “An Institution is the lengthened shadow of one man”) and in terms of the role routines play in more or less all organizations of any scale and complexity. This view of agency and its implications for understanding organizational routines suggests on the one hand a research agenda for specific cases and a line of analysis of what that can yield which is rich and not common and on the other a perspective—which might well be valuable to Ph.D. students and junior faculty—on what historians do and how that can contribute to business education far beyond courses concerning business history as such.