"Explanation, Historical Explanation, and Some Tasks for Business History"

Much historical writing is explicitly explanatory and most is at least implicitly explanatory. The question of what precisely historical explanation is and how it relates to explanation in other well-recognized intellectual domains has been a subject of at least intermittent widespread intense interest—as intellectual fashions have arrived and eventually been displaced—for not less than the past seventy years. This does not seem to be one of those periods of widespread intense interest; yet the older established views all seem, when reviewed now, ripe (if not over-ripe) for reconsideration. This is particularly so given the collision of cultures involved when business historians teach or aspire to teach, as many of our colleagues and students do, in business schools where the research and appointments/promotion culture is dominated by social science perspectives and large-sample statistical methods. This paper explicates and contrasts scientific, social scientific, and historical approaches to explanation. The differences are quite striking. In the last of these three cases, it also considers the ways that business history is interestingly different from history tout court. The paper fashions from these contrasts a picture of possible complementarities and explains how business historians in a business school setting might exploit these to make their work seem cogent and powerful to those whose own work and discourses are in many ways different from ours.