Daniel Raff

2020 Charlotte, North Carolina

Abstract: 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.

2022 Mexico City

Abstract: Professional argumentation about historical explanation in our times begins in the 1940s with a paper by the positivist Carl Gustav Hempel and a book by the idealist R.G. Colllingwood. Historians found it hard to square Hempel’s ideas with their actual practice. Collingwood was a leading historian of Roman Britain and a practicing archeologist as well as Waynfleet Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford and his book rang more true but seemed to license anything. There was much literature for a time (even a journal); but the field seems to have largely faded from broad professional interest in the 1970s. Interest has been revived by a 2019 book by Paul Roth in the analytic philosophical tradition but taking (I would say) post-modernism seriously. I think there is much to admire in Roth’s book but that it is fundamentally misconceived. The paper sketches these debates and lays out an alternative conception of historical explanation, exploring its implications and developing the way that it at once justifies historians’ focus on agency and disrupts without destroying social scientists’ desire to link the idea of explanation to an image of a law-like causal ordering. Historians as a group seem to shy away from talking about this sort of thing. Some even go so far as to say that offering explanations is the farthest thing from their minds, their project being, instead, merely to offer an account of events. This paper has three substantive objectives: to clarify the sense in which such accounts are indeed a form of explanation, to show how helpful this clarification is in cutting through barriers to extra-departmental communications with social scientists, and to show how that notion of explanation exposes a somewhat novel but I argue very helpful agenda of practices and issues which would illuminate histories of operating business organizations.

2022 Mexico City

Abstract: The most remarkable developments in productivity history and in innovation more broadly in living memory have taken place in the so-called Silicon Valley area of Northern California. The early development and growth of the firms carrying out the innovation has been funded by venture capitalists. The history of the venture capital industry has been written for the most part in two strains, one for relatively popular audiences largely in terms of the VC firms’ investments (and focused much more on the handful of great successes than on the much more common merely modest successes or outright failures) and the other for economists and finance academics and professionals in terms of the economic structure and clever incentive alignment in what became the standard forms of contracts between investors in venture capital funds and the VC firms themselves on the one hand and between the VC firms and their portfolio investments on the other. A critical review of the only extant scholarship on the first Bay area firm making new venture investments reminds readers that markets often do not swiftly identify efficient solutions to novel problems and opportunities. This paper examines the logic and history of the limited partnership as a form of innovation finance. That history is much more interesting than simple efficiency-oriented accounts might suggest and the paper brings out the structural role—contingent, agentic, and wildly underappreciated—and content of the contribution of “transaction engineer” lawyers in designing structures which innovated to solve emerging problems, address the emerging opportunities, and generally provide the organizational infrastructure of the history we do know.

2023 Detroit, MI, United States

Abstract: 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.

2024 Providence, Rhode Island

Abstract: 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.

2024 Providence, Rhode Island

Abstract: 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.

2025 Atlanta, Georgia

Abstract: What the historian careful with sources can hope for confidently is that when the analysis or synthesis comes to subsequent attention, it still seems true to its evidentiary basis. It is harder to maintain such confidence about evidence which emerges only afterwards and about the perspective new evidence might suggest. This paper challenges a popular impression of Chandler’s central argument in The Visible Hand and, equally, certain prominent claims in Lamoreaux, Temin, and Raff [LRT] (2003). The challenge derives from an observation about the structure and incentives regarding organization of historically key production processes. The structure of production Chandler chronicles is ultimately one of flow-style integrated sequential production. Vitally important once, this seems to have run its course. LRT noticed and emphasized the late CXX rise in the importance of long-term vertical relationships between distinct firms. But LRT were also eventually wrong-footed by time: those long-term relationships seem now to have been just a harbinger of the modular organization and products dominating productivity growth and prospective profitability in recent decades (see Baldwin forthcoming etc.). Yet the basic LRT and Raff methodological point (see bibliography) remains intact and indeed visibly robust. In the absence of something like a classification theorem saying that the number of such forms of organization is strictly limited and the empirical observation that the varieties have all emerged already, history remains for the industrial historian a fundamentally open-ended subject and the anti-Whig forward looking perspective remains the best basis for robust historical analysis. What prompts the incidence of cross-sectional change in dominant form over time is not some τελος but rather the differential pace of opportunities for significant technical change across industries. This observation represents a complement to the LRT perspective without diminishing the latter’s force, altering the sense of the facts that essay discusses though it does.