Description
Book SynopsisHow can this field develop in an age of global markets, growing information technology, and diminishing resources? A transnational collaboration between two senior scholars, Reimagining Business History offers direction in forty-four short, pithy essays.
Trade ReviewReimagining Business History belongs in American history and business collections alike and provides new approaches to understanding the evolution of companies, corporate strategies, and resources. Midwest Book Review An important and provocative book, not only in terms of business history but also in terms of the wider discipline, as the authors' plea for greater interaction with other historians. -- Joe Martin American Historical Review I really hope that business historians will read this book, because it is apt to open new roads and strengthen the discipline in such a way as to make of it a more assertive component of the larger field of "Economic History," which cannot be left only to macro-econometricians. -- Vera Zamagni EH.Net
Table of ContentsPreface
Introduction
Part I: Traps: Practices Business Historians Would Do Well to Avoid
1. Misplaced Concreteness
2. Not Recognizing That the State Is Always "In"
3. Periodization as a (Necessary) Constraint
4. Privileging the Firm
5. Retrospective Rationalization
6. Searching for a New Dominant Paradigm
7. Scientism
8. Taking Discourse at Face Value and Numbers for Granted
9. Taking the United States (or the West) as Normal and Normative
10. The Rush to the Recent
Part II: Opportunities: Thematic Domains
1. Artifacts
2. Creation and Creativity
3. Complexity
4. Improvisation
5. Microbusiness
6. The Military and War
7. Nonprofits and Quasi Enterprises
8. Public-Private Boundaries
9. Reflexivity
10. Ritual and Symbolic Practices
11. The Centrality of Failure
12. Varieties of Uncertainty
Part III: Prospects: Promising Themes in Developing Literatures
1. Deconstructing Property
2. Fraud and Fakery
3. From Empires to Emergent Nations
4. Gender
5. Professional Services
6. Projects
7. Reassessing Classic Themes
8. Standards
9. The Subaltern
10. Transnational Exchanges
11. Trust, Cooperation, and Networks
Part IV: Resources: Generative Concepts and Frameworks
1. Assumptions
2. Communities of Practice
3. Flows
4. Follow the Actors
5. Futures Past
6. Memory
7. Modernity
8. Risks
9. Spatiality
10. Time
Afterword
Author Index
Subject Index
