New Economic Approaches to the Study of Business History

decisions as how much of a good to produce, how to make it, and what to ß charge for it, their behavior is nothing if not the subject of economic theory. At the same time, however, businesses are organizations of people whose choices are affected by the social and cultural environment inwhich they live and work. Hence understanding how businesses operated in the past and why they succeeded orfailed is inevitably an interpretive activity that requires the tools and sensitivity of historical scholarship aswell. Unfortunately, there is little communication today between economists and historians or even between economic historians (who are largely economists by training) and business historians (who typically come out of history departments). The former have organized themselves into the Economic History Association; the latter into the Business History Conference. Only a small number of people attend both sets of meetings. Moreover, the two groups of scholars largely subscribe to and publish in different journals. Economic historians read the Journal ofEconomic H story and Explorations i Economic History, and business historians the Business History Reviem and the Conference's annual publication, Business and Economic History. There are relatively few articles in either set of journals that appeal to both groups of scholars.