The Significance of Spatial Theory for Business Historians

In recent decades, "theory" has achieved substantial market penetration among historians, regarded by some as a lodestar and by others as a devilish influence. Veteran business historians can certainly recall the rapid advance of quantitative methodologies, with their underlying strata of science-based theoretical assumptions, into economic and social history during the 1970s. Ironically, at roughly the same time, a set of social science disciplines, whose practitioners had become dissatisfied with the dominant quasi-scientific paradigms in sociology, political science, and geography commenced taking the "historical turn," a disparate effort to delineate historical contexts and dynamics that structured social, political, and spatial behaviors and provided them with broader significance [21]. Though their efforts to appropriate histories often ran at cross-purposes with historians' search for systematic principles to organize narrative accounts, the interactions these initiatives generated were and continue to be intellectually provocative, particularly in the new "field" of historical sociology and in the revitalization of historical geography [1, 2, 12, 26]. In parallel, other historical disciplines, notably intellectual, gender, and cultural history, drew substantially on theories of language and textuality (the "linguistic turn"), as well as from perspectives on identity, ritual, and myth (in ethnographic and post-structuralist "moments"), to redirect research and ground novel specializations [6, 17, 27, 37]. Recent, valuable work by Ken Lipartito and Angel Kwollek-Folland has called business historians' attention to aspects of these perspectives [18, 19 ]. Though relatively little of this ferment has yet had an impact on the practice of business history, theory has nonetheless played an important role in the discipline's development. From Coase through Simon and Penrose to the organizational synthesis, models derived from neo-classical economics and institutional analysis have profoundly and subtly influenced the selection of topics, understandings of significance, and modes of explanation in business history [24, 30, 38]. Alfred Chandler's early work was indebted to Max Weber's thinking about enterprise and bureaucracy, and his later studies interacted with Oliver Williamson's transaction cost economics [5, p.400; 4, pp. 14, 631-2]. Scholars of entrepreneurship ave, of course, found Schumpeter instructive. Most recently, in her response to Leslie Hannah's plenary paper at the 1995 Business History Conference, Mary O'Sullivan made a dozen or more references to "theory" while defending the proposition that "the stuff of business history...is the analysis of the process through which some business organizations come to dominate certain industrial sectors and national economies" [22, p. 235]. Theory is essential, clearly, though debates have intensified over which theories are to be used and how.