Gilded Age capitalists, according to Nevins, sought to impose order and stability on competitive business, and that their work made the United States the foremost economy by the 20th century.
[9] By contrast, historian Priscilla Roberts argues that Nevins' studies of inventors and businessmen brought about a reassessment of American industrialization and its leaders.
In 1958 historian Hal Bridges finds that "The most vehement and persistent controversy in business history has been that waged by the critics and defenders of the 'robber baron' concept of the American businessman.
Scholars worked to develop theoretical explanations of the growth of the business enterprise, the study of strategy and structure by Alfred Chandler being a prime example.
Also included were Sam Walton; J. P. Morgan; Alfred P. Sloan; Walt Disney; Ray Kroc; Thomas J. Watson; Alexander Graham Bell; Eli Whitney; James J. Hill; Jack Welch; Cyrus McCormick; David Packard; Bill Hewlett; Cornelius Vanderbilt; and George Westinghouse.
His first two chapters looked at traditional owner-operated small business operations in commerce and production, including the largest among them, the slave plantations in the South.
Chandler argued that modern large-scale firms arose to take advantage of the national markets and productive techniques available after the rail network was in place.
This ability to achieve efficiency through coordination, not some anti-competitive monopolistic greed by robber barons, explained the high levels of concentration in modern American industry.
Moving beyond the markets-versus-hierarchies framework that underlies the previously dominant interpretation of Chandler, the authors highlight the great variety of coordination mechanisms in use in the economy at any given time.
As a result, the authors can situate the "New Economy" of the late 20th century in broad historical context without succumbing to the temptation to view it as a climactic stage in the process of economic development.
A key event was the publication of the Gordon-Howell report, Higher Education for Business (1959), by economists Robert Aaron Gordon and James Edwin Howell.
Funded by the Ford Foundation, the report gave detailed recommendations for treating management as a science and improving the academic quality of business schools.
[26][27][28][29][30] Another influential report, that same year, was The Education Of American Businessmen: A Study Of University-College Programs In Business Administration (1959) by Frank Cook Pierson.
Anne S. Tsui has suggested that business and management should not treat the issues of rigor (credibility of evidence) and relevance (usefulness of knowledge) separately, but see them as related.
[35] Understanding the development of business history as a discipline meriting its own aims, theories and methods is often understood as a transition from dominating themes of 'company biography', toward more analytical 'comparative' approaches.
Geoffrey Jones, who was McCraw's successor as Isidor Straus Professor of Business History, also pursued a comparative research agenda.
They argued that the economic development in this period stemmed from various phenomena of the late 19th century: the corporation system, the joint-stock deposit and investment banks, and the technological innovations in the steel industry.
To clarify the contributions of 19th-century entrepreneurs to the economic development in France, French scholars support two journals, Enterprises et Histoire and Revue d'Histoire de la Siderurgie.
[50][51] In Mexico, for example, under presidents Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–94) and Ernesto Zedillo neoliberalism became the basis for state-private sector relationships.
Other examples included Coleman's work on Courtaulds and artificial fibers, Alford on Wills and the tobacco industry, Barker on Pilkington's and glass manufacture.
[58][59] These early studies were conducted primarily by economic historians interested in the role of leading firms in the development of the wider industry and therefore went beyond mere corporate histories.
For economic historians, the loss of British competitive advantage after 1870 could at least in part be explained by entrepreneurial failure, prompting further business history research into the individual industry and corporate cases.
William Lazonick for example argued that cotton textile entrepreneurs in Britain failed to develop larger integrated plants on the American model; a conclusion similar to Chandler's synthesis of a number of comparative case studies.
[60][61] Studies of British business leaders have emphasized how they fit into the class structure, especially their relationship to the aristocracy, and the desire to use their wealth to purchase landed estates, and hereditary titles.