Beyond Markets and Hierarchies: Toward a New Synthesis of American Business History

Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Daniel M.G. Raff and Peter Temin ()

No 9029, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We sketch a new synthesis of American business history to replace (and subsume) that put forward by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., most famously in his book The Visible Hand (1977). We see the broader subject as the history of the institutions of coordination in the economy, with the management of information and the addressing of problems of informational asymmetries representing central problems for firm- and relationship design. Our analysis emphasizes the endogenous adoption of coordination mechanisms in the context of evolving but specific operating conditions and opportunities. This naturally gives rise both to change and to heterogeneity in the population of coordination mechanisms to be observed in use at any moment in time. In discussing the changes in the population of mechanisms over time, we seek to avoid the tendency, exemplified by Chandler's work but characteristic of the field, to see history of adoption in teleological rather than evolutionary perspective. We see a richer set of mechanisms in play than is conventional and a more complex historical process at work, in particular a process in which hierarchical institutions have both risen and, more recently, declined in significance.

JEL-codes: M0 N0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-pke and nep-reg
Note: DAE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Published as Lamoreaux, Naomi R., Daniel M. G. Raff, and Peter Temin. “Beyond Markets and Hierarchies: Towards a New Synthesis of American Business History." American Historical Review 108 (April 2003): 404-33.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w9029.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:9029

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w9029

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().