Terry Gourvish

Business History: In Defence Of The Empirical Approach?

The theme of this article is the status of business history, and the methodologies with which it is associated. Business history is often regarded by more mainstream historians and business school ...

Peterson and Berger revisited: Changing market dominance in the British popular music industry, c.1950-80

In studies of the popular music industry, there has been much interest in the market share of the leading firms (majors), and the apparent connections between a high level of concentration and musical innovation and diversity. Peterson and Berger argued that in the United States the majors lost market share to independent companies in 1955–62, then recovered their position to 1973. This article uses a newly-constructed database and concentration measures to test the proposition in relation to Britain for 1952–75. We find that British majors also lost market share, but the process started much later, and was not followed by a recovery. Instead, American majors entered the market directly from the late 1960s.

Management and business in Britain and France : the age of the corporate economy

For generations, the uneasy relationship between Britain and France has captured the popular and scholarly imagination. Comparative studies between the two countries abound, from political systems to eating habits: hitherto they have not extended to business history. There is now growing interest in comparative business systems, practices, and performance. In these areas comparison with America, Germany, or Japan have taken precedence. This volume, with contributions from leading British and French experts, explores comparative developments and trends in the two countries which for so long were the guiding lights of Europe and the world. In particular it looks at three main dimensions - the family firm; education and training; and mergers and company structure. With a mixture of case-studies, sectoral analysis, and wider-ranging comparison, the book will be a useful addition to an understanding of the evolution of business organization, competitivness, and performance.

The Rise of the Professions

The emergence of a substantial and powerful professional group — class, perhaps, is not quite the right word — within the British middle class was a phenomenon which gathered considerable pace in the later Victorian period. Yet it is a process which is rather difficult to summarise effectively. There are many problems inherent in defining the term ‘profession’ and in measuring the extent of professional development. In this chapter attention is given to these, after which an examination is made of the several paths to professional status in the period to 1900; the impact of professions on the economy; and, briefly, the role of professional people in stimulating social change and, in particular, social reform. By way of introduction, it should be noted that the emergence of a larger group of professional occupations was naturally a function of more global developments in nineteenth-century Britain: the growth and maturation of the world’s first modern capitalist economy; an increasing, and an increasingly prosperous, population, together with its concentration in urban settlements; and the diversification of the industrial structure, with an increased emphasis upon the service sectors. The statistical summary in Table 2.1 provides an indication of the scale of these changes since 1841, and an opportunity to compare change in the thirty years before and after 1871.

The Rise (and Fall?) of State-Owned Enterprise

One of the main barometers of British industrial policy since 1945 has involved those enterprises taken into public ownership after the war. The nationalisation of inland transport (chiefly the railways), coal, gas, electricity, airways and steel was undertaken by the Labour governments of 1945–51 in a spirit of economic and political idealism about the advantages of industrial management by the state, although the precise aims of the new enterprises were left rather vague, and the legacy of government-industry relations during the inter-war years played an important part in the process, as will be argued below. There then followed a long debate about the organisation and performance of the public sector model in a mixed economy. Criticisms of the alleged inefficiency of the nationalised industries gained ground in the 1960s and reached a crescendo in the more difficult economic conditions of the 1970s. The post-1979 Thatcher administrations pursued a consistent and determined policy of ‘rolling back the public sector’, such that ‘privatisation’ became the watchword of the 1980s quite as much as ‘nationalisation’ was in the late 1940s. In this chapter the main features of these developments are sketched out, and an attempt is made to provide a long-term perspective on state-owned enterprise in Britain.

What Can Business History Tell Us About Business Performance

This article reveals how business historians, analysts and managers tackle the key subject of business performance, and identifies the tensions between the principal approaches. Particular attention is devoted to Chandler, Porter and the FMA literature, financial measures, and broader measures, including benchmarking and performance indicators. The conclusion is that historians provide historical assessments that contrast with the more predictive measures of economists and analysts. It is argued that business historians, who emphasise profits, survivability and adaptive capability, can inform the strategic decision-making of the contemporary business manager.

Later Victorian Britain

Between the second Reform Act and 1900 Britain experienced a crucial transformation. By the turn of the century the country had become a mass democracy, though not one founded on universal suffrage; it was a heavily urbanised community based increasingly on distribution and professional services for economic success; and some 4.7 million square miles and 88 million people had been added to what was an already immense empire. Contrary to the fears of many people at the outset of the period, change had taken place gradually and without sparking a serious upheaval. To outsiders and also to many at home Britain appeared a model community capable of resolving internal conflict without resort to excessive force or revolution. Britain, by the norms ofother nations, enjoyed high degrees of social cohesion and national unity built on consent and co-operation between the governed and the ruling order. This sense of community survived despite the economic difficulties of the period, troubles in Ireland, labour unrest, imperial problems, religious tensions and a hard-fought political contest between competing factions. Later Victorian Britain was pre-eminently a stable society in which disputes were conducted within understood guidelines. Public disturbances such as the Trafalgar Square riots of February 1886 and November 1887 were rare.

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rounded chapter as there is some repetition. The importance of the Connexion needing to support the wives and children of the itinerant preachers is clear throughout these two chapters, but it is not until chapter three that we hear about the Preacher’s Fund, and its importance in terms of benefits, both retirement and familial, to the preachers. Nonetheless, it is an important element in the funding of early Methodism and deserves its own chapter. Chapter six moves away from the funding of preachers, their families and the churches, and onto the societies, circuits and the Connexion. Funding remains prominent in this chapter, focusing on the wider examination of funding throughout the Methodist Connexion. The success of this is shown by the fact that, as Norris claims, ‘By the late 1780s, Wesleyanism was no longer John Wesley’s personal fiefdom; it was becoming a sophisticated organization with an increasingly powerful central bureaucracy’ (p. 152). The final three chapters of the book examine other aspects of Wesleyan Methodism that are not directly linked to the financing of preachers and chapels. Using the financing of the Book Room and education provides more of an insight into how Wesley and the Connexion used transport to move their ideas around the country. Books were produced by Wesley in order to spread the word, and this was financed by the Connexion. The manner in which these books were moved shows that the importance of the existing transport and bureaucratic infrastructure to the dissemination of Methodism. The postal service moved large numbers of books quickly around the country. Although not discussed further, the postal service in the later 18th century used stagecoaches. This links back to the itinerant preachers’ use of horses, but stagecoaches were able to move larger quantities of materials further and more quickly than a single man on a horse. Children, too, were sent to Wesley’s boarding school, and both the children and teachers required transport to reach the school. These topics are not the focus of Norris’ analysis, however. Overall, for the historian looking to see how Wesley made use of transport in his Connexion, this book hints at a number of thought-provoking questions. However, this book never claimed to be an examination of transport. As a book examining the financial aspects of Wesleyan Methodism, this book is excellent, making extensive use of primary sources, and constructing a well-researched and compelling argument.

The economics of beer

with these articles and their conclusions. The book also offers no systematic discussion of how the second-generation private companies fared relative to the first generation of companies and relative to GOI owned lines in terms of efficiency and profitability. Again recent quantitative evidence suggests GOI ownership reduced costs in particular labour costs. Such a comparative perspective would help contextualise the impact of the revolving door between the public and private sector, and the associated regulatory failures highlighted in the book. That said, Financing India’s Imperial Railways, 1875–1914 is a detailed historical study of the environment in which railway policy developed in this very important period of Indian railway history. The book is a welcome addition for any specialists working in the field.

The Chiltern Railways story

This is a celebratory volume identifying Chiltern Railways as the paragon of a successful privatised railway enterprise in Britain. Hugh Jones is a committed Chiltern passenger and the former chairman of one of its user groups. In part 1 he provides a short, 80-page historical narrative, which begins with a chapter on the franchise company’s response to the infamous Tesco tunnel collapse at Gerrards Cross in 2005, and concludes with a chapter on a more typical day’s operations (in 2009). Part 2 contains a series of edited autobiographical contributions by several of those involved in making the company a success, including Chris Green, Adrian Shooter, John Nelson, Richard Fearn, Tony Allen, Steve Murphy and Cath Proctor. As Nelson, one of Chiltern’s former chairmen, explains, it ‘has become a symbol of all that has been good about privatisation . . . Innovative in just about every aspect of its activity, the company has enjoyed more or less continuous double-digit annual growth since its inception . . . when other companies were unwilling to risk investment without guarantees of an extended franchise, Adrian Shooter and his team took the opposite view’ (p. 7). Its strength was ‘built on an overriding belief in the importance of meeting the needs of its customers’. This may be so, but Jones points out that a fair proportion of its achievement rested on the prior investment by the public sector, in British Rail’s time, when Green and Nelson led the Network SouthEast sector. The line was an outstanding example of what could be done with a determined programme of ‘total route modernisation’ under a nationalised management. So this is not just a matter of the private sector succeeding where the public sector had failed; indeed, the private sector managers had to avoid squandering a fairly generous legacy. However, with old British Rail hands such as Nelson and Shooter remaining at the helm this possibility was remote; and it is evident that substantial improvements to the rail service were made once the seven-year franchise had been won by a management buy-out team and its partners in 1996. The initial bid included an order for new trains, the first in Britain for almost three years. It later became the only franchisee to win a new 20-year term from the Strategic Rail Authority. The Chiltern Railways story is a well illustrated, ‘fun and light’ effort. There are no footnotes and very few references (indeed, there is very little engagement with academic or even non-academic writing on the railways). Business historians will be disappointed to find that the basic building blocks are missing: the company’s balance sheet, profit and loss account, employment, assets, and so on. However, those who persevere will discover much to interest them, notably evidence of the differences in the entrepreneurial content and risk-return profile of public and private Business History Vol. 52, No. 7, December 2010, 1182–1196