Stories, strategies, structures: rethinking historical alternatives to mass production

Abstract

This book grows out of an effort to rethink the history of industry and the writing of history more generally in the light of the vast transformation of the advanced economies that began nearly twenty years ago and may continue for at least as long into the future. Its proximate cause was a Parisian seminar in which economic historians and sociologists, predominantly from Western Europe, responded in studies of their own to our earlier work on artisanal, flexible alternatives to mass production, and we responded in many joint discussions and now in this Introduction to them. There is nothing novel in such an undertaking, for the most common of historical commonplaces is that every epoch rewrites history according to its own preoccupations. Yet predictable as they are, such efforts often produce results that disconcert by calling into question connections to the past that were among the few fixed points left in a turbulent age. The essays in this volume may well disconcert in a narrower intellectual sense as well. Most current economic history is meant to show that methods and models for understanding the economy in the present can illuminate the rationality of previously obscure realms of business activity in the past. But our aim is to show that the strategic reflections and deliberate institutional innovations of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century economies are no less instructive than any analysis based on current theory.

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