Whither Business History?: Memory, Message and Meaning

Abstract

IntroductionI started my Bachelor of Economics at Monash University in 1963. My arrival intersected the publications of Noel Butlin's two seminal pioneering works, Australian Domestic Product (1962) and Investment in Australian Economic Development, 1861-1900 (1964). Of course, I had no idea at the time how Noel's work, and the discipline of Australian economic history he created almost single-handedly, would shape my professional life. I was one of the lucky ones who found gainful employment in the burgeoning departments of economic history that sprang up in so many universities. While I never worked at ANU, I met Noel on many occasions. All of us in the field were drawn to Canberra for conferences and seminars, and to use the wonderful collection of records at the Noel Butlin Archives Centre (NBAC).The question I want to explore is the future of archives, such as the NBAC and the one at my own university. My broad point is that the supply of business history and the demand for it by corporates have changed significantly in the past few decades. The most pessimistic interpretation is that the changing practice of business history within universities and the increasing reluctance of business to permit independent 'outsiders' access to their records bodes ill for specialist archives.Let me start with a paradox. More and more is being written about 'business', but the work of researchers, whom we might describe as business historians drawing on archival material, is situated on the margins of this avalanche. What scholars write tends, with some notable exceptions, to be read only by other business historians. Telling stories about business that reaches a mass audience is done by others, most notably by journalists and critics of various hues, and this information reaches its audience through a variety of media. Archives holding extensive records relating to individual firms will be less useful to those current and future scholars working in a shifting paradigm of 'business history'. A recent paper by de Jong, Higgins and van Driel in Business History showed that only around 20 per cent of the articles published in the leading business history journals from 1970 to 2012 were written about a firm! Moreover, I fear that in the current climate and foreseeable future it will be harder to persuade companies to donate their records to archives that mandate the independence of scholars using them.My argument progresses in a number of steps. First, I want to discuss the changes in what I call the 'practice' of business history that lessen the demand from academic practitioners for access to comprehensive archival material. Second, I want to suggest that firms today are less likely to make over their records for scholarly analysis than they were a generation or so ago. I will conclude by suggesting that the tide may yet turn back to the commissioning of full-blown histories.The practice of business historyThe practice of business history - the questions raised, the methodologies employed by authors, and type of records used - has changed over time in several significant ways. These changes have equally important implications for the fate of specialist archives holding 'whole of firm' records. The first dramatic shift could be placed shortly after the Second World War when Charles Wilson, a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, produced his seminal The History of Unilever: A Study in Economic Growth & Social Change (1954), which broke away from the interpretations of an earlier generation of largely amateur authors, family members and long-serving employees whose work he rather condescendingly described as 'heroic mythology'. In one sense Wilson was right, as these authors lacked the technical skills of the professional historians and, most likely, employed a good deal of self-censorship in the construction of their narratives. We learnt more about successful firms than the much larger group of those that had failed. …