Based on the proceedings of a conference organised by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Chicago, 1999. The Editors demonstrate, through contributions from business historians and economists, that “advanced research” has superceded the neo-classical theory of the firm.

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...

Learning by Doing in Markets, Firms, and Countries draws out the underlying economics in business history by focusing on learning processes and the development of competitively valuable asymmetries. The essays show that organizations, like people, learn that this process can be organized more or...