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New directions in business history:Themes, approaches and opportunitiesJohn K. Walton aa IKERBASQUE Research Professor, Basque Foundation For Science,in the Departamento de Historia Contemporánea, Universidad delPaís Vasco UPV/EHU, Bilbao, SpainPublished online: 23 Feb 2010.
To cite this article: John K. Walton (2010): New directions in business history: Themes, approachesand opportunities, Business History, 52:1, 1-16
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KEYNOTE LECTURE
New directions in business history: Themes, approaches and
opportunities
Association of Business Historians 2009 Conference, University of LiverpoolManagement School
John K. Walton*
IKERBASQUE Research Professor, Basque Foundation For Science, in the Departamento deHistoria Contemporanea, Universidad del Paıs Vasco UPV/EHU, Bilbao, Spain
I come to this conference as an outsider, grateful for the opportunity to make hisvoice heard in what has sometimes felt like alien territory, although I have to admitthat I am the sort of historian who goes to the Urban History conference and leavesas the economic historians arrive. I am a social and increasingly a cultural historianwith core interests in tourism, resorts and regional identities, but with an enduringattachment to ‘history from below’ and to the ‘history of everyday life’. I feel more athome with Co-operators (especially), Chartists, trade unions and the survivalstrategies of the poor than with the bourgeoisie of the boardroom, except when theygo to the coastal resorts to which I have devoted a lot of attention. But businesshistory forms an important element in my curriculum vitae, without actuallyappearing under that label. Two of my books generated reactions ranging frompuzzlement to incredulity to rage when they first appeared; and they constitute thecore of my contribution to business history. The first, The Blackpool Landlady: aSocial History,1 examines the operation of small businesses, operated mainly bywomen, in seaside tourism in the world’s first working-class seaside resort, from thelater nineteenth century onwards. The second, Fish and Chips and the BritishWorking Class 1870–1940,2 looks at the workings of the first of the ‘fast food’industries, which was (and remains) distinguished by its overwhelming predomi-nance of family businesses and almost complete historical absence of multipleretailers. In both these cases I tried to reconstruct the business environment andsystems of provision of these small enterprises while setting them in the context ofclass, gender, community, popular culture, social mobility, survival strategies andgovernment food and public health policy regimes. This, I suggest, is the sort of thingbusiness history should always try to do; but this was, perhaps, a very un-Chandlerian kind of activity, and it has never been recognised or ‘adopted’ asbusiness history within that discipline. We should bear in mind at the outset,
*Email: [email protected]
Business History
Vol. 52, No. 1, February 2010, 1–16
ISSN 0007-6791 print/ISSN 1743-7938 online
� 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/00076790903475734
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however, that the identity of ‘business historian’, like Victorian ‘respectability’, is notnecessarily a permanent state: it can be adopted or set aside according to prevailingcircumstances, and it might be interesting to see what proportion of contributors to‘business history’ publish only in ‘business history’ journals, and what proportionare more eclectic in their choice or negotiation of outlets. And publications thatmight be regarded as ‘business history’ do appear in a wide range of locations, as weshall see.3
Meanwhile, another strand of my work has been the history of the British Co-operative movement, which was until comparatively recently, in its most visibleincarnation ‘on the ground’, a congeries of local retail (and related) businesses, ofsocieties based on individual towns and villages and expressing local attachment andcivic pride. The movement has attracted more attention from the perspectives of ‘self-help’ (a label that tells only part of a complicated story, and distorts by prioritisingindividualism over mutuality and ‘getting on’ over ethical business) and popularpolitics than as an alternative way of organising business, despite the best efforts of (forexample) Stephen Yeo and Peter Gurney.4 Yet another project, still in the publicationpipeline, has been an analysis, undertaken jointly with a Spanish colleague, of therelationships between Freemasonry, local government and business, especially thebuilding and entertainment industries, in Blackpool during its formative decades as apopular resort. The approach adopted combines the political history of localgovernment with a prosopography of municipal councillors and an examination ofMasonic symbolism in Blackpool’s public architecture and art: in a sense, a classic wayof extending the concerns of business history on to adjacent historical territories, andalso a reminder of the neglected historical importance of Freemasonry in business.5
So I bring distinctive perspectives and experience to my central questions: what isbusiness history, what should it be, and what might it be? I shall argue that itsdominant remit is unnecessarily narrow; that its central focus on the entrepreneur,the family firm and the limited company marginalises alternatives to an increasinglyexclusive, monocultural version of economic activity; and that this removesostensible legitimacy from the historical study of other ways of organising theprovision and consumption of goods and services. If business history wants to defineitself as the history of capitalist economic practices, fair enough: in that case weknow where we are and what our working definition is. That would certainly identifyits remit as much narrower than that of economic history, and any discussion ofbusiness history’s identity must be haunted by the question of whether it is merely asub-set of economic history, although many of its practitioners would clearly want itto be more than that. If, as occasional concessions to diversity indicate in increasingvolume, it wants to be more than the history of capitalist enterprises, whether or notthat extends beyond business organisation and economic activity to take in ‘businessculture’ and the relationship between businesses, living standards, consumption andindeed politics, then it needs to take a careful look at its current assumptions andideology, and work out just what its preferred terrain – and methodologies – shouldbe. Simply being ‘what business historians do’ is clearly not enough.6
I am particularly sensitive to this because the developing discipline of tourismstudies, which should share overlapping territory with my interest in tourism history, islikewise in danger of falling into the pathway dependency trap of excluding relevantand important categories and experiences by default. Its ‘mainstream’ outputs arefocusing on big business and international tourism at the expense of alternative modesof provision and experience, and defining anything that does not fit its dominant
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paradigms as somehow ‘not tourism’ – resulting, for example, in the marginalisationof academic interest in domestic tourism in Asia, as revealed in Shalini Singh’sintroduction to a book of essays to which I have recently contributed.7 Many aspectsof the provision and consumption of domestic tourism are organised and marketedinformally, involve family businesses, and are entangled with other kinds of marketsand activities, often selling to locals as well as ‘tourists’. They operate on the fringes ofthe legitimate economy, and remain below the radar of official tourism statistics. Thismakes them difficult to investigate, but not unimportant; and an exclusive focus oninternational business and traffic flows (important though that is, as Waleed Hazbunhas recently shown in his history of the post-war politics of tourism in the Arabworld8) distorts the overall picture of tourist industry activity and impact. Is businesshistory, like tourism studies, and perhaps unconsciously, erecting artificial barriers andexclusion zones that narrow the ‘permitted’ range of themes, philosophies and types ofeconomic activity that its dominant consensus is prepared to embrace?
What does business history think it is? I begin with its British incarnation, in so faras it is possible to abstract British business history from the rest of the world, and withthe first book to try to pull together an overview of its concerns. I suggest that thecontent of John Wilson’s pioneering survey of British business history in 1995suggested, by implication or omission, that the concept did not include labour history,or SMEs, or any alternative model to the capitalist firm, whether this was based on thefamily or partnership, or some form of the public or private limited company, mainlyin manufacturing industry.9 Nothing else seemed to count as business history,although business networks and industrial clusters were apparently relevant, as wasinteraction between business and government, especially at national and internationallevels. There is very little on services apart from financial ones, especially banks. Co-operatives, mutuals, nationalised industries, anything run by regional and localgovernment, transport (apart from – especially – Victorian railways), selling theintangible, are all marginalised. Three years later David Jeremy’s less ambitious text-book introduction to business history in twentieth-century Britain placed moreemphasis on company culture, labour relations and business ethics, and paid attentionto the political environment of business and to relations between businesses and thestate, but kept the same overall emphasis in terms of what was prioritised and whatwas kept at the margins or ignored.10 How far have we gone from there, over the lastten to fifteen years, in Britain and the wider world?
The dominant Chandler paradigm on which business history was founded istightly focused on corporate management structures and the development of thelarge (international) manufacturing firm. I note that we are now supposed to havereached the post-Chandler era, and debate focuses on how many of the Chandlerassumptions business history should retain, and in what ways the Chandler agendamight be extended. For example, the influential Italian business historian FrancoAmatori, in his recent survey article ‘Historia de la empresa: estado de la cuestion ycontroversias’ (‘Business history: state of the question and current debates’), stillproposes keeping to the Chandler paradigm while making it more flexible inapplication.11 His preferred agenda of priorities for business historians embraces thefurther development of historical perspectives on globalisation, entrepreneurshipand the relationships between business, society and culture; and the alliances he seeksto develop with contiguous subject areas entail outreach to economics, managementstudies and history, although perhaps (reading between the lines) not all the housesof the many mansions in the latter discipline.
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And if we look at that flagship publication of 2008, the Oxford Handbook ofBusiness History, we also find that things have not moved on as much as one mighthave hoped.12 When co-editor Geoffrey Jones was interviewed about it for aHarvard Business School publication, he emphasised the importance to business oflearning from the past, not least to challenge fashionable theories that lackedhistorical grounding; but he also accepted that business history tended to occupy itsown silo and to make less contact than it might with potentially cognate disciplines.His explanations for this are interesting: business history deals more in books thanpeer-reviewed articles, so is less visible in the culture of business disciplines andeconomics where the article in a top-ranking journal is the gold standard; businesshistory methodologies tend to be qualitative and case-study based, in contrast withthe quantitative and overtly theory-driven conventions of the same cognatedisciplines; and the geographical remit of business history tends to be nationalrather than international or global. There was, interestingly, nothing here aboutreaching out to other kinds of history, to most of which these arguments wereirrelevant, and Jones’s own ambitious current project on the international beautyindustry seemed more concerned with globalisation than with engagement with themethodologies of cultural history as such. The context and purpose of the interviewwill have affected the nature of the content, of course, but it is still revealing.13
The content of the Handbook itself is equally conservative in most respects. The25 chapters, in four sections, expand the classic Chandler agenda but withouttransforming it: there are contributions on corporate governance, accounting,information technologies, and the remit extends further to cover industrial districts,business culture, education and skills, and industrial design and engineering. Thesection on ‘forms of business organisation’ reinforces the impression that onlycertain ways of organising economic activity qualify as ‘business history’. Theyinclude ‘big business’, ‘family business’, industrial districts and regional clusters,business groups and inter-firm networks, cartels and business interest associations.Bob Millward’s chapter on ‘business and the state’ extends the agenda in veryimportant ways to cover the public corporation and the nationalised industry, andthe debates surrounding nationalisation, privatisation, intermediate modes, andassessments of relative efficiency.14
But where are (for example) Co-operatives, mutuals,15 collective not-for-profitinsurance societies, municipally run utilities and other services,16 LETS and otherlocal exchange schemes, charitable and voluntary economic activities,17 communalarrangements for management of shared assets such as common pasture orfisheries,18 SMEs, ‘penny capitalists’ (to conjure up the title of an excellentpioneering book by John Benson19), family economies involving trading as well aswage-earning elements,20 and other kinds of economic arrangement? Where are thetowns and cities as organic business systems, organising and boosting themselves incomplex regional, national and international marketplaces, which constitute theorganising principle of the 2009 ABH conference, and which might, incidentally,include towns whose economies are based on tourism?21 Where, for example, arepublic corporations (if that is the apposite label) like the universities whose modernpublic service and educational mission, pursuit of knowledge and understanding,ethic and purpose are being so badly damaged by the uncomprehending importationof inappropriate business models and management systems? Edward Thompson sawsome of these developments coming as long ago as 1970; and business historians maywish to interrogate the ‘New Public Management’ to which Rosemary Deem and her
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co-authors provide a revealing introduction, especially as its implications come veryclose to home.22 What of the further education colleges which in Britain were amongthe most disastrous of many disastrous privatisations, but which are hardly everdiscussed outside that particular ‘education industry’ silo, or in Private Eye?23 Whatof New Labour’s academies, which bring private enterprise into the schools systemmore directly and overtly than before?24 What are the limits of the business historyof education and training, and are they to be constrained by the extent to whichinstitutions fit the model of the public limited company? There are interestingpotential research projects on the invasion of the school curriculum by certain kindsof business assumptions (but also by the Co-operative movement); but would thesebe ‘business history’? And what can business historians learn from, and contributeto, the evidence-based critical analyses of the Private Finance Initiative and of thecreeping privatisation of the National Health Service which have been undertaken bycourageous dissenters such as Allyson Pollock?25 This is very contemporary history,indeed ‘historia actual’ (the ‘history of now’) as promoted by an enterprising groupof Spanish academics; but it also needs its contexts.26
Are the histories of Co-operatives, mutuals and those other important aspects ofeconomic activity that provide goods and services in (or beyond) marketplaces, butnot according to preferred or privileged models of business organisation, not to beseen as ‘business history’? It is currently hard to find them under that heading; but ifnot, where do they find an academic home? To a large extent, presumably, they areto be defined under such headings as social history or labour history, especially whenthey entail resistance to the universalisation of strong and exclusive definitions ofprivate property and capitalist business practices, as in the eighteenth-century casesexamined in the extensive research of Edward Thompson and his collaborators andsuccessors on the ‘moral economy’.27 But their invisibility here suggests that businesshistory is to be equated with the history of private capitalist enterprises run forprofit; that the family, partnership and especially variants on the public and privatelimited company are the only ‘proper’ agencies for doing business; and that nothingelse has legitimacy in this branch of the academic world. This would fit neatly withthe definition of ‘L’histoire des affaires’ offered by the on-line EncyclopedieCanadienne: ‘Business history is the written record of the activities of individualsand enterprises which pursue private profit while producing goods and services.’28 Isthis what business history wants to be? If so, it is implicitly highly ideological, in thatit refuses to recognise, if not the existence, then the significance for its purposes ofany kind of economic activity that does not fit the sacrosanct model of the privatefirm or corporation.
A distinctive feature of the Handbook is the chapter by Patrick Fridenson on therelationship between business history and the discipline(s) of history more generally.In looking at the traffic initiated by business history, he begins (unexpectedly, at leastto me) by pointing up an example of the pioneering use of oral history by businesshistorians in the United States, and the way in which business historians avoided thesterile debates about the legitimacy of this kind of source that endured amongprofessional historians in other fields. This is a telling way in which to assert atransferable innovative streak in business history, but the salient pathways to thewider adoption of oral history from the 1970s originated elsewhere, especially in thetraditions of folklore studies and ‘history from below’, and the claim for effectivebusiness history primacy in this field, as it actually developed, cannot besubstantiated. Moreover, the debates about oral history were not necessarily sterile:
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the problems of philosophy, methodology and ethics that have been endlesslyrehearsed in the pages of Oral History and elsewhere are real and important,although they may have been pursued in some cases at the expense of actually gettingon with the interviewing.29 Similar caveats apply to Fridenson’s claims aboutbusiness history’s pioneering role in the development of industrial archaeology,30
and to histories of paternalism or occupational health and housing: these themeswould have been pursued with or without the existence of something labelled‘business history’, and many of their liveliest practitioners have been in nomeaningful sense ‘business historians’: consider, for example, the work of PatrickJoyce in the area of industrial paternalism.31 Such claims for business history’spositive or distinctive contribution to the wider world of historical studies thus fallrather flat, while the ‘historical alternatives approach’ to understanding processesjust seems to be what most historians do. When Fridenson’s presentation moves onto what other kinds of history can contribute to business history, the omissions areglaring: nothing on environmental history, for example, and a very limited gesture enpassant to the actual businesses of art, leisure, sport and tourism, while gender seemsto be represented essentially by typists and female consumers of cosmetics, and classis conspicuous by its absence, even as it returns forcefully to the agenda of social andlabour history, both of which remain alive and kicking, although the latter, inparticular, has been driven further back into its own silo.
All this at a time when the failures of existing business models, and the damagingeffects of the infection of other spheres of life and thought (including universities) bycrass versions of ‘business culture’ and management systems, cry out for critical,systemic interrogation across a broad historical front. There are signs that this ishappening: recent publications on the history of business scandals and corporategovernance are a good example.32 A further, systematic extension of the interests ofbusiness historians into the murky worlds of tax evasion and avoidance, ‘blackeconomies’, mobs, mafias and money-laundering would be a difficult and no doubtin some cases a dangerous enterprise, but there are already some pioneering works tolight the way, again not necessarily carrying an ostensible ‘business history’ label.33
But we need more of this, and we need business historians to tell practitioners, insubstantiated ways, things they do not want to hear. Some interrogation of thestimulating work of George Ritzer, and provocative concepts like McDonaldisationand glocalisation, together with Disneyfication, might occupy a more visible andcreative place in business history than seems currently to be the case.34 But I worrythat critical business history, perhaps informed by heterodox economics orunfamiliar philosophies or moralities, might simply not be recognised by themainstream of the subject area. I think, for example, of John Ruskin’s efforts to re-moralise economics and business ethics through his great work Unto this Last in1860, and the stony ground on which that fell until its incorporation into the ‘NewLiberalism’ and emergent Labour Party of the next generation, only to gounderground again between the wars.35 Of more immediate and direct concern, Ithink also of Frederic S. Lee’s disturbing work on how the politics of editorialboards, journal rankings and research assessment exercises has systematicallyreinforced and entrenched current orthodoxies in economics while marginalisingalternative philosophies.36 Similar fears have also been expressed about ‘policing thediscipline’ in geography, especially as regards Marxist interpretations and attitudesto ‘international critical geography’.37 We might also consider the disappearance of(for example) Co-operatives from economics text-books written for undergraduates,
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as documented by Kalmi for the University of Helsinki, but of general applicability:alternatives to the current economic orthodoxy are being steadily silenced and driveninto silos by a pervasive academic monoculture which will brook no challenge.38
This is part and parcel of the general problem in early twenty-first centuryacademe of the tyranny of journal rankings, ‘impact factors’ and league tables, whichuniversalises assumptions based on the academic culture of the sciences andencourages career strategies that foster contributions to existing debates (whichgenerate instant citations) following the agenda associated with established journals,and discourages interdisciplinarity and genuine originality, especially the openingout of new fields which might be slow to achieve wider recognition and generate aliterature. Academics can be very effective at identifying and pursuing opportunitiesthrough game-playing, which is an inevitable response to target-based work cultures.The addiction to mechanistic metrics among managers who lack subject expertise,and who are detached or semi-detached from academic culture, leads to the use ofsuch sterile evaluations as a management tool, which is capable of generatingcultures of bullying and intimidation.39 Sharp critical comment has emanated fromsocial and cultural geography, for example. Nigel Thrift and David M. Smith haveboth attacked the application of neoclassical economics and industrial productiontheory to scholarly activity and academic research. Despite his general endorsementof the process, the former has argued that the harnessing of this culture to theResearch Assessment Exercise has ‘accentuated a culture of anxiety, militatedagainst certain groups, and produced competition when cooperation may have beencalled for’, while the latter issued an outspoken clarion call to colleagues: ‘it is crucialthat we critically engage the forces of darkness seeking to turn academic life intosome gross parody of the competitive world of profit-seeking businesses’.40 Businesshistory is located in an interesting position from this perspective, between economicsand the management disciplines which have gone a long way down this road, andhistory, which is defending its culture of external research assessment through peerreview, together with the acceptance that excellent work can be found in manylocations and should not be ‘read off’ from where an article (or book) was published(as put into practice at RAE 2001 and 2008), and a continuing emphasis on themonograph rather than the article as the ‘gold standard’.41 Critical businesshistorians are, in fact, uniquely well placed by experience, position and culturalcapital to mount an attack on the current research assessment orthodoxy anddiscourage its further spread, especially in the light of an anonymous recentcomment on the problem of RAE target cultures and their unintended consequences,which identifies the issue as ‘really . . . a management problem . . . So I think thestarting point should be a no-holds-barred reconsideration of the nature ofmanagement in modern society, especially, but not only, in relation to scholarship’.42
Business historians ought to be particularly well equipped to take this discussionfurther.
Are the critical comments I have made about ‘real, existing’ business historyentirely fair? Outsiders are, after all, at their most vulnerable when presuming topontificate on the basis of, by definition, imperfect knowledge. Moreover, thestrictures about the content and remit of the Oxford Handbook need to take accountof that volume’s long gestation period, during which the world of business historyhas been shifting around it.43 The four-volume collection of articles pulled togetherby Jeremy and Tweedale and published three years earlier, in the Sage Library ofBusiness and Management series, actually has a wider remit, with business ethics and
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environmental issues highlighted, and ‘subordinate’ topics including SMEs, market-ing, labour management, business culture, boardroom management and corporatecrime. But here, too, the overriding agenda is ‘the business history of moderncapitalism’, especially in the twentieth century.44
Have the contents of recent issues of business history journals shown greaterreceptivity to diversity of economic forms and systems than the Handbook and otherrecent general statements might lead one to expect? They are certainly notmonocultural, but the dominance of a broadly Chandlerian agenda seems to thisexternal gaze to remain paramount. Harvard’s own Business History Review is asuitable starting point. It has been very broad in the range of its reviews. It has also runrecent special issues and articles on business and gender, scandal and crisis, pageantry,fashion, toothpaste (involving the tensions between viewing, and promoting, theproduct as more about health or the presentation of self), and clerks and commercialtravellers. These last form part, when viewed from another angle, of the ‘lower middleclass’ who came on the scene in social history circles from the mid 1970s, withimportant work by (for example) Geoffrey Crossick and Gregory Anderson, andsubsequent development by Christopher Hosgood, who also had interesting things tosay about small shopkeepers, without being taken up by ‘business historians’ as suchuntil recent work, after a time-lag, by Heller and Popp.45 This shows a measure ofopenness to expansion of the field through thematic innovation, without offering arevolutionary change of direction in the overall balance of approach or content.
Enterprise and Society, established in 2000, shows an intermittent and perhapsgently increasing commitment to small-scale businesses and non-manufacturingindustries, and even to unorthodox modes of economic organisation, including‘confraternities’ in nineteenth-century Paris, the ‘pyramids of trust’ which sustainedclusters of small-scale Italian businesses, and advertising and marketing in socialistYugoslavia, while female ‘penny capitalists’ in Lille also find their way into thesepages. We also encounter a steady, if rather thin, stream of articles on smallindependent enterprises, getting away from the tyranny of the big firm: independenttruckers in the United States, independent retailers and the rise of consumer culture,independent shopkeepers in 1930s Britain (one of several contributions by AndrewAlexander to what are still unusual aspects of business history), and in 2004 aremarkable consecutive set of dissertation summaries on Afro-American femaleentrepreneurship in beauty culture, black barbers and women in Chicago super-markets. The careful choice of title suggests that this journal may not even regarditself as forming part of the empire of ‘business history’. But the dominant agendaremained predominantly Chandlerian.
The similarly-titled French journal Entreprises et Histoire in recent years hasmaterial on imposing international standards, water management and quality,nationalisations and denationalisations (involving Martin Chick, for example, aswell as Bob Millward, and displaying a growing awareness that public corporationsprovide reputable solutions, especially to the problems posed by naturalmonopolies). To my personal pleasure and interest, it has also brought out asplendidly wide-ranging special issue on tourism (2007), which includes an article byPatrizia Battilani on small enterprises and local networks in Italy.46 This seems to bean increasingly enterprising journal which is indeed extending the frontiers ofbusiness history.
What of Business History itself? The editors are eager to extend the imaginedfrontiers of the sub-discipline, and the journal has for many years had a very wide-
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ranging book review culture. Its declared primary agenda, however, still prioritisescorporate organisation and growth, multinational enterprise, business efficiency,entrepreneurship, technological change, human resource management and profes-sionalisation, an array of signposted interests which still looks very Chandlerian evenwhen it is extended to cover marketing and business culture. Its publicly proposedagenda for change, moreover, entails more of the same on a wider timescale andgeographical front, together with an intention to inform the policy agenda in relationto regulation, nationalisation and privatisation. When the present editors proposed,in 2003, a ‘new paradigm of British business history’, this entailed an extension ofconcerns into the fields of corporate governance and accountability, and was met bya critique that sought to emphasise the varieties and idiosyncrasies of ‘personalcapitalism’.47 For the editors, in a later statement, business history should aim to bea ‘sui generis scholarly discipline’, engaging with ‘mainstream history and the widersocial sciences’, whatever exactly that may mean. Is this (perhaps conventional)rhetoric now being overtaken by a more diverse reality?48
The indications are that a quiet extension of the journal’s agenda, taking itbeyond the public pronouncements of the editors, has been proceeding over thepast decade. The special issue on ‘The emergence of modern retailing, 1750–1950’in 1998, in particular, included articles on consumer-owned flour and breadsocieties in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the development ofmunicipal market halls in nineteenth-century Lancashire, the supply systems of Co-operative retailers in mid-Victorian North-East England, the survival strategies ofspecialist tobacconists, and the ways in which Fascist retail licensing policiesprovided a conducive environment for the survival of small businesses.49 Betweenthem, these articles opened out alternative modes of business organisation fromthat of the capitalist family firm and limited company; examined municipalprovision, government regulation and the fortunes of small enterprises; madeexplicit links between business, economic and cultural history; and set a potentialagenda for the extensive diversification of the subject matter of business history.This has not been fully followed through over the past decade, but it is certainlymore than just a false dawn. Articles over the last few years have examined newkinds of business in terms both of organisation and provision. Pamela Pilbeam’sarticle on Madame Tussaud and her waxworks was a particularly exciting insertioninto an issue on the emergence of modern marketing, focusing as it did on a femaleentrepreneur in the leisure and entertainment industry.50 Other contributions havereached out to architecture and building systems, sport (both football and majorleague baseball), and government intervention in the British gas industry, allextending the coverage of business activity within (mainly) existing paradigms.51
Particularly innovative developments were the articles in 2007 on culturalresistance to marketing practices in Spain under the Franco regime, and on theprovision of and reactions to music in the workplace in two British chocolatefactories, making imaginative use of oral history.52 To return to an earlierpreoccupation, two articles in 2008 looked explicitly at Co-operative businesses,although it could be argued that neither of them really addressed what it was, andis, that makes Co-operative retailing different from the operations of public limitedcompanies, although in fairness there were times in the late twentieth century whenthe differences became obscured.53 This adds up to a steady stream of articles thatextend the agenda of business history into territories that should contribute to itsconcerns, without compromising its core identity.
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Of particular significance is the development of the historical dimension ofCritical Management Studies, which provides a sustained critique of standardbusiness and management studies assumptions from within the discipline,challenging over-generalised and deterministic theory and the political assumptionsoften associated with it. Embracing this development is perhaps even moreimportant than broadening the remit of business history into hitherto unorthodoxterritories, and Business History has been hospitable to (for example) the work ofMichael Rowlinson and his colleagues on the ways in which companies use theirown histories and representations of ‘heritage’ for management and publicrelations purposes, and on the often conflicted relationship between history andorganisational studies. Here is a potentially powerful challenge, through themedium of historical research, to dominant assumptions about the nature and roleof business history.54 The recently-founded journal Management and Organiza-tional History pursues a distinctive agenda which reaches out to an array ofphilosophies of history, including Foucault, Hayden White and post-structuralismmore generally.55
In general, the content of business history journals has been changing in anincremental way which goes beyond manifesto-type pronouncements aboutdesirable practice and innovation, in an inversion of the expected pattern wherebyprescription is more radical than reality. But there is a great deal of work on‘unorthodox’ businesses that finds its way into print in publications that are notalways accessed by business historians, just as those who regard themselves associal or cultural historians might not always think of checking out developmentsin a field labelled ‘business history’. Writing about co-operation is one exampleamong many of a set of quasi-autonomous historiographies that deal with thesupply of goods and services, but seldom seem to link up with or be recognised bybusiness history as an ‘entity’. Consider the histories of SMEs that I referred topreviously: not only fish and chips and seaside landladies,56 but also (for example)bookmakers (Carl Chinn, Mark Clapson, Mike Huggins57), complex domesticeconomies and their associated survival strategies (Elizabeth Roberts, Ellen Ross,Carl Chinn again, and others58), penny capitalism (John Benson59), small shop-keeping (Crossick, Haupt and Hosgood60), pawnbrokers (Melanie Tebbutt61),laundries (Patricia Malcolmson62) – and, beyond Britain, the tourist andmanufacturing businesses of Rimini,63 the shopkeepers of Milan and Castile,64
the hairdressers of Paris,65 and so on. Would these be regarded as ‘businesshistory’? I am not sure. So we have business history as itself an outlier of‘mainstream’ history, with potential or in some sense actual outliers of its own thatfail to make direct contact with it, though they may feed back into ‘mainstream’histories by way of (for example) labour history, histories of radical politics andgovernment, or histories of consumption.
When, following Lipartito’s lead in the Oxford Handbook, we pursue thequestion of business, culture and cultures of business, how far do we penetrate into(for example) the political and recreational cultures of trade associations, or the roleof business cultures in religious and other voluntary organisations? How far do we,and can we, follow the relationships between business and culture into the worlds ofcivil society that reach beyond business as such, even (for example) those of the golfclub or Masonic lodge? The relationships between business and culture are, ofcourse, a two-way street. But business history seems not to engage much withpopular culture, even though there are business histories of popular culture,
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especially popular music, broadcasting, sport and the pub. Peter Bailey’s editedcollection of essays on the Victorian music-hall as ‘the business of pleasure’ blazedan unconventional trail which might have been followed more widely.66 A.J.Arnold’s A Game that would Pay, on football in Bradford, is a business history inanyone’s language,67 and Charles Korr on West Ham United provides anotherexample,68 as do (perhaps) Mike Huggins’s work on horse-racing and (certainly)Alistair Mutch’s on pub management systems.69 Business histories of tourism are inshort supply, at least on current dominant assumptions about source material andagenda.70 Even the in-house or ‘official’ historians of a relatively well-documentedfirm like Thomas Cook are unable to pass beyond qualitative and discursive analysison the available archival evidence, and the same applied to my history of BlackpoolPleasure Beach, which was able to tackle cultural, social and to some extent labourhistory issues, but without the slightest chance of gaining access to any businesspapers, as opposed to (very useful) newspaper cuttings and photographic evidence.71
A new, expanded business history will be able to recognise such contributions. Butexisting business history approaches to tourism tend to work at the internationallevels where published statistics are available, which returns us to the question ofhow to make SMEs and ‘little people’ visible by creative use of archives andopenness to the enduring importance of this sector. Oral history, involving bothproviders and customers, has a deeply neglected role to play here: if business historywas in at a beginning of oral history, it has done little to extend its range.
But we should also note the ways in which distinguished colleagues likeLaurent Tissot, Patrizia Battilani, Hartmut Berghoff, Margarita Dritsas andAlastair Durie contrive to combine solid reputations as business historians in‘mainstream’ fields with pioneering work as historians of tourism. It has apparentlynot always been easy, as Alastair Durie’s informal chronicles of his academictransition from banking and linen to Scottish tourism history might bring out; butit is possible. So is a broader extension of the remit of business history to reach outto a wider cross-section of activities in the discipline, to escape from the self-imposed constraints of Chandlerian and indeed post-Chandlerian assumptions, andto shake off the bounds of orthodox economic assumptions. This appears to behappening: there are signs of vigorous new life branching out in many directions,and the restricted agenda that is still espoused by overviews and mission statementsseems increasingly at odds with emergent and proliferating innovation. Anextended agenda might include addressing the question of what constitutes‘success’ in business: is it about endless growth, or about sustaining a niche whichinteracts with and contributes to a wider society in a sustainable way? Moreover,we should be asking how the pernicious doctrine came about that the only,overriding, legally binding obligation of a firm is to maximise the return to itsshareholders and directors, without any concern for the comfort, happiness andsecurity of customers and society at large. The contradictions, duplication of effort,exploitation and sheer endemic profligacy and waste of capitalism are becomingincreasingly manifest even as its ambitions to global domination and controlbecome ever more far-reaching, while assumptions about the self-evident validityof the endless pursuit of growth in a finite world are being visibly falsified byclimate change, resource depletion and over-population. We need a criticalbusiness history that will engage with these issues in new and dangerous times. Butthe transformation of an important academic sub-discipline, from within, will stillrequire a major effort of the individual and collective will.
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Notes
1. John K. Walton, The Blackpool Landlady: a Social History (Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press, 1978); and see also Walton, ‘The Blackpool landlady revisited’,Manchester Region History Review 8 (1994), pp. 23–31.
2. John K. Walton, Fish and Chips and the British Working Class (Leicester: LeicesterUniversity Press, 1992).
3. For Victorian ‘respectability’, see the classic article by Peter Bailey, ‘‘‘Will the real BillBanks please stand up?’’ Towards a role analysis of mid-Victorian working-classrespectability’, Journal of Social History 12 (1979), pp. 336–53.
4. S. Yeo (ed.), New Views of Co-operation (London: Routledge, 1988); Peter Gurney, Co-operative Culture and the Politics of Consumption in England, 1870–1930 (Manchester:Manchester University Press, 1996); and see, for example, L. Black and N. Robertson(eds.), Consumerism and the Co-operative Movement in Modern British History: TakingStock (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009).
5. David Martın Lopez and John K. Walton, ‘Freemasonry and civic identity: municipalpolitics, business and the rise of Blackpool, from the 1850s to the First World War’,Manchester Region History Review 21, forthcoming 2010.
6. See R. Middleton, ‘‘‘W(h)ither economic history’’, or economic history is what economichistorians do?’, Business History 47 (2005), pp. 461–73.
7. Shalini Singh (ed.), Domestic Tourism in Asia: Diversity and Divergence (London:Earthscan, 2009).
8. Waleed Hazbun, Beaches, Ruins, Resorts: the Politics of Tourism in the Arab World(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
9. John F. Wilson, British Business History, 1720–1994 (Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press, 1995).
10. David J. Jeremy, A Business History of Britain, 1900–1990s (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1998).
11. F. Amatori, ‘Historia de la empresa: estado de la cuestion y controversias’ (‘Businesshistory: state of the question and current debates’), Revista de la Historia Industrial,Economica y de la Empresa 39 (2009); see also his ‘Business history as history’, BusinessHistory 51 (2009), pp. 143–56.
12. Geoffrey Jones and Jonathan Zeitlin (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Business History(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
13. http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5849.html (accessed 22 May 2009).14. See also R. Millward, Public and Private Enterprise in Europe: Energy, Telecommunica-
tions and Transport, 1830–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).15. These have not generally been well treated by historians: their histories are usually
consigned to the question-begging category of ‘self-help’, or used by ideologues of theNew Right to argue for the replacement of the welfare state by voluntary provisionthrough ‘civil society’: E. Hopkins, Working-class Self-Help in Nineteenth-CenturyEngland (London: UCL Press, 1995); D.G. Green, Working-class Patients and theMedical Establishment: Self-help in Britain from the Mid-nineteenth Century to 1948(Aldershot: Gower, 1985).
16. J.R. Kellett, ‘Municipal socialism, enterprise and trading in the Victorian city’, UrbanHistory Yearbook 5 (1978), pp. 36–45; M.J. Daunton, State and Market in VictorianBritain (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2008), especially Chapter 5, ‘The material politics ofnatural monopoly’; R. Millward, ‘The political economy of urban utilities in Britain1840–1950’, in M.J. Daunton (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 315–49; John Garrard, ‘The Salford gas scandalof 1887’, Manchester Region History Review 2(2) (1988–89), pp. 12–20; and see also (forexample) H. Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture 1919–1934 (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1991).
17. F. Prochaska, The Voluntary Impulse: Philanthropy in Modern Britain (London: Faber,1988); M.J. Daunton (ed.), Charity, Self-interest and Welfare in the English Past(London: UCL Press, 1996); A. Borsay and P. Shapely (eds.), Medicine, Charity andMutual Aid: the Consumption of Health and Welfare in Britain, c. 1550–1950 (Aldershot:Ashgate, 2007).
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18. J.M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England,1700–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Gill Parsons, ‘The use andabuse of scientific expertise in English inshore oyster fishery, 1860–1910’, in K.R. Bensonand P.F. Rehbock (eds.), Oceanographic History: the Pacific and Beyond (Seattle:University of Washington Press, 2002); C. Scoble, Fisherman’s Friend: a Life of StephenReynolds (Tiverton: Halsgrove, 2000).
19. John Benson, The Penny Capitalists (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1983).20. Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); R. Samuel
(ed.), Village Life and Labour (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975); and seebelow, note 42.
21. S.V. Ward, Selling Places: the Marketing and Promotion of Towns and Cities, 1850–2000(London: Spon, 1998); J.K. Walton, ‘Municipal government and the holiday industry inBlackpool, 1876–1914’, in J.K. Walton and J. Walvin (eds.), Leisure in Britain 1780–1939(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), pp. 158–85.
22. E.P. Thompson, Warwick University Ltd (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970); D. Hayesand R. Wynyard (eds.), The McDonaldization of Higher Education (Westport, Conn.:Bergin and Garvey, 2002); R. Deem, S. Hillyard and M. Reed, Knowledge, HigherEducation and the New Managerialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); AndreaMayr, ‘Discourses of Higher Education: enterprise and institutional change in theuniversity’, in Mayr (ed.), Language and Power: an Introduction to Institutional Discourse(London: Continuum, 2008).
23. Melanie Tebbutt, Creating an Impression: Myths, Metaphors and Mistrust in FurtherEducation (Working Paper, Manchester School of Management No. 9606, 1996); SandyCripps, Further Education, Government’s Discourse, Policy and Practice (Aldershot:Ashgate, 2002).
24. For an overview of relevant issues, C. Lubienski, ‘School choice and privatization ineducation: an alternative analytical framework’, Journal for Critical Educational PolicyStudies 4 (2006), http://www.jceps.com (accessed 5 July 2009).
25. Allyson Pollock, NHS plc (London: Verso, 2004); and see also Charles Webster, TheNational Health Service: a Political History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
26. Historia Actual, on-line journal of the Asociacion de Historia Actual, Cadiz, Spain.27. E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Merlin, 1991); Adrian Randall and
Andrew Charlesworth (eds.),Markets, Market Culture and Popular Protest in Eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996).
28. Encyclopedie Canadienne, ‘Histoire des affaires’, www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com(accessed 22 May 2009), author’s translation.
29. R. Perks and A. Thomson (eds.), The Oral History Reader (2nd edn., Routledge, 2006).30. Christopher Harvie, ‘Engineer’s holiday: L.T.C. Rolt, industrial heritage and tourism’, in
H. Berghoff, B. Korte, R. Schneider and C. Harvie (eds.), The Making of ModernTourism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 203–22; Gary Cross and John K. Walton,The Playful Crowd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), Chapter 6, whichexamines the role of the entrepreneurial museum official Frank Atkinson in the creationof the Beamish regional industrial museum in north-east England, a classic example of ahybrid development that falls outside the conventional remit of business history.
31. Patrick Joyce, Work, Society and Politics (Brighton: Harvester, 1980).32. S. Toms and M. Wright, ‘Corporate governance: strategy and structure in British
business, 1950–2000’, Business History 44 (2002), pp. 91–124; B.R. Cheffins, ‘History andthe global corporate governance revolution: the UK perspective’, Business History 43(2001), pp. 87–118. For excellent examples of work on this theme published without a‘business history’ label, see James Taylor, ‘Commercial fraud and public men inVictorian Britain’, Historical Research 78 (2005), pp. 230–52; Taylor, ‘Company fraud inVictorian Britain’, English Historical Review 122 (2007), pp. 700–24.
33. Edward Smithies, The Black Economy in England since 1914 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan,1984). M.J. Daunton, Just Taxes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), hassurprisingly little to say on this. In a United States context see Sally Denton and RogerMorris, The Money and the Power: the Making of Las Vegas and its Hold on America,1947–2000 (NewYork: Aldred A. Knopf, 2001); N. Johnson, Boardwalk Empire: the Birth,High Times and Corruption of Atlantic City (Medford, NJ: Plexus, 2002).
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34. George Ritzer, McDonaldization: the Reader (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press,2006); Cross and Walton, The Playful Crowd, Chapter 5.
35. P.D. Anthony, John Ruskin’s Labour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983);and for discussion of the business activities of one of Ruskin’s disciples, Charles Harveyand Jon Press, William Morris: Design and Enterprise in Victorian England (Manchester:Manchester University Press, 1991), and Art, Enterprise and Ethics (London: FrankCass, 1996).
36. F.S. Lee, ‘The Research Assessment Exercise, the state and the dominance of mainstreameconomics in British universities’, Cambridge Journal of Economics 31 (2007), pp. 309–25.
37. Neil Smith, ‘Neo-Critical Geography, or, the flat, pluralist world of business class’,Antipode 37 (2005), p. 897.
38. P. Kalmi, ‘The disappearance of cooperatives from economics textbooks’, CambridgeJournal of Economics 31 (2007), pp. 625–47.
39. The best source on this difficult area is probably the survey conducted by Dr PetraBoynton in 2005: A. Lipsett, ‘Bullying rife in RAE run-up’, Times Higher Education, 21Oct. 2005; and see also Smith, ‘Neo-Critical Geography’, p. 898.
40. N. Thrift, ‘On being political’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 32(2007), p. 115; David M. Smith, ‘From location theory to moral philosophy: views fromthe fringe’, in R. Lee and D.M. Smith (eds.), Geographies and Moralities (Oxford:Blackwell, 2004), p. 294, both cited on the website of Dr Tom Slater, http://www.geos.ed.uk/homes/tslater (accessed 8 July 2009).
41. Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 55-4 bis (2008), special issue on ‘La fiebre del’evaluation’, especially Y. Gingras, ‘Du mauvais usage de faux indicateurs’.
42. http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode¼405824, contribution by‘Don Quixote’, 24 March 2009 (accessed 8 July 2009). See the discussion on ‘CriticalManagement Studies’, below.
43. I owe this point to Professor Philip Scranton.44. D.J. Jeremy and G. Tweedale (eds.), Business History (4 vols., London: Sage, 2005).45. G. Crossick and H.-G. Haupt (eds.), The Petite Bourgeoisie in Europe 1780–1914
(London: Routledge, 1995); G. Crossick (ed.), The Lower Middle Class in Britain 1870–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1977); G. Anderson, Victorian Clerks (Manchester:Manchester University Press, 1976); Anderson, The White-Blouse Revolution (Manche-ster University Press, 1988); C. Hosgood, ‘The ‘‘Knights of the Road’’: commercialtravellers and the culture of the commercial room in late Victorian and EdwardianEngland’, Victorian Studies 37 (1994), pp. 519–48; Hosgood, ‘The ‘‘pigmies ofcommerce’’ and the working-class community: small shopkeepers in England 1870–1914’, Journal of Social History 22 (1989), pp. 439–60; M. Heller, ‘Work, income andstability: the late Victorian and Edwardian London male clerk revisited’, BusinessHistory 50 (2008), pp. 253–71; A. Popp, ‘Building the market: John Shaw ofWolverhampton and commercial travelling in early nineteenth-century England’,Business History 49 (2007), pp. 321–47.
46. See also, for example, P. Battilani and F. Fauri, ‘The rise of a service-based economy andits transformation: seaside tourism and the case of Rimini’, Journal of Tourism History 1(2009), pp. 27–48.
47. S. Toms and J. Wilson, ‘Scale, scope and accountability: towards a new paradigm ofBritish business history’, Business History 45 (2003), pp. 1–23; R. Lloyd-Jones and M.Lewis, ‘‘‘A new paradigm of British business history’’: a critique of Toms and Wilson’,Business History 49 (2007), pp. 98–105; Toms and Wilson, ‘Scale, scope andaccountability: a reply to Lloyd-Jones and Lewis’, Business History 49 (2007), pp.106–11.
48. Charles Harvey and John Wilson, ‘Redefining Business History’, Business History 49(2007), pp. 1–7.
49. J. Barnfield, ‘Consumer-owned community flour and bread societies in the eighteenthand early nineteenth centuries’; D. Hodson, ‘‘‘The municipal store’’: adaptation anddevelopment in the retail markets of nineteenth-century urban Lancashire’; M. Purvis,‘‘‘Stocking the store’’: co-operative retailers in North-East England and systems ofwholesale supply, c. 1860–1877’; M. Hilton, ‘Retailing history as economic and culturalhistory: strategies of survival by specialist tobacconists in the mass market’; J. Morris,
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‘The fascist ‘‘disciplining’’ of the Italian retail sector, 1922–40’, all in Business History 40(3) (1998), special issue on ‘The emergence of modern retailing, 1750–1950’.
50. P. Pilbeam, ‘Madame Tussaud and the business of wax: marketing to the middle classes’,Business History 45 (2003), pp. 6–22.
51. R. Harris and M. Buzzelli, ‘House building in the machine age, 1920s–1970s: realities andperceptions of modernism in North America and Australia’, Business History 47 (2005),pp. 59–85; P. Dixon, N. Garnham and A. Jackson, ‘Shareholders and shareholding: thecase of the football company in late Victorian England’, Business History 47 (2005), pp.503–24; A. Chacar and W. Hesterly, ‘Innovation and value creation in major leaguebaseball, 1860–2000’, Business History 47 (2005), pp. 407–38; A. Jenkins, ‘Governmentintervention in the British gas industry, 1948 to 1970’, Business History 46 (2004), pp.57–78.
52. G. Bakker, ‘Building knowledge about the consumer: the emergence of market practicein Spain, 1950–1975’, Business History 49 (2007), pp. 367–84; E. Robertson, M.Korczynski and M. Pickering, ‘Harmonious relations? Music at work in the Rowntreeand Cadbury factories’, Business History 49 (2007), pp. 211–34.
53. A. Alexander, ‘Format development and retail change: supermarket retailing and theLondon Co-operative Society’, Business History 50 (2008), pp. 489–508; G. Shaw and A.Alexander, ‘British Co-operative societies as retail innovation’, Business History 50(2008), pp. 62–78.
54. P. Clark and M. Rowlinson, ‘The treatment of history in organizational studies: towardsan ‘‘historic turn’’?’, Business History 46 (2004), pp. 331–52; and see also, for example, A.Delahaye, C. Booth, P. Clark, S. Procter and M. Rowlinson, ‘The genre of corporatehistory’, Journal of Organizational Change Management 22 (2009), pp. 27–48; M.Rowlinson, R. Stager Jacques and C. Booth, ‘Critical management and organizationalhistory’, in M. Alvesson, H. Willmott and T. Bridgman (eds.), Handbook of CriticalManagement Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
55. C. Booth and M. Rowlinson, ‘Management and organizational history: prospects’,Management and Organizational History 1 (2006), pp. 5–30.
56. On an important related topic, see John A. Jakle, Keith A. Sculle and Jefferson S.Rogers, The Motel in America (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press,1996), especially Chapter 2, ‘Mom-and-Pop enterprise’.
57. Carl Chinn, Better Betting with a Decent Feller (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991);M. Clapson, A Bit of a Flutter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992); M.Huggins, ‘Betting capital of the provinces: Manchester 1800–1900’, Manchester RegionHistory Review 20 (2009), pp. 24–45.
58. E. Roberts, A Woman’s Place (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984); Carl Chinn, They Worked AllTheir Lives (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); Ellen Ross, Love and Toil(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
59. Benson, Penny Capitalists.60. See above, note 45.61. M. Tebbutt, Making Ends Meet (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1983).62. P. Malcolmson, English Laundresses: a Social History 1850–1940 (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1986).63. Battilani and Fauri, ‘Rise of a service-based economy’.64. J. Morris, The Political Economy of Shopkeeping in Milan, 1886–1922 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993); J.M. Gago Gonzalez, El Pequeno Comercio en laPosguerra Castellana (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y Leon, 2008).
65. S. Zdatny, Hairstyles and Fashion: a Hairdresser’s History of Paris, 1910–1920 (Oxford:Berg, 1999).
66. Peter Bailey (ed.), Music Hall: the Business of Pleasure (Buckingham: Open UniversityPress, 1986).
67. A.J. Arnold, A Game That Would Pay (London: Duckworth, 1988).68. C. Korr, West Ham United: the Making of a Football Club (London: Duckworth,
1986).69. M. Huggins, Horseracing and the British, 1919–1939 (Manchester University Press,
2003); A. Mutch, Strategic and Organizational Change: from Production to Retailing inUK Brewing 1950–1990 (London: Routledge, 2006).
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70. But see now C.M. Kopper, ‘The breakthrough of the package tour in Germany after1945’, Journal of Tourism History 1 (2009), pp. 67–92, which the author explicitlyrepresents as a ‘business history’ approach to tourism.
71. Piers Brendon, Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism (London: Secker andWarburg, 1991); John K. Walton, Riding on Rainbows: Blackpool Pleasure Beach and itsPlace in British Popular Culture (St Albans: Skelter Publishing, 2007).
Notes on contributor
John K. Walton is IKERBASQUE Research Professor, Basque Foundation For Science, inthe Departamento de Historia Contemporanea, Universidad del Paıs Vasco UPV/EHU,Bilbao, Spain. He was formerly Professor of Modern Social History at Lancaster University,and Professor of Social History at the University of Central Lancashire and at LeedsMetropolitan University. He is a historian of tourism, sport, popular culture and regionalidentities, with special reference to Britain and Spain. His doctoral thesis examined Blackpoolbefore the First World War, and he has never been able to complete his escape. His booksinclude The Blackpool Landlady: a Social History (Manchester, 1978); Blackpool (Edinburgh,1998); The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century (with Gary Cross: NewYork, 2005); and Riding on Rainbows: Blackpool Pleasure Beach and its Place in BritishPopular Culture (St Albans, 2007). He also edits the Journal of Tourism History.
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