A Conceptual Framework for New Entrepreneurial History

Reinventing Entrepreneurial History

By R. Daniel Wadhwani (University of the Pacific, USA) and Christina Lubinski (Copenhagen Business School, Denmark)

Abstract: Research on entrepreneurship remains fragmented in business history. A lack of conceptual clarity inhibits comparisons between studies and dialogue among scholars. To address these issues, we propose to reinvent entrepreneurial history as a research field. We define “new entrepreneurial history” as the study of the creative processes that propel economic change. Rather than putting actors, hierarchies, or institutions at the center of the analysis, we focus explicitly on three distinct entrepreneurial processes as primary objects of study: envisioning and valuing opportunities, allocating and reconfiguring resources, and legitimizing novelty. The article elaborates on the historiography, premises, and potential contributions of new entrepreneurial history.

Keywords: entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial processes, history, theory, temporality, uncertainty, agency, opportunity, resources, legitimation

URL: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007680517001374

Business History Review, 2017, 91 (4): 767-799 – doi:10.1017/S0007680517001374

Review by Nicholas D Wong (Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University)

This article by Wadhwani and Lubinski proposes the reinvention of ‘entrepreneurial history as a research field’ with the aim of promoting greater ‘conceptual clarity’ between comparative studies and dialogue amongst scholars in the field. This engaging and well-written paper provides a new way of considering entrepreneurial activities over time with the emphasis placed on the processes that drive entrepreneurship rather than the individuals or institutions. Following a call to arms for history to join other social sciences (“management, economics, sociology, finance and anthropology”) in developing a distinct sub-field for the study of entrepreneurship the authors provide a neat structure to the paper which begins by providing an historiographical assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of what they term the “old entrepreneurial history”. This is followed by an insight into the parameters of the concept of “new entrepreneurial history”; one which considers the development temporally and defined succinctly as “the study of the creative processes that propel economic change”. This conceptualization foregrounds entrepreneurial processes rather than focusing on particular actors, institutions, or technologies.” The third section develops a set of core processes that frame the object of study in entrepreneurial history, “(i) envisioning and valuing opportunities, (ii) allocating and reconfiguring resources, and (iii) legitimizing novelty”. The paper concludes by highlighting the important contributions new entrepreneurial history can make to the field of business history.

‘So that’s my presentation. When do I get the half million dollars?’

In assessing the historical foundations of entrepreneurship, the authors follow the well-trawled path through the German Historical School of Schmoller and Weber and ultimately on to Schumpeter which, over time, helped promote the concept of “historical change focussed on entrepreneurial processes”. It was perhaps Schumpeter more than any other who ardently proclaimed the centrality of history in enabling the understanding the role of the entrepreneur as the driving force of capitalism and “central to the operation of markets and the dynamics of economies”. However, despite the strength of scholarship that developed during the immediate post-war period, the authors highlight how the field of entrepreneurial history dissipated in later decades being replaced by formulaic, normative and structured research that was “increasingly focussed on how norms, laws and other institutions shaped entrepreneurial roles and functions”. The authors highlight how this approach ultimately led to the demise of the field in the late 1960s as Chandlerian theory on organisational form and managerial hierarchies dominated business history. The 1970s and 80s saw entrepreneurship studies receive increasing attention from business-people and policy makers alike as a way of understanding how economies and markets operate (and what drives them). However, it was still largely ignored by business historians.

To demonstrate the difficulty for historically-orientated scholarship in defining and framing the concept of entrepreneurship, the authors provide some quantitative analysis of the number of articles published in Business History Review during the period 1954-2015 which mention entrepreneurship in the full text, including references. The figures are startling, with only 44 of 1044 featuring the term ‘entrepreneurship’ and when excluding the phrase appearing in citations this figure reduces to only twenty-six articles. This provides clear evidence of the lack of engagement with entrepreneurship by business history scholars. Moreover, of those articles that directly use the term, ‘entrepreneurship’, there is a general lack of clear definitions (most rely on Schumpterian definition, whilst more recently, Mark Casson’s definition has been widely-used). The authors use this evidence to demonstrate the lack of engagement in entrepreneurial studies (beyond the individual entrepreneur at least!) in business history. This is interesting research method although it could possibly have been improved by extending the analysis into other prominent business history journals such as Business History or Enterprise and Society – this would have strengthened the conclusions drawn from this section of the study. This section finishes by highlighting how historians have tackled entrepreneurship in recent years, with Popp, Raff, Amatori, Friedman, Jones and others using a variety of approaches including biography, microlevel process (such as agency over time) and macrolevel approaches which consider the consequences of entrepreneurship for structural change (such as the industrial revolution or globalisation).

“You told him he should start his own business.”

Following the illuminating section on the historiography of entrepreneurship, the next section tackles the concept of entrepreneurship as it relates to field of history. Here the authors provide a succinct and applicable definition of entrepreneurial history: “the study of the creative processes that propel economic change”. Here they are keen to point out that, “the definition focuses on the study of entrepreneurial processes and their relationship to change”. They provide three key premises that link entrepreneurial history to historical change over time: the temporal foundations of agency; multiplicity in the forms of value; and the collective and cumulative character of entrepreneurship. With reference to the first premise, the authors cite the work of Popp et al., and Beckert, by suggesting that understanding entrepreneurial agency “hinges on examining the processes by which they envision and pursue futures beyond the constraints of the present context”. Here they are making clear linkages to the concept of forward projection, that being the idea that the study of entrepreneurial history requires the researcher to understand the necessity of entrepreneurs to think-forward and plan for an “unpredictable future”. This is a novel approach, although it is reliant on a particular set of sources that work as evidence for qualitative research that can enable the historian to penetrate the mindset of the entrepreneur. The two papers cited by Popp and Holt both rely on extensive sets of letters between entrepreneurs and their familial, social and business networks which help construct a picture of the entrepreneur and the strategic forward planning for key developments such as succession, diversification, or international expansion. The second premise, multiplicity in the forms of value, suggests that entrepreneurs can find value beyond baseline profitability. Here the authors infer that entrepreneurs can seek future forms of (non-economic) value such as civic, environmental, academic, and industrial. This again is linked to the idea that the pursuit (or accumulation) of intangibles such as reputational and social capital can provide competitive advantage in the market place and, perhaps, can be considered as entrepreneurial as innovation, expansion and diversification. The final premise, the collective and cumulative character of entrepreneurship, refers to the domino effect of entrepreneurial opportunities that provide the foundation for, and provoke, further streams of entrepreneurship. This is linked to the notion that entrepreneurs have a sense of collective identity and the idea that “they belong to a generation, group or epoch”. The importance of this premise is that it moves away from what the authors refer to as the “heroic individual”. Here, new entrepreneurial history calls for further analysis of “cumulative entrepreneurial processes across multiple actors over time that propel historical change”.

The third section of the article points to processes that act as primary objects of study in entrepreneurial history. The first of these, envisioning and valuing opportunities, is linked to the classical characteristics of entrepreneurship such as forecasting market changes, seeking new opportunities, accessing and creating new technologies, exploiting new markets/territories and developing new practices. However, the authors highlight how new entrepreneurial history deviates from the old forms by explaining how the new opportunities are enacted rather than discovered. This is because actors define value and worth in different ways and this changes over time. The second process is allocating and reconfiguring resources; here they suggest that entrepreneurial history can “explore the processes and mechanisms by which actors allocated and reconfigured resources towards uncertain, future ends”. This section highlights the value of history in analysing the process and motivation for entrepreneurs to influence macro-level developments in terms of institutional or societal change and how this influences their allocation of resources. The final process identified by the authors, legitimizing novelty, builds on the previous processes as, in their view, legitimacy can pose ‘a problem in the entrepreneurial process because the new forms of value and new combinations of resources entrepreneurs introduce often fail to conform to widely shared expectations regarding rules, norms, beliefs, and definitions. Legitimation processes thus form another important focus of research in entrepreneurial history”. The key contribution of the historian in this area is understand the process of legitimation and to analyse how and why societal or institutional change occurs over time.

Congratulations on starting your own firm.

In terms of the potential contributions that new entrepreneurial history can make the authors have compiled a helpful table that compares it to Chandlerian business history, new institutional business history, and new economic histories of business. This table, in part, helps reinforces the central tenets of new entrepreneurial history (such as the emphasis on the process of entrepreneurship, the cumulative and collective approaches, the impact on development of society and institutions, the methods of assigning value over and above profit etc.) and how it diverges or challenges traditional schools of business history. The eclectic approach to entrepreneurship as designed by the authors provides a framework for future research to follow in order to consider the development of entrepreneurship over time but also in understanding how entrepreneurship influences, and is influenced, by, individual, institutional and societal micro and macro-level factors. Perhaps the greatest contribution, as highlighted in the conclusion, is the implications or influence that new entrepreneurial history can have on entrepreneurs today. Here the authors demonstrate the strength of the historian in enabling entrepreneurs to understand the world and “acting in it”. By following the framework developed in this paper, business historians have opportunity to develop a richer and deeper insight into the core factors that influence and drive the process of entrepreneurship.

A couple of minor observations: the definition provided by the authors, in my opinion, could be broadened out slightly. In the case the authors raise the point that new entrepreneurial history focuses on the study of the creative processes that propel economic change, [my emphasis], however, this framework could be used to study processes far beyond the purely economic (including, for example, environmental, technological, cultural, management, social, political). Indeed, the section on ‘multiplicity in the forms of value’ highlights how value can be assigned to non-economic factors, such as the accumulation of social and cultural capital, environmental, civic, academic, esthetic, industrial etc. The definition in this instance seems too narrow in enabling the researcher to understand change and the authors themselves provide insight into factors beyond market forces. In terms of broadening out the concept, I feel this particular theme has potential to inform research beyond business history and could have relevance to research in other branches of management and organisational studies, and perhaps even other disciplines in social sciences. My second observation concerns the blurring or overlap between premises two and three concerning the recruiting and allocation of resources on one hand and gaining of legitimacy on the other hand. Both sections cover similar areas with regards to the winning institutional support or driving institutional change in order to gain support or enhance legitimacy. I feel there is scope to draw greater distinctions between these two processes.

To conclude, this article presents a well-considered and well-structured contribution to the field of entrepreneurial history. The authors establish a real need for their approach and then provide a strong, clear and adaptable framework that can open the field to future researchers. As a business historian myself, I am always sympathetic to papers championing a historical or temporal approach and found this paper extremely useful to my ongoing research projects. I am sure it will make a strong contribution to the field and provoke much discussion and research in the years to come!

Acknowledgements

I am extremely grateful to Andrew Popp and Niall Mackenzie for their feedback on an earlier draft of this review.

Entrepreneurs and Indian Transnational Business

Transnational Indian Business in the Twentieth Century

By: Chinmay Tumbe (Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, India)

Abstract: This article argues that migration and investment from India moved in tandem to chart the evolution of transnational Indian business in the twentieth century, first toward Southeast Asia and Africa and later toward the United States, Europe, and West Asia. With a focus on the banking and diamond sectors, the overseas investment project of the Aditya Birla Group, and the transnational linkages of India’s one hundred richest business leaders, the article locates important events, policies, and actors before economic liberalization in 1991 that laid the foundation for subsequent globalization of Indian firms.

Business History Review (Forthcoming – Published online: 12 December 2017)
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007680517001350

Review by Niall G MacKenzie (Strathclyde Business School)

Chinmay Tumbe’s article in Business History Review, ‘Transnational Indian Business
in the Twentieth Century’ is, as the title suggests, an exploration of Indian business history at home and abroad throughout the twentieth century. The article is well-written with a number of themes present throughout which go beyond simple transnational analyses, encompassing elements of kith (networks) and kin (family) in the development of Indian business over the period set against changing migration patterns within and outwith, the Indian sub-continent. A further clear theme throughout the paper is the changing role and concomitant impact of the institutional frameworks in which Indian business acted under, both in domestic and international terms. It is on these areas that this review takes its focus.

The paper compares and contrasts twentieth century Indian migration trajectories and their impact on Indian international business connections, with a particular focus on the activities of the banking and diamond industries, as well as highlighting a number of famous Indian firms and entrepreneurs including the Godrej, Birla, and Tata families, Lakshmi Mittal, and the top 100 richest Indians using a mixture of archive data, corporate histories, biographies, and secondary materials such as magazines and newspapers. In this sense, the paper is a non-traditional business history piece that combines a variety of methodological approaches to paint a picture of Indian transnational business history over the twentieth century that distinguishes itself with its attention to rigour, a clear story arc, and the creation of a historical framework for future studies. As one may expect from Business History Review, the writing is tight, the subject matter broad but detailed in its analysis, and a number of valuable insights into how Indian business developed over the period emerge as a result.

Tumbe’s work covers both Indian domestic business activities and overseas investment activities by Indian companies over the twentieth century, offering readers an interesting and illuminating analysis of these subjects which reflect a growing interest in Indian business within business history more generally, including a special issue in Business History edited by Carlo Morelli and Swapnesh Masrani on Indian Business in the Global World, publication of the Oxford History of Indian Business by Dwijendra Tripathi (2014), the developing economies initiative at Harvard Business School which focuses on (amongst other developing countries) Indian business, a 2015 conference on Indian and South East Asian business history hosted by Harvard Business School bringing together scholars from all over the world, and a number of articles published in each of the major business, economic, and accounting history journals. In this sense Tumbe’s paper is a continuation of the growing interest in Indian business history around the world and recognition that much of the history of the country has been written from the perspective of the west, and in particular Anglo-Indian viewpoints.

Work written from the perspective of indigenous Indian scholars therefore has the potential to provide counterpoints, deeper insights, and more interesting considerations of phenomena and change that are oftentimes taken for granted by Western scholars. Indeed, much theory that has been produced in business and management has been done so within Western developed countries and typically by Western scholars. This is a point that has been raised in the Family Business Review journal by its outgoing editor Pramodita Sharma (with family business stalwarts Jim Chrisman and Kelin Gersick), who in a 2012 editorial called for more testing of existing theory, and creation of new theories by looking at ‘different institutional contexts’ as ways of doing this. This is a call that applies beyond family business however and into business and management more generally – cognizance of context and its multiple forms and applications to existing and new knowledge is something that historians are perhaps naturally familiar with and indeed drawn to, but which has value beyond history also.

Arguably the most interesting aspect of the paper (to this author at least) was the focus on the role that Indian family businesses played within the constantly evolving Indian and global institutional contexts over time, engaging domestic and international business networks and deploying their capital in different ways to address their aims and aspirations. The case of AV Birla going to study at MIT is one such example – scions of large family businesses nowadays are regularly packed off to global top institutions to gain a world class education and expose them to more of the world in preparation for taking the helm of the family business. However, according to Tumbe, in the mid-1960s India was a relatively insular looking country and business environment which suggests Birla’s decision to study at MIT was one that was more than just expanding personal horizons but was in fact, at the time, a relatively novel way of preparing Birla and the helping firm’s international expansion aspirations. Birla was then an early example of what is now a relatively standard practice in terms of preparing for the future leaders within the family business, but also of preparing the business itself by accessing and leveraging the networks that come with enrolment in top global education institutions for higher education.

One of the principal questions posted in the paper was “How and why did Indian business operations extend beyond the boundaries of the subcontinent, and was migration a relevant factor in this process?” The short answer that Tumbe’s paper provides, is that migration was a relevant factor in the process (as one might reasonably expect), but also that Indian business operations did exist beyond the boundaries of the subcontinent and the reasons for doing so were varied. In some cases, Indian businesses were accessing existing networks of Indian diaspora for soft landings abroad, in others they were seeking to expand operations due to the constrictions that were imposed on them by an FDI-hostile Indian government that resulted in domestic industrial stagnation and a strong push factor to invest abroad, requiring Indian businesses to look outwards for international expansion and growth opportunities. Kith and kin were therefore important features of such expansion with the desire to mitigate the agential risk that naturally comes with the creation of distance between operations and control as far as possible. Consistent within this is the recognition that friends and family are important in business expansion and development; Tumbe provides a demonstrable example of this in his analysis of Birla’s expansion into Antwerp and the role Vijay Mehta, a cousin of AV Birla’s best friend based in Antwerp and Bangkok, played in Birla’s first overseas investment.

Tumbe’s article is ultimately a broad sweep analysis of Indian transnational business activities and development over the twentieth century that illustrates the changing nature of business in India, the shifting institutional context, and the opportunities and constrictions that come with doing business in a developing country. Its relevance and interest to business and economic historians is clear in its historical analysis and content, but its wider applicability to understanding contemporary business and management phenomena such as resource orchestration, transnational business, and family business is also apparent. For those familiar with Indian business history it will likely confirm a number of existing thoughts and concepts, but for those who are not as familiar it provides an enjoyable and informative overview of how Indian business changed over the course of the twenties century with an array of source material that is handled well and written in an engaging fashion.

Governance structures and market performance

Contractual Freedom and Corporate Governance in Britain in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

by Timothy W. Guinnane (Yale University), Ron Harris (Tel-Aviv University), and Naomi R. Lamoreaux (Yale University)

Abstract: British general incorporation law granted companies an extraordinary degree of contractual freedom. It provided companies with a default set of articles of association, but incorporators were free to reject any or all of the provisions and write their own rules instead. We study the uses to which incorporators put this flexibility by examining the articles of association filed by three random samples of companies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as by a sample of companies whose securities traded publicly. Contrary to the literature, we find that most companies, regardless of size or whether their securities traded on the market, wrote articles that shifted power from shareholders to directors. We find, moreover, that there was little pressure from the government, shareholders, or the market to adopt more shareholder-friendly governance rules.

Business History Review, Volume 91 (2 – Summer 2017): 227-277.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007680517000733

Review by John Turner (Centre for Economic History, Queen’s University Belfast)

Tim Guinnane, Ron Harris and Naomi Lamoreaux are three scholars that every young (and old) economic historian should seek to emulate. This paper showcases once again their prodigious talent – there is careful analysis of the institutional and legal setting, a lot of archival evidence, rigorous economic analysis, and an attempt to understand how contemporaries viewed the issue at hand.

In this paper, Guinnane, Harris and Lamoreaux (GHL) examine the corporate governance of UK companies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The UK liberalised its incorporation laws in the 1850s and introduced its first Companies Act in 1862. From a modern-day perspective, this Act enshrined very little in the way of protection for shareholders. However, the Appendix to the 1862 Companies Act contained a default set of articles of association, which was the company’s constitution. This Appendix, known as Table A, provided a high level of protection for shareholders by modern-day standards (Acheson et al., 2016). However, the majority of companies did not adopt Table A; instead they devised their own articles of association.

The aim of GHL’s paper is to analyse articles of associations in 1892, 1912 and 1927 to see the extent to which they shifted power from shareholders to directors. To do this, GHL collected three random samples of circa 50 articles of association for 1892, 1912 and 1927. Because most (if not all) of these companies did not have their securities traded on stock markets, they also collected sample of 49 commercial and industrial companies from Burdett’s Official Intelligence for 1892 that had been formed after 1888. However, only 23 of these companies had their shares listed on one of the UK’s stock exchanges.

GHL then take their samples of articles to see the extent to which they deviated from the clauses in Table A. Their main finding is that companies tended to adopt governance structures in their articles which empowered directors and practically disenfranchised shareholders. This was the case no matter if the company was small or large or public or private. They also find that this entrenchment and disenfranchisement becomes more prominent over time. However, GHL unearth a puzzle – they find shareholders and the market appeared to have been perfectly okay with poor corporate governance practices.

How do we resolve this puzzle? One possibility is that shareholders (and the market) at this time only really cared about dividends. High dividend pay-out ratios in this era kept managers on a short leash and reduced the agency costs associated with free cash flow (Campbell and Turner, 2011). Interestingly, GHL suggest that this may have made it more difficult for firms to finance productivity-enhancing investments. In addition, they suggest that the high-dividend-entrenchment trade-off may have locked in managerial practices which inhibited the ability of British firms to respond to future competitive pressures and may ultimately have ushered in Britain’s industrial decline.

Another solution to the puzzle, and one that GHL do not fully explore, is that the ownership structure of the company shaped its articles of association. The presence of a dominant owner or founding family ownership would potentially lessen the agency problem faced by small shareholders. In addition, founders may not wish to give too much power away to shareholders in return for their capital. On the other hand, firms which need to raise capital from lots of small investors on public markets may adopt more shareholder-friendly articles. The vast majority of companies in GHL’s sample do not fall into this category, which might go some way to explaining their findings.

A final potential solution is that the vast majority of firms which GHL examine may have raised capital in a totally different way than public companies, and this shaped their articles of association. These firms probably relied on family, religious and social networks for capital, and the shareholders trusted the directors because they personally knew them or were connected to them through a network. Indeed, we know precious little about how and where the multitude of private companies in the UK obtained their capital. Like all great papers, GHL have opened up a new avenue for future scholars. The interesting thing for me is what happens when private firms went public and raised capital. Did they keep their articles which entrenched directors and disenfranchised shareholders?

Unlike the focus of GHL on mainly private companies, a current Queen’s University Centre for Economic History working paper examines the protection offered to shareholders by circa 500 public companies in the four decades after the 1862 Companies Act (Acheson et al., 2016). Unlike GHL, it takes a leximetric approach to analysing articles of association. Acheson et al. (2016) have two main findings. First, the shareholder protection offered by firms in the nineteenth century was high compared to modern-day standards. Second, firms which had more diffuse ownership offered shareholders higher protection.

How do we reconcile GHL and Acheson et al. (2016)? The first thing to note is that most of Acheson et al’s sample is before 1892. The second thing to note is that in a companion paper, Acheson et al. (2015) identify a major shift in corporate governance and ownership which started in the 1890s – companies formed in that decade had greater capital and voting concentration than those formed in earlier decades. In addition, unlike companies formed prior to the 1890s, the insiders in these companies were able to maintain their voting rights and entrench themselves. This corporate governance turn in the 1890s is where future scholars should focus their attention.

References

Acheson, Graeme G., Gareth Campbell, John D. Turner and Nadia Vanteeva. 2015. “Corporate Ownership and Control in Victorian Britain.” Economic History Review 68: 911-36.

Acheson, Graeme G., Gareth Campbell, John D. Turner. 2016. “Common Law and the Origin of Shareholder Protection.” QUCEH Working Paper no. 2016-04.

Campbell, Gareth and John D. Turner. 2011. “Substitutes for Legal Protection: Corporate Governance and Dividends in Victorian Britain.” Economic History Review 64: 571-97.

No man can serve two masters

Rogue Trading at Lloyds Bank International, 1974: Operational Risk in Volatile Markets

By Catherine Schenk (Glasgow)

Abstract Rogue trading has been a persistent feature of international financial markets over the past thirty years, but there is remarkably little historical treatment of this phenomenon. To begin to fill this gap, evidence from company and official archives is used to expose the anatomy of a rogue trading scandal at Lloyds Bank International in 1974. The rush to internationalize, the conflict between rules and norms, and the failure of internal and external checks all contributed to the largest single loss of any British bank to that time. The analysis highlights the dangers of inconsistent norms and rules even when personal financial gain is not the main motive for fraud, and shows the important links between operational and market risk. This scandal had an important role in alerting the Bank of England and U.K. Treasury to gaps in prudential supervision at the end of the Bretton Woods pegged exchange-rate system.

Business History Review, Volume 91 (1 – April 2017): 105-128.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007680517000381

Review by Adrian E. Tschoegl (The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania)

Since the 1974 rogue trading scandal at Lloyds’s Lugano branch we have seen more spectacular sums lost in rogue trading scandals. What Dr Catherine Schenk brings to our understanding of these recurrent events is the insight that only drawing on archives, both at Lloyds and at the Bank of England, can bring. In particular, the archives illuminate the decision processes at both institutions as the crisis unfolded. I have little to add to her thorough exposition of the detail so below I will limit myself to imprecise generalities.

Marc Colombo, the rogue trader at Lloyds Lugano, was a peripheral individual in a peripheral product line, in a peripheral location. As Schenk finds, this peripherality has two consequences, the rogue trader’s quest for respect, and the problem of supervision. Lloyds Lugano is not an anomaly. An examination of several other cases (e.g. Allied Irish, Barings, Daiwa, and Sumitomo Trading), finds the same thing (Tschoegl 2004).

In firms, respect and power come from being a revenue center. Being a cost center is the worst position, but being a profit center with a mandate to do very little is not much better. The rogue traders that have garnered the most attention, in large part because of the scale of their losses were not malevolent. They wanted to be valued. They were able to get away with their trading for long enough to do serious damage because of a lack of supervision, a lack that existed because of the traders’ peripherality.

In several cases, Colombo’s amongst them, the trader was head of essentially a one-person operation that was independent of the rest of the local organization. That meant that the trader’s immediate local supervisor had little or no experience with trading. Heads of branches in a commercial bank come from commercial banking, especially commercial lending. Commercial lending is a slow feedback environment (it may take a long time for a bad decision to manifest itself), and so uses a system of multiple approvals. Trading is a fast feedback environment. The two environments draw different personality types and have quite different procedures, with the trading environment giving traders a great deal of autonomy within set parameters, an issue Schenk addresses and that we will discuss shortly.

Commonly, traders will report to a remote head of trading and to the local branch manager, with the primary line being to the head of trading, and the secondary line being to the local branch manager. This matrix management developed to address the problem of the need to manage and coordinate centrally but also respond locally, but matrix management has its limitations too. As Mathew points out in the New Testament, “No man can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other” (Matthew (6:24). Even short of this, the issue that can arise, as it did at Lloyds Luggano, is that the trader is remote from both managers, one because of distance (and often time zone), and the other because of unfamiliarity with the product line. A number of software developments have improved the situation since 1974, but as some recent scandals have shown, they are fallible. Furthermore, the issue still remains that at some point the heads of many product lines will report to someone who rose in a different product line, which brings up the spectre of “too complex to manage”.

The issue of precautionary or governance rules, and their non-enforcement, is a clear theme in Schenk’s paper. Like the problem of supervision, this too is an issue where one can only do better or worse, but not solve. All rules have their cost. The largest may be an opportunity cost. Governance rules exist to reduce variance, but that means the price of reducing bad outcomes is the lower occurrence of good outcomes. While it is true, as one of Schenk’s interviewees points out, that one does not hear of successful rogue traders being fired, that does not mean that firms do not respond negatively to success. I happened to be working for SBCI, an investment banking arm of Swiss Bank Corporation (SBC), at the time of SBC’s acquisition in 1992 of O’Connor Partners, a Chicago-based derivatives trading house. I had the opportunity to speak with O’Conner’s head of training when O’Connor stationed a team of traders at SBCI in Tokyo. He said that the firm examined too large wins as intently as they examined too large losses: in either case an unexpectedly large outcome meant that either the firm had mis-modelled the trade, or the trader had gone outside their limits. Furthermore, what they looked for in traders was the ability to walk away from a losing bet.

But even small costs can be a problem for a small operation. When I started to work for Security Pacific National Bank in 1976, my supervisor explained my employment benefits to me. I was authorized two weeks of paid leave per annum. When I asked if I could split up the time he replied that Federal Reserve regulations required that the two weeks be continuous so that someone would have to fill in for the absent employee. Even though most of the major rogue trading scandals arose and collapsed within a calendar year, the shadow of the future might well have discouraged the traders, or led them to reveal the problem earlier. Still, for a one-person operation, management might (and in some rogue trading scandals did), take the position that finding someone to fill in and bring them in on temporary duty was unnecessarily cumbersome and expensive. After all, the trader to be replaced was a dedicated, conscientious employee, witness his willingness to forego any vacation.

Lastly, there is the issue of Chesterton’s Paradox (Chesterton 1929). When a rule has been in place for some time, there may be no one who remembers why it is there. Reformers will point out that the rule or practice is inconvenient or costly, and that it has never in living memory had any visible effect. But as Chesterton puts it, “This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable.”

Finally, an issue one needs to keep in mind in deciding how much to expend on prevention is that speculative trading is a zero-sum activity. A well-diversified shareholder who owns both the employer of the rogue trader and the employers of their counterparties suffers little loss. The losses to Lloyds Lugano were gains to, inter alia, Crédit Lyonnais.

There is leakage. Some of the gainers are privately held hedge funds and the like. Traders at the counterparties receive bonuses not for skill but merely for taking the opposite side of the incompetent rogue trader’s orders. Lastly, shareholders of the rogue traders firm suffer deadweight losses of bankruptcy when the firm, such as Barings, goes bankrupt. Still, as Krawiec (2000) points out, for regulators the social benefit of preventing losses to rogue traders may not exceed the cost. To the degree that costs matter to managers, but not shareholders, managers should bear the costs via reduced salaries.

References

Chesterton, G. K. (1929) ‘’The Thing: Why I Am A Catholic’’, Ch. IV: “The Drift From Domesticity”.

Krawiec, K.D. (2000): “Accounting for Greed: Unraveling the Rogue Trader Mystery”, Oregon Law Review 79 (2):301-339.

Tschoegl, A.E. (2004) “The Key to Risk Management: Management”. In Michael Frenkel, Ulrich Hommel and Markus Rudolf, eds. Risk Management: Challenge and Opportunity (Springer-Verlag), 2nd Edition;

Historicising Business Strategy

Evolving Ideas about Business Strategy

by Pankaj Ghemawat (NYU Stern, USA and IESE Business School, Spain)

Abstract

This paper updates an earlier article published in Business History Review that concluded that by the second half of the 1990s, there had been a profusion of new, purportedly practical ideas about strategy, many of which embodied some explicit dynamics. This update provides several indications of a drop-off since then in the rate of development of new ideas about strategy but also a continued focus, in the new ideas that are being developed, on dynamics. And since our stock of dynamic frameworks has, based on one enumeration, more than doubled in the last fifteen to twenty years, updating expands both the need and the empirical basis for some generalizations about the types of dynamic strategy frameworks—and strategy frameworks in general—that managers are likely to find helpful versus those that they are not.

Source: Business History Review 90, 1-23 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007680516000702)

Review by Kyle Bruce (Macquarie University, Australia)

Editor’s note

Ghemawat’s 2017 paper below should not be read in isolation but as part of a round table organized at Harvard Business School that brought together historians and management scholars to discuss the origins of ideas in business and management. The results of the round table were published as a special edition of the Business History Review. In this sense, Ghemawat’s contribution to the special issue and its discussion by Chris McKenna (in the same special issue) came to an independent yet similar conclusion to that expressed by Nobel laureate Robert Shiller, who suggested “that in the age of social information networks, economists need to rethink how and why information really spreads.” (See a summary of Shiller’s ideas in The Role of Narratives in Economics).

It is laudable that the executive editors of the Business History Review created a space to disseminate the results of the round table through the journal. However, as you will read below, Kyle Bruce questions whether this is the right way to engage other management scholars in business history as, strictly speaking, the contribution by Ghemawat would be found wanting as scholarly work of international standing.

A final note is that in its comments to Ghemawat, even McKenna gets it wrong by pointing to Lotus 1-2-3 as the first spreadsheet. It actually was VisiCalc.

Having said that, the aim in this space is to generate academic debate through a blog format. So by all means do chip in.

Bernardo Bátiz-Lazo
General Editor NEP-HIS & Editorial Board member, Business History Review.

As a historian and teacher of strategy and, moreover, as a close follower of Ghemawat’s work, I was very much looking forward to his recent update of his 2002 BHR paper on the history of the sub-discipline. I habitually invoke the decade-and-a-half old piece as background reading for my Executive MBA strategy students and hitherto have experienced little, if any, pushback from students typically cagey about the words “theory” or “history”. Regrettably, I am not so sure the updated paper under review here will escape unscathed for the simple reason that it is pretty tough to follow. Let me explain.

After briefly overviewing the 2002 paper that in essence discerned a profusion of new ideas about strategy – particularly those embodying a more dynamic approach – dating from the early to mid-80s, Ghemawat introduces his new findings. After a big peak in the mid-90s, there has been a marked drop-off in new ideas, but dynamics “is a sustained interest focus of strategic innovation rather than one of passing interest” (p. 5; emphasis added). So far, so good you might think, but I started to worry about the phraseology (“strategic innovation”?) attendant on the use of analytical tools from strategy and adjacent sub-disciplines to make sense of his findings; namely, “what should one make of the drop-off overall and the shift toward more attention to dynamics? And what, if anything, should be done?” (p. 8).

Pankaj Ghemawat

Unless the strictures concerning the dreaded “so what?” question have been lifted in history journals such as BHR, I could not discern after several reads a compelling argument as to why readers should be at all bothered by the findings presented? For students of the strategy-as-practice literature, for instance, the suggestion there’s fewer models and frameworks out there for practising managers to employ is not a concern given they probably don’t use them anyway. For my MBA students who routinely complain of framework fatigue, again, the theory drop-off is not a problem. And so, for me, the remainder of the paper was rather superfluous and unnecessarily complex. Curiously, I think Ghemawat makes it so when he concludes that while it’s certain there’s been a drop-off in the “rate of development of big new strategy ideas/frameworks, it is much harder to be definite about the welfare implications” (p. 10; emphasis added). For me, this conclusion renders redundant both the ensuing “what is to be done” question he poses, as well as the next eight-and-half pages of the article devoted to “a critical assessment of frameworks new and old” (p. 2).

After several reads of these aforementioned pages, I could not really follow or appreciate the “irreversibility” and “uncertainty” dimensions utilised to assess how dynamic current frameworks really are. However, I felt comforted when Ghemawat concludes that “quite a few” of said frameworks “seem subject to some practical limitations” (p. 19). This comfort was short-lived, though, when he finishes the paper with the frustrating and seemingly throwaway line that the way forward, as it were, “is to shift some attention away from the chronologies of frameworks to historiography that attempts to assess them in some fashion” (p. 21). I immediately asked myself: “well, why didn’t he just do this, then??”

For me, and I trust also BHR readers, a historiographical piece embodying intellectual history, actor-network theory, or sociology of scientific knowledge to account for the “trials of strength” in strategy theory, the tension between contributions from the academy and those from business practice, and the current fascination with dynamics, would have been an easier and more interesting read. Like much being published in business and management history journals of late, Ghemawat’s paper is short on actual history and, notwithstanding the final sentence, even short on how to DO history. I was left wondering why this paper was published in this journal and asking myself what this paper’s place tells me about BHR? I have no answers for these questions but look forward to some in due course.

References

Ghemawat, P. (2002) “Competition and Business Strategy in Historical Perspective”, Business History Review 76(1): 37-74. (DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/4127751)