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Business history emerged as a distinct subfield within economic history during the mid-twentieth century, initially defined by a dominant Chandlerian paradigm. This framework, rooted in a structural-functionalist analysis of the modern managerial enterprise, prioritized the study of large corporations, organizational innovation, and strategy-structure dynamics as the primary engines of economic growth. Its evidentiary core was the internal corporate archive, and its interpretive method was one of rational adaptation to technological and market imperatives, establishing a powerful narrative of progressive corporate evolution.
This orthodoxy was challenged by a robust revisionist wave, which fractured the field’s methodological unity. Managerial and entrepreneurial revisionism critiqued the Chandlerian focus on efficiency, reintroducing concepts of power, failure, and alternative business forms. Concurrently, the application of neo-institutional economics, particularly transaction cost theory, provided a new theoretical scaffold for analyzing firm boundaries and governance, shifting emphasis from structure to institutional arrangements and contractual hazards as explanatory variables.
Further diversification arose from the cultural and linguistic turns. A growing cohort of scholars integrated anthropological and sociological methods to analyze corporate culture, reputation, rhetoric, and identity as constitutive elements of business practice, moving beyond purely economic rationality. This was paralleled by a pronounced global and comparative turn, which systematically decentered the Anglo-American corporation. This paradigm emphasized transnational flows, the role of business in empires, and the varieties of capitalism, demanding a broader evidentiary base and challenging teleological models of corporate development.
The subfield now operates within a state of acknowledged pluralism, where no single paradigm holds hegemony. The legacy of the Chandlerian framework persists in modified form, often in dialogue with institutional analysis. Meanwhile, cultural-historical approaches and global/comparative methodologies represent major, co-existing research families. This synthesis is characterized not by sequential replacement but by the layered coexistence of these distinct interpretive traditions, each employing different evidentiary priorities and explanatory logics to address the central historical role of business enterprise.