Philip Scranton & Patrick Fridenson\u27s Reimagining Business History

Philip Scranton and Patrick Fridenson—two senior scholars from Rutgers University and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, respectively—have brought together their decades of experience as practitioners and editors to explore new directions in research and writing in business history. But this is a different kind of historiographical book. In fact, it is “the inverse of a historiographical analysis”; it seeks to provide a “prospective” “collection of ordered, grouped assertions” (9). It is a “book of perspectives” that “has purposes not an argument” and is intended to be browsed, not read cover to cover. Yet, the authors clearly take aim at “traditional business history” and encourage business historians to step “away from our decades-long reliance on economics, economic history, and management science” (9). In doing so, they intend to bring business history into wider debates in humanistic and social science inquiries