Philip Scranton – författare

This book is a collection of essays about the emergence of routines and, more generally, about getting things organized in firms and in industries in early stages and in transition. These are subjects of the greatest interest to students of entrepreneurship and organizations, as well as to business historians, but the academic literature is thin. The chronological settings of the book's eleven substantive chapters are historical, reaching as far back as the late 1800s right up to the 1990s, but the issues they raise are evergreen and the historical perspective is exploited to advantage. The chapters are organized in three broad groups: examining the emergence of order and routines in initiatives, studying the same subject in ongoing operations, and a third focusing specifically on the phenomena of transition. The topics range from the Book-of-the-Month Club to industrial research at Alcoa, from the evolution of procurement and coordination to project-based industries such as bridge- and dam-building and the governance of defence contracting, and from the development of project performance appraisal at the World Bank to the way the global automobile industry collectively redesigned the internal combustion engine to deal with after the advent of environmental regulation. The chapters are vivid and thought-provoking in themselves and, for pedagogical purposes, offer excellent jumping-off points for discussion of relevant experiences and cognate academic literature.

Leading historians explore how our ideas of what is attractive are influenced by a broad range of social and economic factors. They force us to reckon with the ways that beauty has been made, bought and sold in modern America.

Leading historians explore how our ideas of what is attractive are influenced by a broad range of social and economic factors. They force us to reckon with the ways that beauty has been made, bought and sold in modern America.

This original collection abandons culinary nostalgia and the cataloguing of regional cuisines to examine the role of food and food marketing in constructing culture, consumer behavior, and national identity.

This original collection abandons culinary nostalgia and the cataloguing of regional cuisines to examine the role of food and food marketing in constructing culture, consumer behavior, and national identity.

Scientists have developed a featherless chicken designed to make industrial chicken production more efficient, while specially trained Pacific bottlenose dolphins are being deployed in the Persian Gulf to disarm mines and protect our Navy. Everyone knows Darwin's theory of natural selection, but what about his idea of artificial selection--how humans, not nature, rework natural organisms to meet our needs? Industrializing Organisms brings us to the threshold of the new field of evolutionary history--from the mobilization of war horses in the 19th century to today's engineered plants and manipulated animals.

Scientists have developed a featherless chicken designed to make industrial chicken production more efficient, while specially trained Pacific bottlenose dolphins are being deployed in the Persian Gulf to disarm mines and protect our Navy. Everyone knows Darwin's theory of natural selection, but what about his idea of artificial selection--how humans, not nature, rework natural organisms to meet our needs? Industrializing Organisms brings us to the threshold of the new field of evolutionary history--from the mobilization of war horses in the 19th century to today's engineered plants and manipulated animals.

Figured Tapestry is a study of industrial maturity and decline, focused on the Philadelphia textile trades from the era of the Knights of Labor through World War II. Unlike the bulk fabric enterprises of New England and the South, Quaker City textile firms were 'flexible specialists,' combining skilled labor, versatile technologies, and quick responsiveness to demand shifts to create a vast array of seasonal goods. Scranton assesses the significance and limits of industrial versatility, owner-operated businesses, craft labor and its organizations, and the agglomeration of specialist mills in urban districts. An interdisciplinary blend of business, labor, urban, and economic history, industrial geography, and the history of technology, Figured Tapestry illuminates the hidden world of batch production, the 'other side' of American industrialization, and highlights both the benefits and the hazards of flexibility, a matter of moment to those who seek to reorient current manufacturing away from the rigidities of mass production.

The greatest textile manufacturing centre in America used to be, not Lowell, Massachusetts, but Philadelphia, where in 1880 over eight hundred textile firms employed over fifty thousand workers producing fabrics, carpets, yarns, and knit-goods of every description. Proprietary Capitalism presents a careful reconstruction of the rise of textile capitalism in the Quaker City, whose distinguishing features were immigrant family firms, flexible strategies for production, and an emphasis on skill, quality, and market responsiveness. The small and middle-sized firms in Philadelphia, far from being displaced by corporate competitors, proved durable, functioning through networks of linked specializations, with spinning, weaving, dyeing, and finishing often performed in separate establishments. Proprietary Capitalism documents the development of a fully realized alternative to the corporate style of mass production that brought fame to New England's mill cities. This book presents a strong challenge for a rethinking of the role of 'small business' in the saga of American industrial development.

Figured Tapestry is a study of industrial maturity and decline, focused on the Philadelphia textile trades from the era of the Knights of Labor through World War II. Unlike the bulk fabric enterprises of New England and the South, Quaker City textile firms were 'flexible specialists,' combining skilled labor, versatile technologies, and quick responsiveness to demand shifts to create a vast array of seasonal goods. Scranton assesses the significance and limits of industrial versatility, owner-operated businesses, craft labor and its organizations, and the agglomeration of specialist mills in urban districts. An interdisciplinary blend of business, labor, urban, and economic history, industrial geography, and the history of technology, Figured Tapestry illuminates the hidden world of batch production, the 'other side' of American industrialization, and highlights both the benefits and the hazards of flexibility, a matter of moment to those who seek to reorient current manufacturing away from the rigidities of mass production.

Flexibility, specialization, and niche marketing are buzzwords in the business literature these days, yet few realize that it was these elements that helped the United States first emerge as a global manufacturing leader between the Civil War and World War I. The huge mass production-based businesses--steel, oil, and autos--have long been given sole credit for this emergence. In Endless Novelty, Philip Scranton boldly recasts the history of this vital episode in the development of American business, known as the nation's second industrial revolution, by considering the crucial impact of trades featuring specialty, not standardized, production. Scranton takes us on a grand tour through American specialty firms and districts, where, for example, we meet printers and jewelry makers in New York and Providence, furniture builders in Grand Rapids, and tool specialists in Cincinnati. Throughout he highlights the benevolent as well as the strained relationships between workers and proprietors, the lively interactions among entrepreneurs and city leaders, and the personal achievements of industrial engineers like Frederic W. Taylor.Scranton shows that in sectors producing goods such as furniture, jewelry, machine tools, and electrical equipment, firms made goods to order or in batches, and industrial districts and networks flourished, creating millions of jobs. These enterprises relied on flexibility, skilled labor, close interactions with clients, suppliers, and rivals, and opportunistic pricing to generate profit streams. They built interfirm alliances to manage markets and fashioned specialized institutions--trade schools, industrial banks, labor bureaus, and sales consortia. In creating regional synergies and economies of scope and diversity, the approaches of these industrial firms represent the inverse of mass production. Challenging views of company organization that have come to dominate the business world in the United States, Endless Novelty will appeal to historians, business leaders, and to anyone curious about the structure of American industry.

Searching for a "rational" workplace, turn-of-the-century engineers and industrial architects recast the factory itself in the image of the machine. Indeed, they considered the factory building the "master machine," containing and coordinating all of the machinery within. Such rational factory planning improved production speed and the management of workers. Once created, the rational factory transformed the nature of work, both human and mechanical. In The Rational Factory, Lindy Biggs contends that factory design played a crucial role in the development of American mass production. Her interdisciplinary study draws from the fields of business history, engineering, technology, architecture, and theories of modernity. Why did some people want to rationalize the factory, she asks, and how did the system impact those who worked under it?

Emphasizing the economic and cultural dimensions of travel, The Business of Tourism explores the enterprises and technologies of tourist activity with a particular focus on tourism as a phenomenon through which nations, regions, and individuals produce and consume experiences. The volume is divided into three sections. "Commodifying Place" examines how tourist enterprises have helped to create a distinctive sense of identity for specific locales. "Engaging Religion" addresses the ways in which religion and religious travel have been marketed. "Marketing Communism" explores the role of tourism in buttressing ideas and attitudes in communist settings. The essays in The Business of Tourism present a vigorous, novel, and empirically grounded vision of tourism as a local and global enterprise from the 1860s to the 1990s. They transport readers from Egypt in the 1860s, where Thomas Cook & Son laid the foundations for international mass tourism, to Burgundy's gastronomic festivals between the two world wars; from Branson, Missouri, to Belfast, Ireland, in an examination of religion in sightseeing; and in the final leg of the journey, from the Stalinist Soviet Union to post-Soviet Cuba, to see the changing relationship between marketing and communism. Taken together, the essays link the cultural practice of tourism to the businesses that create cultural experiences.

Though it had helped define the New South era, the first wave of regional industrialization had clearly lost momentum even before the Great Depression. These nine original case studies look at how World War II and its aftermath transformed the economy, culture, and politics of the South.From perspectives grounded in geography, law, history, sociology, and economics, several contributors look at southern industrial sectors old and new: aircraft and defense, cotton textiles, timber and pulp, carpeting, oil refining and petrochemicals, and automobiles. One essay challenges the perception that southern industrial growth was spurred by a disproportionate share of federal investment during and after the war.In covering the variety of technological, managerial, and spatial transitions brought about by the South's "second wave" of industrialization, the case studies also identify a set of themes crucial to understanding regional dynamics: investment and development; workforce training; planning, cost-containment, and environmental concerns; equal employment opportunities; rural-to-urban shifts and the decay of local economies entrepreneurism; and coordination of supply, service, and manufacturing processes. From boardroom to factory floor, the variety of perspectives in The Second Wave will significantly widen our understanding of the dramatic reshaping of the region in the decades after 1940.

Though it had helped define the New South era, the first wave of regional industrialization had clearly lost momentum even before the Great Depression. These nine original case studies look at how World War II and its aftermath transformed the economy, culture, and politics of the South.From perspectives grounded in geography, law, history, sociology, and economics, several contributors look at southern industrial sectors old and new: aircraft and defense, cotton textiles, timber and pulp, carpeting, oil refining and petrochemicals, and automobiles. One essay challenges the perception that southern industrial growth was spurred by a disproportionate share of federal investment during and after the war.In covering the variety of technological, managerial, and spatial transitions brought about by the South's "second wave" of industrialization, the case studies also identify a set of themes crucial to understanding regional dynamics: investment and development; workforce training; planning, cost-containment, and environmental concerns; equal employment opportunities; rural-to-urban shifts and the decay of local economies entrepreneurism; and coordination of supply, service, and manufacturing processes. From boardroom to factory floor, the variety of perspectives in The Second Wave will significantly widen our understanding of the dramatic reshaping of the region in the decades after 1940.

How repair components of machines reconstructed the distribution networks that connected production to consumption globally.When machines break, entire systems are exposed. Spare Parts tells the global history of replacement components and shows how their absence—or abundance—has shaped warfare, industry, and everyday life in the twentieth century. Philip Scranton traces the production, distribution, and use of spare parts across capitalist, socialist, and postcolonial economies from World War II through the Cold War. During WWII, parts proved as decisive as fuel or ammunition, determining whether tanks moved, aircraft flew, and factories functioned. In its aftermath, parts shortages became a chronic problem in centrally planned economies, while market societies faced different dilemmas created by rapid technological change, obsolescence, and corporate strategy. Focusing on vehicles, agricultural machinery, and radio and television technologies, Scranton reveals how repair practices differed across political systems. In socialist states, chronic shortages encouraged improvisation, scavenging, and informal exchange. In capitalist economies, parts became tools of profit, control, and planned abandonment, often pushing consumers toward replacement rather than repair. Scranton also follows spare parts beyond the superpowers, examining how postcolonial nations navigated inherited infrastructures and how parts functioned as instruments of geopolitical leverage. Charting the decline of repair culture in the late twentieth century, as durable vehicles and disposable electronics reshaped expectations about maintenance and longevity, Spare Parts reframes a familiar frustration as a central feature of modern history and offers new insight into technology, power, and the hidden systems that keep the world running.

Given the near-silence in technological and business history about post-World War II socialist enterprises, this book gives voice to a generation of Communist China’s managers, entrepreneurs, cadres, and workers from the Liberation to the early 1970s.

This study aims to reconstruct the activities of enterprises and individuals over two decades in one developing country (Hungary), within and across four politico-economic domains (agriculture, infrastructure/construction, commerce, and manufacturing), from the initial Stalinist obsession with heavy industry (Volume 1: Creating the Theft Economy, 1945-1957) through later reforms paying greater attention to profitable farming and the provision of abundant consumer goods (Volume 2: From Chaos to Contradiction, 1957-1972, forthcoming 2023). It provides hundreds of grounded, granular stories for reflection, as reported by actors and direct observers, ranging from innovation and improvisation to obstruction, failure, and fraud. Further, it offers an otherwise-unobtainable close encounter with another world, familiar in some respects while amazingly peculiar in others. The social history of enterprise and work in postwar Central European nations “building socialism” has longbeen underdeveloped. Through extensive macro-level research on planning and policy in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other Bloc countries, a grand narrative has been framed: reconstruction and breakneck industrialization under Soviet tutelage; then eventual mismanagement, stagnation and crisis, leading to collapse. This book seeks to explore what socialism actually looked like to those sustaining (or enduring} it as they faced forward into an unknowable future, to assess how and where it did (or didn’t) work, and to recount how ordinary people responded to its opportunities and constraints. This study will appeal to readers interested in understanding how businesses worked day-to-day in a planned economy, how enterprise practices and technological strategies shifted during the first postwar generation, how novice managers and technicians emerged during rapid industrialization, how peasants learned to farm cooperatively, how organizations improvised and adapted, howpolitical purity and practical expertise contended for control, and how the controversies and convulsions of the postwar decades shaped a deeply flawed project to “build socialism.”

This study aims to reconstruct the activities of enterprises and individuals over two decades in one developing country (Hungary), within and across four politico-economic domains (agriculture, infrastructure/construction, commerce, and manufacturing), from the initial Stalinist obsession with heavy industry (Volume 1: Creating the Theft Economy, 1945-1957) through later reforms paying greater attention to profitable farming and the provision of abundant consumer goods (Volume 2: From Chaos to Contradiction, 1957-1972, forthcoming 2023). It provides hundreds of grounded, granular stories for reflection, as reported by actors and direct observers, ranging from innovation and improvisation to obstruction, failure, and fraud. Further, it offers an otherwise-unobtainable close encounter with another world, familiar in some respects while amazingly peculiar in others. The social history of enterprise and work in postwar Central European nations “building socialism” has longbeen underdeveloped. Through extensive macro-level research on planning and policy in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other Bloc countries, a grand narrative has been framed: reconstruction and breakneck industrialization under Soviet tutelage; then eventual mismanagement, stagnation and crisis, leading to collapse. This book seeks to explore what socialism actually looked like to those sustaining (or enduring} it as they faced forward into an unknowable future, to assess how and where it did (or didn’t) work, and to recount how ordinary people responded to its opportunities and constraints. This study will appeal to readers interested in understanding how businesses worked day-to-day in a planned economy, how enterprise practices and technological strategies shifted during the first postwar generation, how novice managers and technicians emerged during rapid industrialization, how peasants learned to farm cooperatively, how organizations improvised and adapted, howpolitical purity and practical expertise contended for control, and how the controversies and convulsions of the postwar decades shaped a deeply flawed project to “build socialism.”

This book aims to reconstruct the activities of enterprises and individuals over two decades in one developing country (Hungary), within and across four politico-economic domains (agriculture, infrastructure/construction, commerce, and manufacturing), from the initial Stalinist obsession with heavy industry through later reforms paying greater attention to profitable farming and the provision of abundant consumer goods.  It provides hundreds of grounded, granular stories for reflection, as reported by actors and direct observers, ranging from innovation and improvisation to obstruction, failure, and fraud. Further, it offers an otherwise-unobtainable close encounter with another world, familiar in some respects while amazingly peculiar in others.The social history of enterprise and work in postwar Central European nations “building socialism” has long been underdeveloped. Through extensive macro-level research on planning and policy in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other Bloc countries, a grand narrative has been framed:  reconstruction and breakneck industrialization under Soviet tutelage; then eventual mismanagement, stagnation and crisis, leading to collapse. This book seeks to explore what socialism actually looked like to those sustaining (or enduring} it as they faced forward into an unknowable future, to assess how and where it did (or didn’t) work, and to recount how ordinary people responded to its opportunities and constraints.This study will appeal to readers interested in a understanding how businesses worked day-to-day in a planned economy, how enterprise practices and technological strategies shifted during the first postwar generation, how novice managers and technicians emerged during rapid industrialization, how peasants learned to farm cooperatively, how organizations improvised and adapted, how political purity and practical expertise contended for control, and how the controversies and convulsions of the postwar decadesshaped a deeply flawed project to “build socialism.”

This book aims to reconstruct the activities of enterprises and individuals over two decades in one developing country (Hungary), within and across four politico-economic domains (agriculture, infrastructure/construction, commerce, and manufacturing), from the initial Stalinist obsession with heavy industry through later reforms paying greater attention to profitable farming and the provision of abundant consumer goods.  It provides hundreds of grounded, granular stories for reflection, as reported by actors and direct observers, ranging from innovation and improvisation to obstruction, failure, and fraud. Further, it offers an otherwise-unobtainable close encounter with another world, familiar in some respects while amazingly peculiar in others.The social history of enterprise and work in postwar Central European nations “building socialism” has long been underdeveloped. Through extensive macro-level research on planning and policy in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other Bloc countries, a grand narrative has been framed:  reconstruction and breakneck industrialization under Soviet tutelage; then eventual mismanagement, stagnation and crisis, leading to collapse. This book seeks to explore what socialism actually looked like to those sustaining (or enduring} it as they faced forward into an unknowable future, to assess how and where it did (or didn’t) work, and to recount how ordinary people responded to its opportunities and constraints.This study will appeal to readers interested in a understanding how businesses worked day-to-day in a planned economy, how enterprise practices and technological strategies shifted during the first postwar generation, how novice managers and technicians emerged during rapid industrialization, how peasants learned to farm cooperatively, how organizations improvised and adapted, how political purity and practical expertise contended for control, and how the controversies and convulsions of the postwar decadesshaped a deeply flawed project to “build socialism.”

Business history needs a shake-up, Philip Scranton and Patrick Fridenson argue, as many businesses go global and cultural contexts become critical. "Reimagining Business History" prods practitioners to take new approaches to entrepreneurial intentions, company scale, corporate strategies, local infrastructure, employee well-being, use of resources, and long-term environmental consequences. During the past half century, the history of American business became an unusually active and rewarding field of scholarship, partly because of the primacy of postwar American capital, at home and abroad, and the rise of a consumer culture but also because of the theoretical originality of Alfred D. Chandler. In a field long given over to banal company histories and biographies of tycoons, Chandler took the subject seriously enough to ask about the large patterns and causes of corporate success. Chandler and his students found the richest material for theorizing about the course of business history in large companies and their institutional structures and cultures.Meantime, Scranton and others found smaller firms, those specializing in batch work as opposed to mass-produced goods, far closer to the norm and more telling. Scranton and Fridenson believe that the time has come for a sweeping rethinking of the field, its materials, and the kinds of questions its practitioners should be asking. How can this field develop in an age of global markets, growing information technology, and diminishing resources? A transnational collaboration between two senior scholars, "Reimagining Business History" offers direction in forty-four short, pithy essays.