Salesmen have received a bad rap over the years, but increasingly the profession is drawing scholarly interest. Business History Review coeditor Walter A. Friedman discusses the publication's recent themed issue on salesmanship.
Professor Joseph L. Bower discusses a two-year research project exploring the views of global business leaders and HBS faculty on what might threaten the world's economic progress.
Published in 2008
Compiling a handbook on the current thinking in any area of study seems daunting enough, but the just-published Oxford Handbook of Business History carries an even larger mission: bring the lessons of business history to current research in other disciplines and to the practice of business management itself. A Q&A with coeditor Geoffrey Jones.
Published in 2007
Alfred D. Chandler Jr., who died in May, defined the field of business history and shaped the way we think about the modern corporation. Harvard Business School colleagues share their thoughts on his legacy as well as their personal reminiscences.
Economist Joseph Schumpeter was perhaps the most powerful thinker ever on innovation, entrepreneurship, and capitalism. He was also one of the most unusual personalities of the 20th century, as Harvard Business School professor emeritus Thomas K. McCraw shows in a new biography. Read our interview and book excerpt.
Before influential Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote the seminal Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, there came the difficult-to-digest Business Cycles. Although the book was a failure, professor Thomas K. McCraw, who has written a forthcoming Schumpeter biography, believes Business Cycles developed Schumpeter's thinking on capitalism and ultimately changed the practice of business history. Excerpted from Business History Review.
Published in 2003
Harvard Business School faculty Richard S. Tedlow, Alfred D. Chandler, Nancy F. Koehn, and Debora L. Spar discuss the different research paths they took leading to their most recent publications.
Published in 2002
Rohit Daniel Wadhwani, the Harvard-Newcomen Fellow in Business History for the 2002-03 academic year, discusses his research work and his experiences as a Fellow at Harvard Business School in this interview with Laura Linard.
Published in 1999
The Virginians in Jamestown, the Puritans in Massachusetts Bay, the Quakers in Pennsylvania and other early settlers of what later became the United States all brought with them elements of capitalism, precursors of the future nation's market-driven direction. In this excerpt from his article "American Capitalism" in Creating Modern Capitalism: How Entrepreneurs, Companies, and Countries Triumphed in Three Industrial Revolutions, HBS Professor Thomas K. McCraw looks at the early years of capitalism on the North American continent.
The term entrepreneur — literally, "undertaker"—has been around for over two centuries, but attempts to define it have remained elusive. In this excerpt from their article "Entrepreneurial Management: In Pursuit of Opportunity," HBS Professors Howard H. Stevenson and Teresa M. Amabile look back at the roots of entrepreneneurship as an academic field of interest and ahead to what they believe will be "the entrepreneur's century."
