Skip to Main Content
HBS Home
  • About
  • Academic Programs
  • Alumni
  • Faculty & Research
  • Baker Library
  • Giving
  • Harvard Business Review
  • Initiatives
  • News
  • Recruit
  • Map / Directions
Working Knowledge
Business Research for Business Leaders
  • Browse All Articles
  • Popular Articles
  • Cold Call Podcast
  • Managing the Future of Work Podcast
  • About Us
  • Book
  • Leadership
  • Marketing
  • Finance
  • Management
  • Entrepreneurship
  • All Topics...
  • Topics
    • COVID-19
    • Entrepreneurship
    • Finance
    • Gender
    • Globalization
    • Leadership
    • Management
    • Negotiation
    • Social Enterprise
    • Strategy
  • Sections
    • Book
    • Podcasts
    • HBS Case
    • In Practice
    • Lessons from the Classroom
    • Op-Ed
    • Research & Ideas
    • Research Event
    • Sharpening Your Skills
    • What Do You Think?
    • Working Paper Summaries
  • Browse All
    Book Excerpt: ’Entrepreneurship and Multinationals’
    11 Mar 2014Research & Ideas

    Book Excerpt: ’Entrepreneurship and Multinationals’

    An excerpt from Entrepreneurship and Multinationals: Global Business and the Making of the Modern World, by Geoffrey Jones.
    LinkedIn
    Email

    Entrepreneurship and Multinationals: Global Business and the Making of the Modern Worldbook excerpt

    Firms As Actors

    From Chapter 1 Entrepreneurship and Multinationals: Global Business and the Making of the Modern World

    By Geoffrey Jones

    Entrepreneurs and firms have been important actors in the making of our modern global world. Forty years ago this would not have needed to be said. As the pace of globalization speeded up from the 1960s, the term "multinational enterprise" (hereafter MNE) was coined, and there was an outpouring of discussion, much of it critical, about the political, social, and economic role of large global firms. MNEs were perceived to be so powerful that they posed a threat to the nation state.

    Yet as historians, economists and other scholars have discovered that globalization has a long history, so the role of business enterprises has tended to be written out of the script. The neglect of firms is apparent across disciplines. For several decades academic historians devoted almost no attention to businesses as such, as they focused on the role of culture, race, gender, and religion in historical developments. Mainstream historians, Beckert recently observed, "largely ceded interpretative hegemony when it comes to matters of economic change to economists, political scientists, sociologists, and a host of popular writers." A renewal of interest in the "history of capitalism" is finally beginning to correct this peculiar omission.

     

    Related Article

    Related Article

    An Interview With The Author

    Read The Interview
     

    Economic historians, often in recent decades trained in economics and employed in economics departments, have remained focused on economic change, but have often paid little attention to firms. In exploring globalization, they have done pioneering work in quantifying historical trends in the integration of world markets. They have shown that the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a deeper globalization than ever seen previously using that criterion. By 1914 world capital, commodity and labor markets were closely integrated, and more integrated than they were to be for several decades thereafter. Yet this literature has had much more to say about international trade and institutional structures than about entrepreneurship and MNEs. Indeed, the story of the creation of the nineteenth-century global economy has been written about without mentioning a single business enterprise. Political scientists, although more interested in firms, have focused primarily on the politics and policy decisions which impacted and drove globalization. Sociologists, who have approached the subject of globalization from the perspective of organizations, have primarily focused on states and intergovernmental organizations.

    This book makes the case that the role of business needs to be more centrally incorporated into narratives explain the making of the modern world. Broadly, it explores a number of key questions. Were entrepreneurs and firms architects, co-architects, or consumers of the modern world? How important were they compared with governments and other institutional actors in building global capitalism? Were they followers of fashions and trends, or creators of them? Could they dictate to consumers and governments? Or were they dictated to? MNEs have been described by Alfred D. Chandler and Bruce Mazlish, two prominent historians, as a "new kind of Leviathan," which had "an impact on almost every sphere of modern life from policymaking on the environment to international security, from issues of personal identity to issues of community, and from the future of work to the future of the nation-state." How powerful were these so-called Leviathans, and how did their power change over time? If business was a shaper of global capitalism, was its force for good, or otherwise?

    These questions remain as relevant today as in the past, and perhaps even more so, given both the pace of globalization in today's world, and the reappearance of multiple critics. This book is motivated by the belief that it is important to provide robust historical evidence on which to inform opinions and judgment about both the present and the future.

      Trending
        • 13 Dec 2021
        • Research & Ideas

        The Unlikely Upside of Mergers: More Diverse Management Teams

        • 14 Mar 2023
        • In Practice

        What Does the Failure of Silicon Valley Bank Say About the State of Finance?

        • 16 Mar 2023
        • Research & Ideas

        Why Business Travel Still Matters in a Zoom World

        • 14 Dec 2021
        • Op-Ed

        To Change Your Company's Culture, Don't Start by Trying to Change the Culture

        • 25 Feb 2019
        • Research & Ideas

        How Gender Stereotypes Kill a Woman’s Self-Confidence

    Geoffrey G. Jones
    Geoffrey G. Jones
    Isidor Straus Professor of Business History
    Contact
    Send an email
    → More Articles
    Find Related Articles
    • History
    • Globalization

    Sign up for our weekly newsletter

    Interested in improving your business? Learn about fresh research and ideas from Harvard Business School faculty.
    This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
    ǁ
    Campus Map
    Harvard Business School Working Knowledge
    Baker Library | Bloomberg Center
    Soldiers Field
    Boston, MA 02163
    Email: Editor-in-Chief
    →Map & Directions
    →More Contact Information
    • Make a Gift
    • Site Map
    • Jobs
    • Harvard University
    • Trademarks
    • Policies
    • Accessibility
    • Digital Accessibility
    Copyright © President & Fellows of Harvard College