网络信息技术与零售业市场结构变迁

进入网络信息时代以来,零售服务业的"沃尔玛现象"逐步显现,并以广泛运用信息技术,不断突破规模经济和范围经济的界限,对市场结构产生重大冲击。本文从"沃尔玛现象"入手研究零售业市场结构的变迁,发现信息技术创新对熊彼特的五大创新活动有着强烈的整合作用,对市场结构及消费者福利等方面产生了深远影响,而且新的创新模式已经展开。     

Real Wages,Business Cycles and New Production Patterns

In contrast with most conventional business cycle models, empirical data show no clear correlation between real wage movements and output and employment. This paper presents a model, largely based on concepts presented by Joseph Schumpeter,in which economic growth and the business cycle are triggered by endogenous real shocks to technology. It suggests that the speed and magnitude by which technological shocks spread throughout the economy determine whether the resulting changes in real wages will be pro-or counter-cyclical.     

David Reisman. Schumpeter's Market: Enterprise and Evolution. Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar, 2004. vii + 294 pp. ISBN 1-84376-164-5, $120.00.

The life and works of Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) continueto fascinate social scientists of diverse disciplines and schools.For some economists Schumpeter’s institutional and evolutionaryapproach is the only way to practice economics; but even forthe mainstream the current buzz about endogenous growth andthe knowledge economy has renewed interest in his writings,especially those on technology and entrepreneurship. Businesshistorians always have been attentive to Schumpeter’sentrepreneurs and the dynamic of creative destruction, and globalizationnow provides a     

Madeleine Zelin, Jonathan K. Ocko, and Robert Gardella, eds. Contract and Property in Early Modern China. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004. vii + 398 pp. ISBN 0-8047-4639-7, $65.00.

In 1887 the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society—ChinaBranch sponsored a symposium on "Chinese partnerships," in whicha number of eminent China hands such as E. H. Parker and ChalonerAlabaster shared their long experience with the subject. Thediscussants agreed, among other things, that liability for debtsof the firm was enforceable in Chinese courts, that this liabilitywas shared among the partners according to their contractuallydetermined shares in the business, and that a contractuallydesignated "managing partner" normally     

Charles Loft. Government, the Railways and the Modernization of Britain: Beeching's Last Trains

"This book," writes Charles Loft, "is first and foremost aboutrailway closures ... [It] is not a business history, or an economicstudy" (p.2). What, then, does it have to offer to readers ofEnterprise & Society, who may not expect much of a bookwhich is part of a series on "British Politics and Society"?The simple answer is that it provides much more than the author'smodest opening remarks. By analyzing the political and popularopposition     

H. Roger Grant. "Follow the Flag": A History of the Wabash Railroad Company. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004. xii + 291 pp. ISBN 0-87580-328-8, $49.95 (cloth).

"Follow the Flag" reaffirms Roger Grant’s status as oneof the preeminent historians of transportation in the UnitedStates. The book reflects the predilection of many railroadhistorians to focus on a specific firm, rather than addresslarger thematic issues. Far more than being "just another railroad,"however, the Wabash reflected changes in its political, economic,and social milieu, while also playing a leading role in shapingthe very environment that surrounded it. The Wabash rose from the ashes of an 1830s Illinois internal     

Marina Moskowitz. Standard of Living: The Measure of the Middle Class in Modern America. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xii + 300 pp. ISBN 0-8018-7947-7, $45.00.

In Standard of Living: The Measure of the Middle Class in ModernAmerica, Marina Moskowitz seeks to elucidate a term that cameinto broad usage at the turn of the twentieth century but seemedto have no clear definition. Sociologists, journalists, novelists,and government officials alike all referred to the "standardof living," yet they did not necessarily agree on just whatthat standard was. Moskowitz argues that the standard of livingwas a measure not of how     

Steven Deyle. Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life

Steven Deyle’s Carry Me Back demolishes the myths of thedomestic slave trade, replacing images of scheming manstealerswith a comprehensive, yet lucid, account of the human traffic.It does even more than this, however. Its subtitle promisesto discuss the role of the domestic slave trade "in Americanlife," and on this the book fully delivers. The first three chapters of Carry Me Back offer a broad narrativeof the rise and demise of the domestic trade. Deyle argues thatthe trade arose in the years following the American     

Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill. The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004. xii + 263 pp. ISBN 0-8047-4854-3, $24.95 (cloth).

Adopting the approach of the "new institutional economics,"Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill argue that grassroots, cooperativelydeveloped property rules in the nineteenth-century AmericanWest led to the peaceful resolution of most conflicts. To thedegree that cooperation trumped conflict and violence, the authorsinsist, "the ‘wild, wild West’ was really the ‘notso wild, wild West’" (p. 5). Institutional entrepreneurs,they contend, emerged to establish property rights governingaccess to rangeland,     

Michael Redclift. Chewing Gum: The Fortunes of Taste

Chewing gum was foremost an American invention, Michael Redclifttells us in Chewing Gum: The Fortunes of Taste, a brief yetserious and engaging book that details how chewing gum cameto occupy a distinct place in the rise of American consumerism.Perhaps nothing signified the triviality of consumerism as chewinggum. It possessed what Redclift calls an "ephemeral quality,"it was an easily replicable mass product, and provided instantgratification. This ephemerality was complicated by     

Karen Olson. Wives of Steel: Voices of Women from the Sparrows Point Steelmaking Communities. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. x + 216 pp. ISBN 0-271-02685-5, $40.00.

In her introduction to Wives of Steel, Karen Olson warns thatthe book is "not a business or labor history of the SparrowsPoint steel complex," stressing that it is instead a genderedanalysis of an industrial community (p. 13). Yet historiansof business and labor should find much of interest in this book.By placing women at the center of her history of Sparrows Point,Maryland, and the neighboring communities of Dundalk and TurnerStation, Olson highlights the     

Editor's Introduction

This issue marks a departure from our brief tradition. EachDecember Enterprise & Society has published the addressof the president of the Business History Conference     

Franco Amatori and Geoffrey Jones, eds. Business History around the World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xv + 425 pp. ISBN 0-521-82107-X, $65.00.

This important cluster of perspectives on practice and prospectin business history derives from a fall 1998 colloquium heldat Bocconi University in Milan, sponsored jointly by the Institutefor Economic History, the Italian Association of Business Historians(ASSI), Reading University, and Johns Hopkins University. Thecollection echoes its support team’s transnational diversity,presenting an opening set of conceptualizing essays, elevenconcise national/regional overviews, and four closing chaptersthat identify themes for comparative business history. Botha snapshot of the discipline’s preoccupations in the late1990s and a handbook of historiography and work then in progress,Business History around the World is a volume every referencelibrary should own. For practicing historians and graduate students,in my view, parts one and     

Warren Belasco. Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food

Warren Belasco does not know what the future of food is goingto be, but he does know a great deal about the history of thefuture of food. In his book, Meals to Come: A History of theFuture of Food, Belasco examines predictions, discussions, fears,and controversies that have surrounded our food supply overthe previous two centuries. As he notes in his introduction,making predictions is a risky business, but, risk aside, therehave been no shortage     

Dwijendra Tripathi. The Oxford History of Indian Business

Dwijendra Tripathi has provided an invaluable service to scholarsand practitioners in business management, history, and socialsciences with his book, The Oxford History of Indian Business.Tripathi is considered to be the founder of the field of businesshistory (with an emphasis on all facets of this history includingpolitics, economics, and society) in India. His tenureship atthe Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad led to the adoptionof an academic and research program in business     

The End of History, Specters of Marx and Business Ethics

More often than not, business ethics textbooks have included sections on "the great economic debate," that is, the discussion of capitalism as a total system, of the criticisms against it and of the proposed alternatives. The reason for such sections is fairly obvious: at some point one has to consider whether or not all the particular problems of employment, of product quality, of environment, of regulation and so on prove beyond solution without a radical change in the basic institutions of society. Since the collapse of real socialism as an alternative in the period 1989–1991, it has become increasingly difficult to have this discussion. Yet we cannot do without the critique of capitalism even if the answer may be that no other economic system is viable at this moment in history. My interest in this paper is to explore how we might now engage in this critique. Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History?" (1989) and Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (1993) provide a framework for this renewed engagement.     

Entrepreneurship and Uncertainty: Innovation and Competition among the Many

Schumpeter stressed innovation and Knight uncertainty as preconditions for entrepreneurship and productivity growth. Schumpeter emphasized entry in his early work but came to consider incumbent innovation the dominant mode in his later work. Modern growth theory emphasizes dissemination of knowledge to explain progress in the steady state. The paper analyzes the effects of entry, market structures and uncertainty on the incidence and diffusion of innovation. The insertion of Knightian uncertainty in Schumpeter's model can explain why innovators are numerous and arrive unexpectedly. Uncertainty spurs diffusion and improves the utilization of human capital. Combining the ideas of Schumpeter and Knight also elucidates several stylized facts of entrepreneurship, such as small entry size; low chances of survival and high growth rates.     

Mark Duckenfield, Stefan Altorfer, and Benedikt Koehler, eds. History of Financial Disasters, 1763-1995

In a History of Financial Disasters, Stefan Altorfer has assembleda collection of contemporary accounts and journal articles toexamine the history of financial crises since the eighteenthcentury. The collection is divided into three volumes with eachchapter devoted to one financial crisis. The first volume examinesimportant financial disasters prior to 1850, including earlyEuropean financial crises in 1763 and 1772–73, and theAssignat Inflation during the French Revolution. This is followedby a discussion of the 1918–1919 crisis of the SecondBank of the United States, the London Crisis of 1825, the Panic     

Evidence of creative destruction in the U.S. economy

Schumpeter discusses the importance of innovation and new firm entry in a capitalistic economy as a means to creatively destruct oligopolies and generate new economic wealth. He warns of R&D becoming the arena of professional engineers in large corporations; Schumpeter feared the obsolescence of entrepreneurship would result in an increasing concentration of wealth among large corporations and toward socialism.Using a longitudinal data base of U.S. corporations over the period 1961–1980, this paper statistically tests several aspects of Schumpeter's analysis. Overall our results give some support to Schumpeter's creative destruction hypothesis, though there exists some sensitivity to the measure of size used. We find most of the firms exiting the ranks of the largest 500 firms (as measured by assets) are those with ranks in the 401–500 range; there is also evidence of churning as the same firms enter and exit the top 500 over time. Additionally, we find that merger has gained prominence as the reason why firms exit the top 500. Among our conclusions is that further work is needed on the role of mergers in the growth-and decline-of entrepreneurial firms.     

Robert M. Collins. Transforming America: Politics and Culture during the Reagan Years

Robert Collins has written two superb books treating modernAmerican business history—The Business Response to Keynes(1981), and More: The Politics of Growth in Postwar America(2000). In this, his most recent and elegantly written book,he takes on the rather more slippery, amorphous cultural historyof the period. He even dives undaunted into that most murkyphenomenon, "postmodernism." There, he has some delightful thingsto say about "the therapeutic culture" and the "self-esteem"fad that it produced. In his treatment