ABSTRACT
Business historians, in their work on the single firm-its birth, growth and, where appropriate, decline-have naturally included sections dealing with entrepreneurial response, organisational forms, and, if relevant, the separation of ownership and control and the emergence of managerial hierarchies. That this writing is often, if not invariably, divorced from a more general, theoretical, approach should not surprise us. There is, of course, no obligation on the historian of an individual business to theorise; indeed, many of such studies are commissioned histories, with all the constraints on subject matter which they impose, whether directly or indirectly. Nor is theorising a straightforward matter. For example, conventional neo-classical economics offers little comfort to those who wish to emphasise the role of the entrepreneur and organisational structures in the dynamic process of business development. Moreover, the situation still persists, notwithstanding the theoretical heritage of Schumpeter and Penrose; the behavioural school of Barnard and Simon; the transaction costs approach pioneered by Commons and Coase; and the imaginative attempts to build constraints into profit-maximising assumptions in micro-economic theory.1 For many years scholars, whether economists or historians, have often complained that much more empirical work is required before confident generalisations on entrepreneurship and organisational change can be attempted. At the same time, theoreticians remain critical of what they deem the blinkered approach of historians of single business entities.2
