ABSTRACT
The place of science and technology in the British economy and society is widely seen as critical to our understanding of the performance of British business this century. Clichés such as ‘Britain is good at inventing but bad at developing’, the ‘low status of engineers’, the ‘Two Cultures’, the ‘anti-industrial’ and ‘antiscientific’ spirit of elites, are granted great explanatory power.1 Despite this our historical understanding of the relationship between science and business in Britain is rudimentary: historians of the British decline are as indifferent to science and technology as the businessmen and the politicians they pillory. One could be more specific: much of business history has ‘failed’ for much the same reason as British businesses have allegedly ‘failed’. Rather than speculate whether the reasons might be similar it may be more profitable to link the neglect of science and technology to the neglect of economic and social theory by British economic and business historians. We should note, for example, that the connections between science and technology and business are central to theoretical accounts of ‘industrial’ and ‘capitalist’ society: is the modern corporation the organisational embodiment of scientific, technical and economic rationality, or is today’s science and technology the product of the specifically capitalist corporation?2 Consideration of arguments such as these would result in greater attention to science in business.
