ABSTRACT
In order to give a fair judgement of the applicability and adaptability of Schumpeter’s conceptual structure, we can do no better than to consider the age of railway construction in the nineteenth century-both in its pioneering and its more mature stages.1 The pioneering period was the time when the horse-driven mail coaches were outcompeted, railway towns mushroomed, financial schemes blossomed and failed, industries supplying and using the railways were set up, etc. The period of maturation was characterised by the routinisation of what earlier had been novelties and by the emergence of early forms of the modem corporation with its processes of rationalisation and control. More abstractly, it was an age of an irrevocable change of the routines of economic life which in many ways suggests an evolutionary-economic analysis.
