ABSTRACT
The specialist journals – Business History and Business History Review – carry few articles which draw extensively on economic theory or employ advanced statistical methods. Many business historians would deny the relevance of most economic ideas or techniques of measurement to their work. The business history community, whilst taking note of the ideas of alternative theorists of the firm like Edith Penrose, has generally regarded economic theory with suspicion, preferring the research methods of traditional history to those those of social science. Accurate measurement is accepted as a precondition for meaningful historical analysis, and what is true of economic history must be true for its sub-discipline, business history. The decade of the 1960s was one of great intellectual achievement for economic history. The application of economic theory and advanced techniques of measurement, in different combinations, is their hallmark. They are examples of social scientific history, in the fashion of the new economic history.
