We sketch a new synthesis of American business history to replace (and subsume) that put forward by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., most famously in his book The Visible Hand (1977). We see the broader subject as the history of the institutions of coordination in the economy, with the management of...

Case studies that examine how firms coordinate economic activity in the face of asymmetric information-information not equally available to all parties-are the focus of this volume.In an ideal world, the market would be the optimal provider of coordination, but in the real world of incomplete...

Learning by Doing in Markets, Firms, and Countries draws out the underlying economics in business history by focusing on learning processes and the development of competitively valuable asymmetries. The essays show that organizations, like people, learn that this process can be organized more or...