Historicism and Industry Emergence: Industry Knowledge from Pre-emergence to Stylized Fact

Management and organization scholars have increasingly turned to historical sources to examine the emergence and evolution of industries over time. This scholarship has typically used historical evidence as observations for testing theoretically relevant processes of industry emergence. In this chapter, an alternative approach is explored that focuses on reconstructing causes and processes that time and theory have erased. The emergence of three industries—plant biotechnology, savings banking, and the automobile—shows how time, along with prevailing functional models of industry evolution, leads to idiosyncratic ordering and reordering of historical evidence and thus systematically excludes developments and processes that do not fit expectations. It is established that historical methods and analytical narratives can serve as valuable complements to functional social scientific explanations in identifying excluded phenomena and explanations, reconstructing uncertainty and alternative paths of industry emergence, and studying the processes of information elision and exclusion in the formation of industry knowledge.