The Nature of the Firm: Towards an Ecocultural History of … · The Nature of the Firm 1579 more promising avenues for integrating business history into larger historic panoramas

Christine Meisner Rosen and Christopher C. Sellers

The Nature of the Firm: Towards anEcocultural History of Business

Business history has never paid much attention to the environment.Brushing aside the firm's reliance and impact on the natural

world, early business historians zeroed in on the role of the entrepre-neur in big business's rise. They found it easy to truncate, marginalizeor altogether ignore the physical processes by which the stuff ofnature—"raw" materials—was carved or coaxed out of mountains, for-ests, and deserts, channeled into factories and squeezed and cajoledinto commodities. They scarcely considered the ever-changing variet-ies of "waste" generated by businesses and customers, which so ofteninfiltrated, polluted, and otherwise altered the world beyond factoryand office. They devoted equally little attention to the effects ofresource extraction and use on plants, animals, land, air, or water,much less entire ecosystems and climate.1

CHRISTINE MEISNER ROSEN is an associate professor of business and public policyat the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.

CHRISTOPHER SELLERS is an associate professor of history at the State Universityof New York at Stony Brook.

We would like to thank Joel Tarr for helping to inspire us to do this special issue on busi-ness and the environment. We would also like to thank him and Brad Bateman for their sug-gestions for improving our introductory article.

1 Much of this early work gave no attention to environmental problems even though it washighly critical of the industrialists who created big business. For example, Matthew Joseph-son's The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861-1901 (New York, 1934), oneof the early classics in American history, bitterly critiques the architects of American big busi-ness without specifically addressing their business's many harmful environmental impacts.This failure is particularly clear in books dealing with John D. Rockefeller and the develop-ment of the environmentally degrading oil industry. See for example, Ida M. Tarbell, Historyof the Standard Oil Company (New York, 1925) and Allan Nevins, Study in Power: John DRockefeller, Industrialist and Philanthropist (New York, 1953). See also Peter D. A. Jones,ed., The Robber Barons Revisited (Boston, 1968).

Business History Review 73 (Winter 1999): 577-600. © 1999 by The President andFellows of Harvard College.

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Christine Meisner Rosen and Christopher C. Sellers 1578

The emergence of Chandlerian institutional history perpetuated thisneglect. The organizational approach encouraged business historians tofocus on the dynamics of corporate management and the internal evolu-tion of the firm. Its adherents impressed upon their colleagues the valueof analyzing how corporate managers responded to market conditionsbeyond the firm's walls, through strategies and organizational struc-tures.2 Although there was nothing in this approach that would have pre-vented them from examining how firms organized themselves to managenatural resource utilization, pollution control, or any other aspect of theinterface between the corporation and the environment, Chandler andhis followers chose to concentrate on matters relating to vertical integra-tion and the evolution of the large, diversified, multi-divisional industrialcorporation. In the process of investigating these admittedly importantaspects of the rise of big business, they continued to ignore the subject ofbig business's dependence and impact on the natural world. Their inat-tention persisted despite the fact that they wrote at a time of mountingpublic outcry over industrial pollution and increasing conflict betweenbusiness and an ascendant environmental movement.3

We hope this special issue of the Business Histonj Review willimpress upon business historians the richness, relevance, and importance ofquestions about business's interface with the natural environment. An envi-ronmentally-minded business history will, we contend, restore crucial mate-rialist dimensions to the field: not just the concreteness of money andmarkets, but of fire, rock, dust and smoke. We also believe there are few

2 For evidence of Chandler's immediate impact, see Louis Gambols, "The Emerging Or-ganizational Synthesis in American History," Business Histonj Review 44 (Autumn 1970):279-290 and Glenn Porter, The Rise of Big Business, 1860-1910 (Arlington Heights, 111.,1973). An excellent review article detailing Chandlers longer term impact is Richard R.John, "Elaborations, Revisions, Dissents: Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.'s, The Visible Hand afterTwenty Years," Business History Review 71 (Summer 1997): 151-200. Chandlers most impor-tant contributions to the field include Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of theAmerican Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge, Mass., 1962); Alfred D. Chandler. Jr., The Visi-ble Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977); andAlfred D. Chandler, Jr., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge,Mass., 1990).

3 An exception is Joseph A. Pratt, "Growth of a Clean Environment? Responses to Petro-leum-Related Pollution in the Gulf Coast Refining Region," Business History Review 52(Spring 1978): 1-29. By the mid-1980s business historians were awakening to the importanceof addressing environmental issues. See, for example, Richard S. Tedlow and Richard R.John, Jr., eds., Managing Big Business: Essays from the Business Histonj Review (Cambridge,Mass., 1986), which included a section on "The Corporation, Technology, and the Environ-ment." But this section only reprinted Pratt's article alongside two others that confined theirenvironmental attentions to energy issues—a telling indication of how little research of thissort had as yet been done. In this collection, see also Albro Martin, "James J. Hill and theFirst Energy Revolution: A Study in Entrepreneurship, 1865-1878," 88-106 (first appeared inBusiness Histonj Revieic 50 [Summer 1976]: 179-197); and Richard H. K. Vietor, "The Syn-thetic Liquid Fuels Program: Energy Politics in the Truman Era," 299-328 (first appeared inBusiness Histonj Review 54 [Spring 1980].- 1-34).

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The Nature of the Firm 1579

more promising avenues for integrating business history into larger historicpanoramas or for ushering the field through a cultural turn.

Business historians can profit in this regard from terms and modes ofanalysis that have evolved in the field of "environmental history." We alsohave an auspicious opportunity to help mold and deepen the environmentalhistory enterprise. Since the founding of the American Society for Environ-mental History and the establishment of its journal in the mid-1970s, envi-ronmental historians have evolved their own ambitious agenda. The mostsweeping statements of purpose—such as that by Donald Worster on "therole and place of nature in human life'and William Cronon on "placingnature in [human] history"—have helped make it one of the mostly broadlyintegrative historical projects around.4 Environmental historians have devel-oped an ever widening and more sophisticated understanding of "nature's"meanings and the variety of ways it has figured into human life and history.0

Oddly enough, however, despite this broad conception of their field, ourcolleagues in environmental history have shown almost as much reluctanceto tackle business's environmental relations as business historians have. Bothfields have sorely neglected the borderlands between them. Path-breakingenvironmental historians have launched a harsh critique of capitalism thathas entailed surprisingly little scrutiny of managers or corporations.6 Earlyon, most environmental historians concentrated on the history of wilderness,agriculture, the conservation movement, or modern environmentalism,where they believed nature and its defense were most obviously found.' Pre-occupied with setting out a distinctive field of historical endeavor in relation

4 Donald Worster, "Transformations of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspectivein History7," and William Cronon, "Modes of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature inHistory," Journal of American History 76 (1990): 1089, 1122 (quotes).

° Reviews of this historiography include: Richard White, "Historiographic Essay; Ameri-can Environmental History: The Development of a New Historical Field," Pacific HistoricalReview (1985): 297-335; Donald Worster, "Doing Environmental History," in idem., ed., TheEnds of the Earth (New York, 1988); Alfred Crosby, "The Past and Present of EnvironmentalHistory," American Historical Revieic 100 (1995): 1177-89; J. Donald Hughes, "Whither En-vironmental History," American Society for Environmental History News 8 (Autumn,1997): 1-3.

6The many works offering critiques of capitalism include, Donald Worster, Dust Bowl:The Southern Plains in the 1930's (New York, 1979) and Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, andthe Growth of the American West (New York, 1985); William Cronon, Changes in the Land:Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983); Richard White, Rootsof Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Paw-nees, and Navajos (Lincoln, Nebr, 1983); and Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions; Na-ture, Gender and Science in New England (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1987).

' Samuel Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (1959; edition used, New York,1975); Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (third edition; New Haven, 1982);Susan Schrepfer, The Fight to Save the Redwoods: A History of Environmental Reform, 1917-1978 (Madison, Wise, 1983); Michael Cohen, The Pathless Way: John Muir and AmericanWilderness (Madison, Wise, 1984); Stephen Fox, John Muir and His Legacy: The AmericanConservation Movement (Roston, 1981); on agriculture, see most works cited in footnote 5.



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to frontier and Western history as well as environmentalism itself, mostassumed that they knew the history of the large corporation all too well—itsinner workings as well as its outwardly impacts. They envisioned a mono-lithic nineteenth- and twentieth-century economic system that offered littleentry point or incentive for closer study of individual companies, business-men, or even industries as a whole. A 1990 Journal of American Historyroundtable presenting the views and agendas of major environmental histo-rians offered virtually no discussion of the shift to corporate capitalism thathad become the central preoccupation of business history.8

Astonishingly, even the worst ravages of industry have gone little studiedby either business or environmental historians. As Joel Tarr and Jeffrey Stinepointed out last year in a Technology and Culture review, historians "have onthe whole neglected not only worker safety but also the environmental con-sequences of industry and manufacturing." Most histories of the iron miningand iron and steel manufacturing, for example, "gloss over or totally ignore"the industry's environmental repercussions.9 Until recently, historians of thechemical industry barely touched on its devastating mid-century environ-mental impacts, despite how these helped compel the stricter environmentalregulations of the 1970s.10

Things have started to change, however, both in business history andenvironmental history. First, as "organizational" lines of scholarship havematured and the limits of the Chandlerian model have become apparent,younger business historians have cast about for fresh lines of inquiry that cancarry the field into new realms. The recent Hagley conference on the futureof business history featured a variety of efforts to define new research agen-das and analytical models, via newer and less functionalist sociological think-

h See Donald Worster, Alfred Crosby, Richard White, Carolyn Merchant, WilliamCronon, and Stephen J. Pyne, "A Roundtable: Environmental History," JtnimalofAmeri-can History 76 (1990): 1087-1147.

9 Jeffrey Stine and Joel Tarr, "At the Intersection of Histories: Technology and the Envi-ronment," Technology and Culture 39 (1998): 601-641, see especially 621-225. Quotes arefrom pp. 621 and 623.

'" Stine and Tarr, 622-623. A big exception is the recent book by Craig E. Colten and Pe-ter N. Skinner, The Road to Love Canal: Managing Industrial Waste before EPA (Austin,Tex., 1996) on the management of hazardous waste by the chemical industry. Far more typi-cal is David Hounshell and John Kenly Smith, Jr., Science and Corporate Strategy; Du PontRl~D 1902-1980 (Cambridge, U.K., 1988), which squeezes fine research into that firm's in-dustrial toxicology into a tiny and anomalous corner of its narrative. Histories centered on asingle firm deal with environmental questions in a similar vein, see Sheldon Hochheiser, Ro-hm and Haas: History of A Chemical Company (Philadelphia, 1986); Andrew J. Butrica, Outof Thin Air: A History of Air Products and Chemicals. Inc., 1940-1990 (New York, 1990); andDavid Dyer and David B. Sicilia, Labors of a Modern Hercules: Evolution of a ChemicalCompany (Boston, 1990); though see also Fred Aftalion, A History of the InternationalChemical Industry, trans. Otto Theodor Fenfey (Philadelphia, 1991). Jeffrey Meikle's Plastic:A Cultural History (New Brunswick, N.J., 1996) carves out a more central place in its storyfor environmental anxieties about plastic, mostly in connection with cancer and biodegrad-abilitv.



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ing about organizations, the economics of imperfect information,structurationist theory, and post-structuralist cultural analysis. Among theseproposals was an appeal by one of us to make "industrial ecology" the startingpoint for a more environmental business history.11

Second, changing attitudes in the business and regulatory worlds and inthe fields of engineering and economics have bolstered the relevance ofenvironmental issues to business history. The new generation of managersnow taking the helm of corporations includes many men and women whogrew up with the environmental movement and arguably share its goals—who seek ways to reduce business's harmful environmental impacts whilemaintaining or enhancing their firms's competitive advantage. "Green" pack-aging, eco-tourism, organic foods, and other environmentally friendly formsof consumption have acquired a significant presence in the market place.12

EPA regulators now hope to expand markets for pollution or emissions cred-its and to step up programs encouraging voluntary pollution reductions,beyond what is required by law.13 Industrial engineers have pioneered theconcept of industrial ecology and, following its precepts, have joined withmanagers at some corporations to begin developing programs in pollutionsource reduction, design for environment, industrial waste exchanges, prod-uct remanufacturing and other innovative technologies and strategies forreducing industry's environmental impacts.14 Economists interested inbridging the gaps between their field and natural ecology have joined

11 Philip Scranton and Roger Horowitz, eds., "The Future of Business History," Businessand Economic History 26 (1997): 1-281; Christine Meisner Rosen, "Industrial Ecology andthe Greening of Business History," Business and Economic History 26 (1997): 123-137.

12 For references on recent trends in green packaging, ecotourism, and organic food in-dustry, see N.H. Lampkin and S. Padel, eds., The Economics of Organic Farming: An Inter-national Perspective (Oxon, 1994).

13 Robert Gottlieb, ed., Reducing Toxics: A New Approach to Policy and Industrial Deci-sion Making (Washington D.C., 1995). An excellent source of information on developmentsin environmental regulation in the U.S. and Europe is Business and the Environment pub-lished by Cutter Information Corp. beginning in 1990.

14 Braden R. Allenby and Deanna J. Richards, eds., The Greening of Industrial Ecosys-tems (Washington D.C., 1994); Robert Ayres, Industrial Ecology: Towards Closing the Mate-rials Cycle (Cheltenham, UK, 1996); John R. Ehrenfeld, "Industrial Ecology: A StrategicFramework for Product Policy and Other Sustainable Practices," The Second InternationalConference and Workshop on Pnxluct-Oriented Policy, Stockholm (1994); T.E. Gradel and B.R.Allenby, Industrial Ecology (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 1995), T.E. Gradel and B.R. Allenby,Design for Environment (Upper Saddle River, N.J, 1996); Tim Jackson, Material Concerns,Pollution Profit and the Quality of Life (London, 1996); E.A. Lowe, J.L. Warren, and S.R.Moran, Discovering Industrial Ecology: An Executive Briefing and Source Book (Columbus,1997); Robert Sokolow, Industrial Ecology and Global Change (Cambridge.U.K., 1994);Ronald Smith, Profit Centers in Industrial Ecology: The Business Executive's Approach to theEnvironment (Westport, Conn., 1998); see also the Journal of Industrial Ecology, which be-gan in 1997 out of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. A useful but al-ready somewhat outdated reference book on this topic is Peter Groenewegen, The Greeningof Industry Resource Guide and Bibliography (Washington D C , 1996). See also Businessand the Environment.



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together to inaugurate an "ecological" economics and have extended analyticapproaches developed to assess the value of natural resources to measure,instead, the value of entire ecosystems like forests and wetlands.1'

Related developments in environmental history and the envi-ronmental movement have encouraged environmental historiansto move in similar directions. During the Clinton years, the envi-ronmental community has evolved in ways that mirror the changestaking place in business. Environmentalists have become increas-ingly intrigued with market-oriented ways of thinking and regulat-ing. Whether this revival of the market signals a conservative turnin environmentalism or a frustration with legally mandated andadministered controls, it has prompted growing numbers of envi-ronmental historians as well as environmentalists to start rethink-ing the re la t ionships between business, markets, andenvironmental change.16 Just as importantly, an "environmentaljustice" movement among working class and ethnic minorities haslaunched a powerful and influential critique of inequities in thedistribution of what are predominantly corporate environmentalimpacts.1'

Like business historians, environmental historians are also re-examining their field's existing paradigms, seeking to recast theboundaries of their discipline. Growing frustrated with environ-mental history's longstanding focus on farms, forests and wilder-ness and fortified by a dawning recognition of the much wider

lo Robert Costanza, An Introduction to Ecological Economics (Boca Raton, Fla., 1997);Malte Michael Faber, Ecological Economics: Concepts and Methods (Cheltenham, U.K..1996); A.-M. Jansen, ed., Investing in Natural Capital: The Ecological Economics Approachto Sustainability (Washington, D.C., 1994); Robert Costanza, ed.. Ecological Economics: TheScience and Management of Sustainability (New York, 1991); Thomas Prugh et. al., NaturalCapital and Human Economic Survival (Solomons, Md., 1995); Herman Daly, "On Econom-ics as a Life Science," journal of Political Economy 76 (1968): 392-406. These approachesmostly extend the resource economics developed by Harold Hoteling ("The Economics ofExhaustible Resources, "journal of Political Economy 39 [1939]: 137ff.) and others to a grow-ing range of natural, heretofore unpriced entities defined by ecologists and other natural sci-entists. Economists interested in this endeavor founded the International Society for Ecolog-ical Economics in the early 1990s.

16 Michael Kraft and Norman Vig, "Environmental Policy from the 1970's to tlie 2.990's," inKraft and Vid, eds.. Environmental Policy in the 1990s (Washington, D.C, 1994); HarnessingMarket Forces to Protect Our Environment: Initiatives for the Neic President, A Public Policy StudySponsored by Senator Timothy E. Wirth, Colorado, and Senator joint Heinz, Pennsylvania (Wash-ington, D.C, 1988): see also the critical commentary by Samuel Hays in "The Future of En-vironmental Regulation," in Explorations in Environmental History (Pittsburgh, 1998), 109-114.

'' Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American EnvironmentalMovement (Washington, D.C, 1993); Laura Pulido, Envinmmentalisin ami Economic Justice:Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (Tucson, 1996); Eileen Maura McGurty, "From NIM-BY to Civil Rights: The Origins of the Environmental Justice Movement," Environmental His-tory 2 (1997): 301-23; Temma Kaplan, Crazy for Denwcracy: Women's Grassroots Movements inthe U.S. and South Africa (New York, 1996)!



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scope of the "natural," many environmental historians have begunto gravitate away from the study of pristine environments towardthose more thoroughly and unmistakably shaped by human hands.Environmental historians, especially younger ones, have exploreda wide variety of subjects beyond the field's original purview—including the environmental dimensions of industrial develop-ment.18

In short, at the start of the new millenium, both business andenvironmental historians have arrived the same juncture: they'vediscovered the need for careful and exacting scrutiny of the firm'senvironmental relations. The first group stands poised to injectnature into business history, while the second is ready to injectbusiness into environmental history. An unprecedented opportu-nity for collaboration now presents itself. After decades of sepa-ration, business historians can join with environmental historiansin considering the role and place of nature in business develop-ment. We find this possibility extremely exciting and important.Because we are writing for the Business History Review, thisessay primarily addresses this opportunity from the perspective ofbusiness historians. But we also hope that environmental histori-ans will hear our message about the need for and value of collab-oration.

In our view, research into the environmental dimensions ofbusiness offers just as much potential for business historians asthe cultural dimensions whose study Philip Scranton, RogerHorowitz, and others urged upon us at the recent Hagley confer-ence on the "Future of Business History."19 Moreover, webelieve that study of these two aspects of business life should beclosely connected. Like scholars in a variety of culturally-inclined fields who have recently endeavored to bring "nature"or "materiality" itself more into their scope of analysis, we thinkthat efforts to understand the environmental dimensions ofhuman activity must inevitably engage the realm of the symbolic.From anthropology to science studies, movements are underwayto break down the nature/culture divide that has structured

14 William Cronon's award winning Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West(New York, 1991) marked the emergence of this new attitude. For evidence of its spread andgrowing influence, see Char Miller and Hal Rothman, eds., Out of the Woods: Essays in En-vironmental History (Pittsburgh, 1997) and William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Re-thinking the Human Place in Nature (New York, 1995).

19 Philip Scranton and Roger Horomtz, '"The Future of Business History': An Introduc-tion," Business and Economic History 26 (1997): 3-4.



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inquiry in these and other disciplines for so long. New coinageslike "nature-culture" aim to capture this sense of interconnec-tion, to draw attention to the idea that you can't study one with-out broaching the other. Inquiries into culture lead intoquestions about nature, and vice versa.20 To realize the fullestand deepest potential of this revisionist moment in our field, wemust extend analysis of the environmental history of business tothe symbolic as well as the material components of business'senvironmental relations.

The remainder of our introduction to this special issue of the BusinessHistory Review on "Business and the Environment" sketches out the rudi-ments for an "ecocultural" approach to our discipline. We offer a few point-ers and prescriptions to guide those interested in working at this intersectionof fields and questions. We challenge our readers to develop their ownagendas as well. Our main purpose is to foster new ways of re-connectingour histories of the firm with narratives about both the natural and culturalworlds within which firms are embedded.

A first step in opening the borderlands between environmental andbusiness history is to acknowledge that we have, as a discipline, tended totreat industrial impacts like pollution as well as most other environmentaldimensions of business activity as if they were what economists call "exter-nalities." Externalities are "social costs" or "spill-over effects" of economicactivity, which may impact buyers and sellers as well as bystanders in a giveneconomic transaction, but are not priced into the transaction itself. As such,they are distinct from the conventional economic costs internalized by theprice mechanism of the market system in which business managers operate.And as such, they have long been widely accepted as naturally outside orbeyond the scope of the businessman's economic calculations, unless artifi-cially internalized into the market by regulation.

We do well to recall that the externality concept itself is only onelatter-day tool by which economists have struggled to comprehend howmarkets handle or mishandle environmental questions. Classical econ-

20 "Nature-culture" is from Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge,U.K., 1993), 7, 96, 105-09. Other representatives of a vast emerging literature include, in sci-ence history, Mikolas Teich, Roy Porter, and Bo Gustaffson, Nature and Society in HistoricalContext (Cambridge, U.K., 1997); in anthropology, Klaus Seeland, ed., Nature Is Culture: In-digenous Knowledge and Socio-Cultural Aspects of Trees and Forests in Non-European Cul-tures (London, 1997); Philippe Descola and Gisli Palsson, eds., Nature and Society: Anthro-pological Perspectives (London, 1996); in sociology, Raymond Murphy, Sociology and Nature:Social Action in Context, (Boulder, Colo., 1997); and in cultural studies, Tom Jagtenberg,Eco-impacts and the Greening of Postmodernity: New Maps for Communication Studies,Cultural Studies, and Sociology (Thousand Oaks, Calif, 1997). For environmental history,see William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (NewYork, 1995).



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omists from Adam Smith to David Ricardo devoted considerable atten-tion to the supply and value of arable land but neglected other naturalresources as well as what later became known as "environmental amen-ities." Later, not least through the influence of Karl Marx's labor the-ory of value, an emphasis on capital and labor as the most importantfactors in production increasingly submerged questions aboutresources and supply in the work of many economists. With the neo-classical revolution, Alfred Marshall and A.C. Pigou opened the door tothe externality concept through arguments that production gave rise tounpaid "social costs," costs imposed both on the transacting parties andthe rest of society that were not internalized in prices.21 Only afterWorld War II, however, did economists adapt this notion to pollutionand other kinds of environmental degradation, through coinage of the"externality" concept and through innovations in resource economics.Much of this flowering of economic thought about the environment,from Ronald Coase to Kenneth Arrow and Paul Portney, has had astrong public policy orientation. It has focused on theorizing abouthow society structures legal rules and regulatory policies to control theallocation of natural resources and internalize negative environmentalexternalities. A great deal of attention has also been given to develop-ing methods for more accurately quantifying the costs and benefits ofinternalizing externalities. ~

We do not mean to contradict this important body of economicwork by suggesting that there is a problem when business historianstreat the environment as an "externality" in their research. We recog-nize (as we assume most business historians do) the importance of theexternality concept for business history. Under many conditions,industrial pollution and other harmful environmental impacts of busi-ness do indeed generate "social costs" that are not reflected in theprices charged or paid. Like imperfect information, public goods, and

"' See Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Lon-don, 1776); David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (London,1817); Karl Marx, Capital vol. 1 (1872; edition used, New York, 1967), 177-98; A. Marshall,Principles of Economics (London, 1890); A.C. Pigou, The Economics of Welfare (London,1920). Thanks to Bradley Bateman for sharing his unpublished manuscript on "Supply" thatsketches out this history'.

~ For instance, Kenneth Arrow, "Dynamic Aspects of Achieving Optimal Allocation ofResources," Econometrica 20 (1952): 86; Idem., "The Future and the Present in EconomicLife," Economic Inquiry 16 (1978): 157ff.; R.H. Coase, "The Problem of Social Cost," Jour-nal of Laic and Economics 3 (1960): Iff.; Robert Solow, "On the Intergenerational Allocationof Natural Resources," Scandanavian Journal of Economics 88 (1986): 141f£; John Krutillaand Anthony Fischer, The Economics of Natural Environments (Baltimore, 1975); Paul Port-ney and Ruth Haas, eds., Current Issues in Natural Resource Policy (Washington, D.C.,1982); Kenneth Arrow, et al., Benefit-Cost Analysis in Environmental, Health, and SafetyRegulation (Washington, D.C., 1996).



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monopoly power, environmental externalities have been imperfectionsin the market system that have prevented ostensibly "rational" eco-nomic decisions from leading to efficient outcomes. This often dis-torted the market, preventing it from optimizing economic welfare inthe neoclassical sense. As a result, over the long run, in the absence ofeffective regulation, even the biggest, most successful firms could notoperate efficiently in the welfare optimizing way envisioned by neoclas-sical economists.23

Rather, our complaint is that business historians have tended totreat the environmental dimensions of business development—ques-tions of "natural" goods and supplies as well as pollution and otherharms—as if they were externalities to the enterprise of business his-tory itself. We have taken the "externality" of environmental issues forgranted, treating them as if they were spillover effects of industrialactivity to which we need not pay attention. We have fallen into thetrap of assuming that environmental factors and problems were extra-neous to the development of business institutions and managerial deci-sion making—even when this was not the case.

The purpose of this special issue is to challenge theseassumptions about the externality of the natural environment tobusiness history. Instead of continuing in the current main-stream path, we want to persuade our fellow historians to startasking explicit questions about the role of environmental fac-tors in industrial development and corporate evolution in dif-ferent places and times. More open-minded and empiricalresearch will allow us to better determine how nature actuallyfigured into what business managers did: how managers did ordid not handle their firms' extraction and transformation of nat-ural resources; how nature's openings and impositions shapedtheir strategies and organizational choices; and what impactstheir activities had on their human and nonhuman physical sur-roundings.

Within environmental history, the "tragedy of the commons"model popularized by Garrett Hardin has similarly steered envi-ronmental historians away from more penetrating empiricalresearch into the history of the modern firm. Writing near the

23 For a detailed overview of externalities and other market imperfections and their rele-vance to market performance and public policy, see Jeffrey M. Perloff, Microeconomics(Reading, Mass., 1999), 369-459, 655-725. Forabrief summary of types of market failure andregulatory responses to them see: James M. Carman and Robert G. Harris, "The PoliticalEconomy of Regulation: An Analysis of Market Failure" and "The Political Economy of Reg-ulation: Analysis of Regulator)' Responses," in S. Prakash Sethi and Cecilia M. Falbe, eds.,Business and Society: Dimensions of Conflict and Cooperation (Lexington, 1987), 177-213.



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height of the post-World War II environmental movement, biolo-gist Hardin drew on William Forster Lloyd's writings about theenclosure movement in eighteenth-century England for a modelof how self-interested extractive activity culminates in environ-mental devastation. The "tragedy of the commons" posited a com-munity of sheep holders composed entirely of atomized economicactors who were incapable of incorporating the externality effectsof their actions into their economic calculations. The private mar-ket gave the sheep owners every reason to use the commonlygrazed pasture as intensively as possible. It gave them no eco-nomic incentive to curb their herd's grazing so that the pasture-lands would be conserved.

This neoclassical conception, based on experience prior tothe modern firm's emergence, has become "central to environ-mental studies" and to the analysis of many environmental his-torians.24 Even when questioning its universality, however,environmental historians have too quickly assumed its validityfor corporate motivations and behavior. They have asked veryfew questions about how business managers actually managedtheir firms' environmental impacts in a given time and place.

In contrast, what we have discovered in our own historicalresearch, and what we see in the articles we have reviewed for this spe-cial issue, is that when environmental impacts like pollution do come tobe perceived as "problems," they do not stay "external" to economicactors for long. Instead they stir increasing deliberations and engage-ments among those concerned, including business managers. Theenvironment is thereby brought within the cultural sphere of thosewho manage business organizations. It influences their thoughts andactions, whether as managerial decision-makers within the firm or ascivic actors beyond it.

Like other members of society, business managers do not line upin a monolithic fashion in opposition to pollution control and other

-4 Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons," Science 162 (1968): 1243-48; quotecomes from T. O'Riordan and R.K. Turner, An Annotated Reader in Environmental Planningand Management (Oxford, U.K., 1983); for the general "commons" literature, see GarrettHardin and John Baden, eds., Managing the Commons (San Francisco, Calif, 1977); BonnieJ. Mcay and James Aeheson, eds., The Question of the Commons: The Culture and Ecology ofCommunal Resources (Tucson, Ariz., 1987). The best-known explicit adaptation of this mod-el to environmental history is by Arthur McEvoy, The Fisherman's Problem: Ecology and Lawin the California Fisheries, 1850-1980 (Cambridge, U.K., 1986); also Marvin Soroos, "The In-ternational Commons: A Historical Perspective," Environmental Review 12 (1988): 1-22;Louis Warren, The Hunter's Game; Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-CenturyAmerica (New Haven, Conn., 1997). Much environmental history has been guided less ex-plicitly by this model.



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forms of environmental protection. As one of us, Christine MeisnerRosen, showed in an article in this journal, a group of Chicago busi-nessmen near the turn of the century became involved in anti-smokecampaigns. They took it upon themselves to clean up their own as wellas their fellow business owners' smoke stacks, some of whom stronglyopposed their efforts.20 However "social" or "external" the cost ofsmoke pollution may have been in theory, many business people sawtheir own advocacy of smoke reform as pivotal to maintaining their rep-utation both among their fellows and among actual or potential cus-tomers in Chicago and elsewhere. Theirs was an "altruism" with asteady eye to the bottom line.

Moreover, once we move to consider the entire range of businessdealings with material throughput and its impacts, it becomes clearthat what can seem "external" to business calculations in one era canbecome a carefully figured entry on corporate balance sheets inanother. In his book, Hazards of the Job, Christopher Sellers showedhow industrial diseases arising among workers in lead factories andmines remained largely external to the economic calculations as well asthe awareness of American owners and managers in the late nineteenthcentury. Once a hue and cry were raised within and without the fac-tory, however, and especially once an industrial hygiene expertise and aworkers' compensation system began to hold firms accountable forsome of these costs, companies started to pay experts to assess andremedy these "problems."26

In sum, rather than writing off business' environmental relations as"externalities," we propose that business historians treat the environ-mental dependencies and impacts of business just as they have treatedmarket conditions and labor relations. We urge our colleagues in busi-ness and environmental history alike to investigate the ways in whichpeople in industry have viewed, used, and otherwise managed naturalresources and allowed, palliated, or ignored the environmental conse-quences. Take a look at how managers have responded to the existingpossibilities and constraints of the physical world, as well as thoseposed by markets, economics, technologies, social and governmentaldemands. Test the hypothesis that managers in specific industriesknowingly managed their firms' environmental impacts in ways that

2 ' Christine Meisner Rosen, "Businessmen Against Pollution in Late Nineteenth CenturyChicago," Business History Review 71 (Fall 1995): 351-397. See also critiques of the com-mons model such as those by Bonnie J. McCay ("The Ocean Commons and Community."Dalhousie Review 74 ([1994-95]: 311-338), Arthur McEvoy, and Louis Warren which call for"a more anthropological approach" (quote from McCay, 316).

2h Christopher Sellers, Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to EnvironmentalHealth Science (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997).



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harmed or benefited natural ecosystems or human health. Considerwhether firms reduced pollution and mitigated other environmentalproblems, not only in reaction to court decisions and regulation, butalso in order to maximize profits or to enhance the personal goals ofindividual managers.

For a starting point, we take our cue from the integrative vision ofthe young Karl Marx: " . . . the celebrated 'unity of man with nature'has always existed in industry, just like the 'struggle' of man with nature.. . "2l As Richard White suggests in his history of the Columbia River,The Organic Machine, this unity as well as this struggle are encom-passed in the notion of "work" performed on "nature."28 All businessactivities involve the direct or indirect manipulation of materials andenergy derived from the natural world. This involvement can be asglaringly obvious as the clear-cutting of a forest, or as subtle and covertas the nearly invisible electronic sinews grounding global hedge fundsand the vast and growing commerce of the Internet. Whatever thelevel of visibility, an environmental history of business must keep aneye on the "natural" origins of the physical stuff used in economic pro-duction. It must trace the environmental metamorphoses and impactsthat result, as well as the operative notions of "nature" and the "natu-ral" that guide and constrain such transformations. Seen in this light,questions about the environment are not peripheral but central to busi-ness history. They are a basic dimension of what business is about.

Industrial ecologists have laid out a useful framework forconceptualizing this unity between business and nature. 29 Theyhave developed a theoretical model of an "industrial ecosystem"that describes the flows of material and energy that connectbusiness with the natural world. Materials and energy flow fromthe natural world into the industrial system and back out again ina continuous and never ending feedback loop. Stages in thesecurrents divide roughly into three: one, the transformations by

2| Karl Marx, The German Ideology: Including Theses on Feuerbach and Introduction tothe Critique of Political Economy (edition used; Amherst, N.Y., 1998), 170.

28 Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York,1995).

29 The following conceptualization of materials and energy flows is derived from work be-ing done in the emerging field of "industrial ecology." See citations at n. 14. For further dis-cussion of the concept see: Robert A. Frosch and Nicholas E. Gallopoulos, "Strategies forManufacturing," Readings from Scientific American: Managing Planet Earth (New York,1990), 18-26; T.E. Graedel, B.R. Allenby, and P.B. Linhard, "Implementing Industrial Ecolo-gy," IEEE Technology and Society Magazine (Spring, 1993): 18-26; and Hardin Tibbs, "In-dustrial Ecology: An Environmental Agenda for Industry," Arthur D. Little, Inc. (1991). Forfurther development of the ways in which the industrial ecology concept can be fruitfully ap-plied in business history see Rosen, "Industrial Ecology and the Greening of Business Histo-ry-"



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which natural resources are extracted from the earth and con-verted into raw materials and mechanical energy; two, the manu-facturing operations by which these material and energy flowsare worked and reworked into useable or saleable products; andthree, those processes and practices by which manufacturedproducts come to be distributed to and used and disposed byconsumers.

All three of these stages in the flow of materials and energybetween business and the natural world generate "wastes" thatcan become "pollution." Though the content and definition ofthese terms may vary drastically across time and place, our arti-cles show how resource extraction, manufacture, and consump-tion all eventually give rise to excess or residual materials, fromthe brine of oil wells and the smoke of industrial boilers to peel-ing house paint. Treated or untreated, these inevitable discardsreturn directly to the natural world, where they eventually decayor degrade over time—unless managers or consumers shuntthem back into the production and consumption loop by repro-cessing and reusing them. Our articles show how these wastescould have powerful consequences that managers could notignore.

Business managers and institutions play an active role indirecting the flow of energy, materials, and wastes, through allthe stages of production and consumption in the earth's indus-trial ecosystem. In so doing, they deeply influence how the restof society emits waste and interacts with and impacts on the nat-ural world. Most business historians are quite familiar with theeffects that mines and factories have had on the air peoplebreathe, the water they drink, and the physical landscape inwhich they live, work, raise families, and engage in recreationalactivities, even if these subjects are not often addressed in theirhistorical work. What is important about the industrial ecologyconcept is that it directs attention to how flows of energy, mate-rial, and waste within industry affect the world beyond the fac-tory and office when they move into the realm of the society thatconsumes the fruits of industrial production. As one of our arti-cles indicates, this outflow could bring toxic chemicals directlyinto the homes and schools of ordinary Americans. It has alsoled to animal and plant extinctions and other less drastic forms ofnatural eco-svstem change and may be causing global climatechange. Industrial ecology points toward management's role in



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fostering the consumption that drives such broad environmentalchange, as an important facet of the historical relationshipbetween business and the environment.

At the same time, we also need to recognize where, for ourpurposes, the analytical model distilled by industrial ecologistsfalls short. A theory developed by engineers, industrial ecologyfocuses heavily on quantitatively analyzing material and energyflows as they move through industrial ecosystems. It alsodevotes a great deal of attention to the development of moreenvironmentally benign product designs and manufacturing sys-tems and the creation of waste exchanges and other engineeringsystems, in an effort to close material and energy flows to bringthem more in line with the closed loop flows characteristic ofnatural biological ecosystems. As yet, however, it offers only thecrudest of tools for grappling with the symbolic or strategicdimensions of managerial decisions, especially those dealing withmarketing, advertising, public relations, and even philanthropy,which may sustain or alter the flow of commodities past the fac-tory or office door. Nor does it adequately contend with howchanging understandings and values may alter decisions aboutthe streaming of energy or material within the workplace as wellas without. Not least of its limitations, it gives minimal attentionto how market factors shape the managerial thoughts and actionsthat direct the flow of energy and materials through industrialecosystems. In contrast, we've seen fit to craft an approach tobusiness history that is at once ecological and economic and cul-tural.

No matter what aspect of business's co-evolution with thenatural world a business historian may choose to tackle, he or shewill confront a wide array of questions and challenges. In solicit-ing and editing the articles for this special issue, we have settledupon several themes and guidelines that we feel are critical to anecocultural approach to business history.

One of the most important themes is technology. Fromflaked rocks and other simple hand tools, to water, steam, andelectric powered machinery and the modern computer, technol-ogy has shaped economic production in a myriad of ways sinceancient times. Many of the most important stories waiting to betold in the ecocultural history of business pivot around sometechnological change, whether in energy sources, shop floor pro-cesses, or extractive machinery. As the articles assembled here



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show, technology has served as an instrument both by whichbusiness managers exploited and/or degraded the environmentand as a tool by which they sought to rectify the damage. Wemust address both sides of this historical potential.

A second theme is the role of the market, a topic as central toan ecocultural business history as it is to the other more conven-tional aspects of our discipline. The market has shaped busi-ness's interactions with the natural environment in trulypowerful ways. It is, as we all know, the primary engine of busi-ness's development and so a major determinant of business'simpact on water, air, land, climate, and biological ecosystems.With all its imperfections (including environmental externali-ties), it set the prices that determined when and where managerschose invest in the technologies that allowed them to extract rawmaterials from the earth and process them into manufacturedgoods. It was the mechanism through which consumers discov-ered the prices of those goods and purchased them. It providedthe signals that enabled managers to decide whether it madeeconomic sense to invest in technologies to abate pollution andother environmental harms.

The market did not operate in a vacuum, however. A third themewith which ecocultural business historians must grapple is the role ofthe government in shaping the interactions between business and thenatural world. We cannot address the role that the marketplace playedas a driver, mediator and shaper of the material flows of materialsthrough the industrial ecosystem without studying the role of the state.Through its allocation of property rights, its adjudication of court cases,its regulation of economic activity, its ownership of natural resources,its decisions to go to war, and other activities, government has played acrucial role in structuring the institutions that define the market signalsto which business managers responded. It has also imposed rules andrequirements on business that sometimes forced managers to takeactions that conflicted with or changed those signals. Government fig-ures prominently in all of the articles assembled here, not just as anactual or potential environmental regulator, but as an advisor to indus-try, the creator of demand for manufactured goods, and a shaper of val-ues and attitudes.

While the ecocultural history of business shares these threethemes with other approaches, its distinctiveness resides in theguidelines by which it addresses them. First, the ecoculturalperspective in business history consistently focuses on the cul-



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tural shaping of the interface between business and the environ-ment. "Cul tu re" here includes the ideas, values, andassumptions of business managers regarding what is good, bad,technically and economically feasible with regard to environ-mental issues—as well as those of environmentalists, governmentregulators, judges, scientists and the public as a whole. Forinstance, to understand the impact of either markets or the statein the history of environmental management, it is necessary thatwe examine the critical role that managerial (and non-manage-rial) perceptions of cost and "interest" played in the economicsand politics of pollution control. We must not assume that theseideas are necessarily objective measures of reality. Our histori-cal actors may have believed that their ideas accurately reflectedeconomic, political, technological, or ecological reality, butnotions about economic and political self-interest have proven atleast as mutable as ideas about the workings of nature. Severalof our authors offer glimpses of how managerial perceptions oftheir industry's economic interest in pollution control evolved asmarket conditions, production and control technologies, scien-tific knowledge, and the law and regulatory policies developed.

As business historians, it is important that we examine theenvironmental impacts of culture at the level of the individualfirm or industry, at least to the extent the primary sources permitthis. We must be sensitive to the fact that individual managers atdifferent companies typically exhibited a range of attitudestoward environmental issues. Management attitudes and prac-tices also varied across different industries. We need to try tounderstand the reasons for these differences as well analyzetheir consequences—for the development of business, as well asthe evolution of the natural world.

We must also explore the values and experiences of ordinaryfactory workers. Direct contact with the raw materials andmachinery of production often made workers the first witnessesto the environmental consequences of managerial decisions.From their ranks came the earliest victims of industrial materialslater decried as environmental toxins, like lead paint and pesti-cides. Communities of working families have historically bornwitness to their suffering as well as to the worst environmentaldisasters wrought by corporations, from Donora to Love Canal toBhopal. Depending on era and topic, the ecocultural historian ofbusiness may find workers' experiences as revealing and impor-



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tant as those of the managers who direct their labor, a valuablecounterpoint from which to evaluate the significance of the atti-tudes and values expressed by high ranking executives and otherbusiness managers and professionals.

In addition to these micro-level aspects of business culture, however, wemust address more macro cultural dimensions of the business-environmentinterface. Broader societal and national cultural contexts shaped the valuesand attitudes that managers and workers and others brought to the subject ofbusiness's use and abuse of the natural world. One of the most surprisingdiscoveries we made in the course of putting this special issue together is thepowerful role that national cultures played in how business people and gov-ernment regulators made sense of and dealt with pollution and other envi-ronmental problems. Further grappling with this dynamic requires thatAmerican business historians pay more attention to work being done bybusiness historians in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. While one of the mostexciting contributions of the Chandlerian business historians has been theworld-wide similarities they have documented in the evolution of corporateorganization, the ecocultural perspective may better enable us to understandhow, over time, differences in national cultures led to different managerialexperiences even in similarly organized firms.

Throughout, another fundamental guideline for ecoculturalinquiries into business history must be to maintain a steadyattentiveness to the physical world with which business peopleand their enterprises interact. One of our most important tasksis to incorporate analysis of the material world into our study ofthe evolution of the firm. We need to explore how business man-agers responded to the opportunities as well as the constraintsoffered up by their material surroundings. Environmental his-tory has deep roots in historical approaches that attribute agencyto influences and forces beyond the social or cultural activities ofhumanity—to climate, geography, pests, disease vectors and thelike. Business historians can profit by following suit. We needrecognize the agency of the physical world, even as we attend tothe agency of business. This is to say that we need to addressboth the matter of how business has been shaped by the physicalworld and the matter of how managers have in their turn man-aged that interaction. From the vantagepoint of this dual focus,business historians can provide a unique perspective on one ofenvironmental history's chief concerns: the dialectical, interac-tive dance between human and non-human agency in history.



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As our authors will testify, culling and interpreting the evidence towrite nature into business history poses a variety of methodological diffi-culties. Society, culture, even markets arise out of the fabric of humantalk, evidence of which we can often obtain through documentaryrecords. Alas, however, many of the natural world's physical actors andinfluences, from smoke or lead dust to perturbations of climate, registerfitfully in the documentary leavings on which historians must rely.

Today's scientific accounts of environmental agents and dynamicscan help us overcome this hurdle, aiding our understanding of theenvironmental conditions to which past business managers (and gov-ernment regulators, and ordinary citizens) responded. We can makeuse of contemporary research bearing upon those aspects of natureabout which we plan to write, whether in biology, chemistry, physics,or other natural sciences. Applying modern science to the past pre-sents further dilemmas, however, since the knowledge and awarenessin other times and places often proves so different from today's claims.Fortunately, those more Western and industrialized societies whichenvironmental historians of business will likely study offer at least someprecursor body of written knowledge on most environmental dynamicsand effects we will choose to investigate. Often it has been compiledby some earlier group of scientific professionals.

We nonetheless think it necessary for ecocultural historians ofbusiness to contend with the culturally rooted dimensions of knowl-edge, rather than relying entirely upon the "truth" of modern scienceto explain everything. We also need to make sense of the often dra-matic differences between past and present claims about the physicalworld, rather than simply dismissing the old assumptions and under-standings as incorrect. Economists' notions of "information" and"uncertainty," while they provide some tools for dealing with suchquestions, can only go so far.30 Taking our cue from the work of anthro-pologists and cultural studies of science, we urge business historians topiece together how nature and its operations looked to past businesspeople and their experts.31 However mistaken today's science may ini-

30 See for instance Kenneth Arrow, "Informational Structure of the Firm," American Eco-nomic Review 75 (1985): 303ff.; Idem., "Exposition of the Theory of Choice under Uncertain-ty," Synthesc 16 (1966): 253ff.

31 Path-breaking varieties of this approach are Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Labora-tory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills, Calif, 1979); and SteveShapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hohhes, Boyles, and the Experi-mental Life (Princeton, 1985). For a sense of the range of approaches that then evolved inscience studies, see Andrew Pickering, ed., Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago, 1992).For culturalist perspectives on knowledges of special relevance to business history; seeMichael Power, ed., Accounting and Science; Natural Inquiry and Commercial Reason (Cam-bridge, U.K., 1994).



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tially make business people in other times and places appear, ecocul-tural historians may find that the past natural knowledge or expertiseon which their business subjects relied had its own internal sense andcoherence. Understanding how different groups socially and culturallyconstructed nature in the past—what they believed certain rocks wereand could become, what harms they thought a metal to cause—willstrengthen our explanations of past business behavior. For while busi-ness decisions had objective impacts on the physical world that today'sscience may better comprehend, managers often made those decisionsquite rationally in the context of their convictions about that world. Weneed to take seriously both past and present knowledge about nature inorder more fully to fathom the history of the business/environmentinterface.

This brief list of desiderata for an ecocultural approach tobusiness history is far from exhaustive. It should nevertheless beenough to give our readers a sense of where we'd like to see thefield go, and how to get there. Of course, the greatest chal-lenges come as we pursue more than just a couple of thesethemes and guidelines and seek to weave them together intocoherent and illuminating narratives.

We are pleased to present some excellent articles that webelieve have met these challenges. Four pieces can only suggestthe plenitude of topics along the interface between environmen-tal and business history, but these cover a great deal of ground.Their emphasis, like most of the papers sent to us, falls on howbusiness managers themselves dealt with the more harmful envi-ronmental dimensions of their operations, especially industrialpollution and its control. Each of the four illustrates importantaspects of what it means to write business history from an ecoc-ultural perspective.

Hugh Gorman's article, "Efficiency, Environmental Quality,and Oil Field Brines: The Success and Failure of Pollution Con-trol by Self-Regulation," concerns the management of oil fieldbrines, a form of water pollution associated with first phase inthe flow of materials through the industrial ecosystem, resourceextraction. Gorman examines the methods by which petroleumproducers disposed of the salt-water wastes generated by thedrilling of oil wells between 1920 and 1970. His article providesa clear illustration of the two edged nature of industrial techno-logical innovation. Gorman explains both how the developmentof technologies for extracting oil form the earth polluted water in



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the American Southwest, and how oil companies developed tech-nologies for abating that pollution. He also provides insight intothe intertwined way in which government and the market placeaffected management decision making in the area of industrialpollution abatement. Courts and government regulators pushedthe industry to develop methods for controlling brine pollutionfrom the 1920s on. Significantly, however, the more advancedforms of abatement went hand in hand with the more efficientexploitation of oil resources, at least until the 1950s and 1960swhen the goal of increasing the efficiency of production began todiverge from the goal of protecting the environment.

Frank Uekoetter's article, "Divergent Responses to IdenticalProblems: Business and the Smoke Nuisance in Germany andthe United States, 1880-1917," deals with questions relating tothe pollution generated by the burning of coal as fuel for indus-trial production and the heating of factories, offices, stores, andhomes—a problem associated with the second stage of materialflows through industrial eco-system. Uekoetter examines effortsby industry and government regulators in Germany and the U.S.to deal with industrial smoke pollution during the late nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries. Uekoetter documents sur-prising differences between the German and Americanresponses to the coal smoke problem. The differences involvedbusiness attitudes toward smoke abatement and regulation aswell the methods used by government regulators to impose con-trol on smoke polluters. His essay suggests that distinctivenational cultures and political institutions played a criticallyimportant role in how business, government, and the broadersociety construed and defined the problem of pollution and itspossible solutions.

The article by David Stradling and Joel Tarr, "EnvironmentalActivism, Locomotive Smoke, and the Corporate Response: The Caseof the Pennsylvania Railroad and Chicago Smoke Control," also looksat the problem of controlling industrial smoke pollution in the earlytwentieth century. In contrast to Uekoetter, Stradling and Tarr exam-ine this subject from the perspective of a single corporation, the Penn-sylvania Railroad. By focusing on a single firm, this article shows howChandlerian institutional history can illuminate the interface betweenbusiness and the environment. Using materials from the PennsylvaniaRailroad's corporate archives, Stradling and Tarr analyze the Pennsyl-vania's organizational and strategic responses to the efforts of smoke



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Christine Meisner Rosen and Christopher C. Sellers I 598

reformers to use regulation to force the firm to reduce its smoke. Theyexplore how management tried to appease regulators through techno-logical retrofitting of their locomotives, fuel substitution, and employeetraining, documenting its efforts to balance responsiveness to regula-tion and public protest with cost minimization in the face of fluctua-tions in the economy as well as public and official interest in the smokeproblem. They also describe the methods management used to lobbyreformers and city government official to stave off regulations thatwould have forced the company to take more extreme steps to reduceits smoke by electrifying its facilities.

Christian Warren's article, "Toxic Purity: The ProgressiveEra Origins of America's Lead Paint Poisoning Epidemic," shiftsthe focus of analysis back to a more macroscopic level. It con-cerns the management of toxic materials at both the productionand consumption stages of the industrial materials flows process.Warren explains why the U.S. Congress debated but neverpassed laws to regulate the use of lead in paint during the Pro-gressive Era. This failure had consequences not only for workersin lead paint factories, but also for consumers and for the wholepaint industry's technology of production, product design, andindustry structure. It also impacted the consumers of paint.Like Uekoetter's article, Warren's sheds light on the role of cul-ture in environmental regulation. In particular, it opens a win-dow on how values and widespread popular assumptions aboutthe "nature" of things influenced business approaches to envi-ronmental problems and shaped the outcomes of environmentalpolicy debates. The essay also makes a new contribution to thedebate over business power and regulatory failure that so fasci-nated radical revisionist historians during the 1960's and 70's. 32

Warren shows that what sealed the success of the American leadindustry and its allies in turning back the legislative ban on leadpaint was not so much the lead paint companies' political powervis a vis the newer non-leaded paint producers, but a commonand widely accepted fabric of knowledge, perceptions, and val-ues shared by the entire paint industry as well as many publichealth reformers.

In sum, the articles in this special issue have a great deal totell us about how business managers coped with the pollution

:il For a critique of business historians' more recent neglect of "power" questions, seeLouis Galambos, "What Makes Us Think We Can Put Business Back into American History?"Business and Economic History 20 (1991): esp. 9-10.



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The Nature of the Finn 1599

generated by different materials flows, from oil and coal to lead.Managers reacted to a wide variety of influences in determiningand then acting upon what was in their interest: to markets; toavailable technologies; to government policies; as well as to per-sonal as well as more broadly held attitudes about such issues asthe nature of product purity, the right of a corporation to oper-ate in profit maximizing ways without interference from regula-tors, and the obligation of managers to respond in forthcomingways to the public's objections to environmental degredation.

These essays put to rest any assumption that it is possible toconfine business's historical role and place to a traditional focuson the internal organization of the firm. Like the smoke thatfinds its way outdoors, like the lead that becomes coloring mate-rial for wall paint, like the oil brines that seep through theground, each of these stories draws attention to the connectionsbetween what managers do with regard to production, market-ing, and other internal business functions and people, events,and material and biological conditions in the world beyond.

At the same time, the articles also make clear that there is areal place for the history of the firm in environmental history.All of our articles trace industry's environmental impacts back todecisions and events inside business: to the management andtechnology of production, marketing, procurement, and otherpractices of business people qua business people. Gorman'sexamination of oil brine disposal leads him into, among otherthings, analysis of corporate strategies for minimizing the costand maximizing the efficiency of oil extraction and for managingrisks associated with pollution litigation. On questions of indus-trial air pollution, Uekoetter delves into the technology and effi-ciency of coal based energy in industry. Stradling and Tarrtackle the energy economics of converting from coal to electricpower, as they explore how one railroad's managers responded topublic pressures to cut back on smoke. Even Warren, in explain-ing Congress's early failure to regulate the health hazard of leadin paint, explores conditions in industry. He examines not onlythe political power and lobbying activities of the leaders of thelead paint industry, but also the organization of the paint indus-try and the technology of making lead paint. He finds that man-agers' ideas about the lead hazard, based on their experiencewith factory workers, blinded them to the health risks lead paintposed to people outside the factory.



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All of our authors effectively integrate histories of business's envi-ronmental relations with the mainstream concerns of business histori-ans. They also seriously contend with many under-examined culturaldimensions of business practice. Taken together, these four articlesillustrate the range and value of an ecocultural perspective for businesshistorians. We believe such a perspective can both encompass anddeepen some of the most provocative recent visions for a new businesshistory. Its distinctively historicist materialism can serve as a basis forweaving business together with its material and symbolic environmentsin a seamless web. Not only can this new approach help us bring thecomplex physical, cultural, managerial, technological, and economicconnections between business and the environment into better focus;it also gives us another route through which we can explore the rela-tionships between business and nationality, business and politics, andbusiness and public policy.



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Documents

The Nature of the Firm: Towards an Ecocultural History of … · The Nature of the Firm 1579 more promising avenues for integrating business history into larger historic panoramas