Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (original) (raw)
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American business history emerged from the 1980s thoroughly permeated by the "new institutional economics," most would agree. But what has not been sufficiently appreciated is the extent to which business historians who focus on institutions must become political historians as well [17]. For institutions are inherently political entities. According to conventional wisdom, they consist of rules, compliance procedures, and norms that order relationships among individuals [10, 25, 39, 49]. In doing so, institutions necessarily spell out a distribution of power, and in that sense they must be considered political. The problem, however, is that the point of departure has proven unduly constraining. Transaction cost economics, for all of the rich insight that it yields into the economic impact of institutions [49], is not necessarily well-equipped to deal with their political dimensions [36]. It is fortunate, therefore, that a "new institutionalism" also emerged in pol...
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