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¹¹ Small businesses are, however, becoming more involved in foreign markets in the 1990s than in times past. See: “The Little Guys Are Making It Big Overseas,” Business Week, 27 Feb. 1989, 94–96.

¹² As a part of this investigation, historians need to explore further the variety of factors that in different eras have conditioned the formation and success or failure of businesses of varied scales. For early works on this topic see: Hutchinson, Ruth G., Hutchinson, Arthur R., and Newcomer, Mabel, “A Study in Business Mortality: The Life of Business Enterprises in Poughkeepsie, New York,” American Economic Review 28 (Sept. 1938): 497–514Google Scholar; and Newcomer, , “The Little Businessman: A Study of Business Proprietors in Poughkeepsie, New York,” Business History Review 35 (Winter 1961): 477–531CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a recent study, see Dunne, Timothy, “The Measurement and Analysis of Firm Entry and Exit in the United States Manufacturing Sector, 1963–1982” (Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1987)Google Scholar.

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²⁵ Seen by the author in Columbus, Ohio, 11 July 1989.

²⁶ Rowland Berthoff, “Independence and Enterprise: Small Business in the American Dream,” in Bruchey, Small Business in American Life, 29.

²⁷ Bunzel, The American Small Businessman, 13.

²⁸ McCraw, Thomas K., Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adams, Louis D. Brandeis, James M. Landis, and Alfred E. Kahn (Cambridge, Mass., 1984)Google Scholar, chap. 3.

²⁹ Much has been written on the chain store fight. See especially: Horowitz, David, “The Crusade Against Chain Stores: Portland's Independent Merchants, 1928–1935,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 89 (Winter 1988): 341–68Google Scholar; and Ryant, Carl, “The South and the Movement Against Chain Stores,” Journal of Southern History 39 (May 1973): 207–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an early contemporary account, see Farrington, Frank, Meeting Chain Store Competition (Chicago, Ill., 1922)Google Scholar. For an introduction to the politics involved in the Robinson-Patman Act, see Posner, Richard, The Robinson-Patman Act: Federal Regulation of Price Differences (Washington, D.C., 1976)Google Scholar.

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³¹ Blackford, Mansel, “Small Business in America: Two Case Studies,” in Business and Economic History, ed. Uselding, Paul (Urbana, Ill., 1979)Google Scholar, examines some of the difficulties encountered in doing research on small businesses.

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⁴⁰ Geelhoed, E. Bruce, “Business and the American Family: A Local View,” Indiana Social Studies Quarterly 33 (Autumn 1980): 58–67Google Scholar; see also: Geelhoed, , Bringing Wall Street to Main Street: The Story of K. J. Brown & Company, Inc., 1931–81 (Muncie, Ind., 1981)Google Scholar. On the relationship between family business and small business in the 1980s, see Bork, David, Family Business, Risky Business (New York, 1986)Google Scholar.

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⁴³ Dicke, Thomas, “Franchising in the American Economy, 1840–1980” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1988)Google Scholar; this study is a forthcoming publication with the University of North Carolina Press. On the development of franchising see also Luxenberg, Stan, Roadside Empires: How the Chains Franchised America (New York, 1985)Google Scholar, a journalistic account; and Marx, Thomas G., “The Development of the Franchise Distribution System in the U.S. Automobile Industry,” Business History Review 59 (Autumn 1985): 465–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar, a scholarly work.

⁴⁴ Tedlow, Richard S., New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America (New York, 1990)Google Scholar, chap. 4.

⁴⁵ Mayer, Kurt, “Small Business as a Social Institution,” Social Research 14 (March 1947): 349Google Scholar. The question of the socio-economic backgrounds of small business people and their social mobility has long attracted the attention of scholars; see: Anderson, D. and Davidson, P., Occupational Mobility in an American Community (Stanford, Calif., 1937)Google Scholar; and Lewis, G. F., “A Comparison of Some Aspects of the Backgrounds and Careers of Small Businessmen and American Business Leaders,” American Journal of Sociology 65 (Jan. 1960): 348–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁵¹ Averitt, Robert, The Dual Economy (New York, 1971)Google Scholar; Bowring, Joseph, Competition in the Dual Economy (Princeton, N.J., 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; especially chaps. 2 and 3; and Galbraith, John Kenneth, The Rise of the New Industrial State (Boston, Mass., 1966)Google Scholar.

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⁵³ Piore, Michael J. and Sabel, Charles F., The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity (New York, 1984), 17Google Scholar. See also Sabel, and Zeitlin, Jonathan, “Historical Alternative to Mass Production: Politics, Markets, and Technology in Nineteenth Century Industrialization,” Past and Present 108 (Aug. 1985): 133–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This article, which deals mainly with Europe, argues that small industrial firms were able to compete with their larger counterparts until political decisions made in the twentieth century gave an edge to big businesses. For an examination of the continuing importance of small firms as subcontractors see Berger, Suzanne and Piore, , Dualism and Discontinuity in Industrial Societies (New York, 1980)Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ Scranton, Figured Tapestry, 3, 6.

⁵⁵ See, for instance, Brock and Evans, The Economics of Small Business, 178–82; and Judd, Richard J., Greenwood, William T., and Becker, Fred W., Small Business in a Regulated Economy: Issues and Policy Implications (New York, 1988)Google Scholar, a collection of essays written mainly by economists and business school faculty.

⁵⁶ See, for example Soloman, Steven, Small Business USA: The Role of Small Companies in Sparking America's Economic Transformation (New York, 1986)Google Scholar.

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⁵⁸ On how scholars have pictured entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship, see Hebert, Robert F. and Link, Albert N., The Entrepreneur: Mainstream Views & Radical Critiques (Westport, Conn., 1988)Google Scholar. On entrepreneurship and small business, see Adnor, James, “The Spirit of Entrepreneurship,” Journal of Small Business Management 26 (Jan. 1988): 1–4Google Scholar. Historians have also looked at these topics; see, for example, Livesay, Harold, “Entrepreneurial Persistence Through the Bureaucratic Age,” Business History Review 51 (Winter 1977): 415–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁶⁰ Birch, David, Job Creation in America: How Our Smallest Companies Put the Most People to Work (New York, 1987)Google Scholar. Two business school faculty members clearly recognizing that not all, or even most, small businesses are entrepreneurial in nature (that is, interested in growth) are Donald Sexton and Nancy Bowman-Upton. Writing in 1987, they observed that “High growth entrepreneurial firms and small businesses are not the same,” and they concluded that “Government programs designed to assist small businesses are not addressing the issues and needs of growth oriented firms.” See Sexton and Bowman-Upton, “A Growth Model of New Venture Development,” unpublished paper as submitted to IEEE Transactions, 1987, p. 1.

⁶¹ Birch, Job Creation in America, 9.

⁶² Wall Street Journal, 21 Nov. 1988; see also Ibid., 8 Nov. 1988.

⁶³ Storey and Johnson, Job Generation and Labour Market Change, 66, 119.

⁶⁴ Ibid., 3. For a critique of Storey and Johnson, see Fitzroy, “Firm Size, Efficiency and Employment.”

⁶⁵ Zoltan J. Acs, “Flexible Specialization Technologies, Innovation, and Small Business,” in Judd, Greenwood, and Becker, Small Business in a Regulated Economy, 41–50; and Carlsson, “The Evolution of Manufacturing Technology.” Storper, Michael and Christopherson, Susan, “Flexible Specialization and Regional Industrial Agglomerations: The Case of the U.S. Motion Picture Company,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77 (March 1987): 104–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar, shows that the many independent firms now making up the motion picture industry have adopted the strategy of locating near each other as a substitute for vertical integration, in this way minimizing their external transaction costs. This trend toward regional agglomeration appears to be spreading. For instance, Japanese automobile companies manufacturing cars in the United States have imported Japanese production methods, including a heavy reliance on subcontractors usually located near their plants. In a case that one of my students, Masami Mitsui, studied, the assembly line of Honda's main factory in Marysville, Ohio, was even connected directly by computer link-up to the assembly line of one of its prime subcontractors located a mile away, thereby guaranteeing a very fast response to Honda's needs. As American companies adopt some of Japan's production methods, especially just-in-time inventory management, such arrangements may become increasingly common.

⁶⁶ For an introduction to the development of America's service industries, see Riddle, Dorothy I., Service-Led Growth: The Role of the Service Sector in World Development (New York, 1986)Google Scholar.

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⁶⁸ Hounshell, David and Smith, John Kenly Jr., Science and Corporate Strategy: Du Pont R&D, 1902–1980 (New York, 1988)Google Scholar; and Reich, Leonard S., The Making of American Industrial Research: Science and Business at GE and Bell, 1876–1926 (New York, 1985)Google Scholar.

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⁷⁰ Mowery, David C., “Industrial Research and Firm Size, Survival, and Growth in American Manufacturing, 1921–1946: An Assessment,” Journal of Economic History 48 (Dec. 1983): 953–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Mowery does conclude, however, that engaging in industrial research did increase a firm's chance for survival and growth. Mowery counts as “small” any company not among the largest two hundred manufacturing businesses in the United States.

⁷¹ Soltow, , “Small City Industrialists in the Age of Organization: A Case Study of the Manufacturers' Association of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, 1908–1958,” Business History Review 33 (Summer 1958): 178–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar, is one of the few studies on this topic.

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⁷⁴ See, for example, “What Do Women Want? A Business They Can Call Their Own,” Business Week, 22 Dec. 1986; and “Why Women Aren't Getting to the Top,” Fortune, 16 April 1984.

⁷⁵ Although winning some places in the management of small businesses in the 1970s, blacks were, nonetheless, underrepresented as workers in small businesses as compared to big businesses. Women, in contrast, constituted a larger proportion of the work force in small as opposed to large firms. See Storey and Johnson, Job Generation and Labour Market Change, 160.

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⁷⁸ Several scholars have compared individual aspects of small business development across national boundaries, but no comprehensive historical account exists. See, for example, Oakley, Ray, Rothwell, Roy, and Cooper, Sarah, Management of Innovation in High Technology Small Firms (New York, 1988)Google Scholar; Storey, , ed., The Small Firm: An International Survey (London, 1983)Google Scholar; and Storey and Johnson, Job Generation and Labour Market Change.