
Louis GalambosJohns Hopkins University | JHU · Department of History
Louis Galambos
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (107)
Galambos and Amatori applaud this discourse over entrepreneurship but contend that the multiplier is not a metaphor. They acknowledge Wadhwani’s insightful analyses and look forward to further fruitful discussions focused on innovation, capitalism’s major strength. They briefly argue for scalar evaluations rather than binary evaluations of innovati...
America’s entrepreneurial culture is important because it promotes the search for new opportunities for innovation. Here, the author traces that culture through two industrial revolutions and focuses on the growing tension between entrepreneurship and bureaucracy inside and outside of the nation’s twentieth-century firms. Business histories are exp...
This article leans against specialization by cutting across three disciplines to analyze the entrepreneurial function in modern, U.S capitalism. The author blends the basic ideas of Joseph A. Schumpeter (economics), Alfred D. Chandler (history), and Max Weber (sociology), with recent work done by Daniel Kahneman in behavioral economics. Two case st...
Historians and economists are interested in the same subject but they approach that subject from different perspectives and with different objectives. As one might expect, they come to different conclusions about the long-term process of economic development that took place during industrialization. Although they are approaching their subject from...
This commentary reviews the scholarly contributions of the several authors to the pre-history of industrial research, a subject that has been largely ignored in previous works in the field. While finding much to approve in all of the contributions, the commentator objects to the use of the word “entrepreneur” to describe those innovators who develo...
Since the Keynesian revolution in economics, a standard part of the profession?s analytical framework, and an argument for government support for investment, has been the multiplier concept. This classical multiplier works through consumption in an equilibrium model. Our contention is that there is also an entrepreneurial multiplier that works dire...
Recent studies have raised serious questions about the significance of the 1880-1920 turning point in modern American history. I defend the Wiebe analysis, focusing on four major developments: the professionalization (1) that reflected decisive economic (2) and urban (3) transitions and that shaped the new role of experts (4) in all aspects of a gr...
Noncommunicable diseases (NCDs)—including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, asthma and other chronic respiratory conditions, and cancers—are the leading causes of death worldwide. An estimated 36 million people die from such diseases each year; this represents roughly two out of three deaths globally. Eighty percent of these fatalities occur in dev...
Merck and the pharmaceutical industry are headline news today. Controversies over public safety, prices, and the ability of the industry to develop the new drugs and vaccines that society needs have been covered worldwide. Roy Vagelos, who was head of research and then CEO at Merck from the mid-1970s through the early 1990s, addresses these issues...
The Bureaucratization of the World. By JacobyHenry (Translated from the German by KanesEveline). Berkeley, University of California Press, 1973. Pp. vii + 241. $12.95. - Volume 49 Issue 1 - Louis Galambos
The Creative Society is the first history to look at modern America through the eyes of its emerging ranks of professional experts, including lawyers, scientists, doctors, administrators, business managers, teachers, policy specialists and urban planners. Covering the period from the 1890s to the early twenty-first century, Louis Galambos examines...
Since many of the modern professions had a substantial impact on economic development, this essay examines Alfred D. Chandler’s
description and analysis of the business-related aspects of professionalization. According to Chandler, professional managers,
scientists, and engineers made crucial contributions to the expansion of large enterprises in t...
The essays in this volume probe the impact the digital revolution has had, or sometimes failed to have, on global business. Has digital technology, the authors ask, led to structural changes and greater efficiency and innovation? While most of the essays support the idea that the information age has increased productivity in global business, the ev...
The essays in this volume probe the impact the digital revolution has had, or sometimes failed to have, on global business. Has digital technology, the authors ask, led to structural changes and greater efficiency and innovation? While most of the essays support the idea that the information age has increased productivity in global business, the ev...
Once, long ago, I was teaching business and economic history at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Alas,my academic career was stalled in the early 1960s. A distinguished Yale professor had kept the revised manuscript of my dissertation sitting on his desk for a year without reading it or submitting a report to the press. Meanwhile, I had just lear...
In a world focused on science and new technology, brands help to explain why several of the world's multinational corporations have little to do with either. Rather they are old firms with little critical investment in patents or copyrights. For these firms, the critical intellectual property is trademarks. Global Brands, first published in 2007, e...
In The World's Newest Profession Christopher McKenna offers a history of management consulting in the twentieth century. Although management consulting may not yet be a recognized profession, the leading consulting firms have been advising and reshaping the largest organizations in the world since the 1920s. This groundbreaking study details how th...
Joseph Schumpeter long ago provided those seeking an understanding of modern capitalist economic growth with a dynamic model. The central engine that made capitalism run, Schumpeter explained, was the entrepreneur, the innovator, the unusual businessman who combined capital, labor, and natural resources to develop a new product, a new service, a ne...
This book fills a critical gap in modern economic and business history by presenting research by leading scholars to an international audience of academics, business executives, and policy makers. This research is presented in two clusters. The first cluster of studies explores four cross-cutting topics, including surveys of the changes in industry...
Bulletin of the History of Medicine 79.2 (2005) 378-379
Two complex historical phenomena have brought innovation to center stage in a number of academic disciplines and in policy circles during the past few decades: one is the third industrial revolution, the information-age revolution driven by the transistor, the integrated circuit, the computer,...
Two major forces have been remaking the organizational setting of the United States in the recent past. The third industrial revolution and globalization are having a dramatic impact on the structure and process of American economic institutions and on the nation's political process. This third version of the organizational synthesis probes, with v...
In the 1980s, the Reagan Administration drastically altered American antitrust policy, virtually eliminating Section 2 cases involving monopolies. This chapter provides a context for that decision by tracing the efforts that the federal government made since 1890 to reconcile an opposition to highly concentrated economic power with the even stronge...
For most of its early history, business history evolved as an isolated American subdiscipline, separated by a wide gulf from the strong intellectual currents reshaping the larger discipline of history in the United States. It was not the only subdiscipline that was isolated in this way during the period between 1930 and 1960. As Charles Neu has poi...
Wireless entrepreneurs are transforming the way people live and work around the globe. In the process they have created some of the fastest-growing companies on the planet. This 2002 book tells the story of the birth and explosion of cellular and wireless communications as seen through the eyes of one of the industry’s pioneers, Sam Ginn. As deregu...
This book examines the rise and fall in the twentieth-century Western world of state-owned enterprises, a chief instrument of state economic intervention. It offers historical perspective on the origins and purpose of state-owned enterprises, their performance, and the reasons for their precipitate decline from their heyday in the 1960s to the wave...
This book examines the rise and fall in the twentieth-century Western world of state-owned enterprises, a chief instrument of state economic intervention. It offers historical perspective on the origins and purpose of state-owned enterprises, their performance, and the reasons for their precipitate decline from their heyday in the 1960s to the wave...
During the twentieth century, the pharmaceutical industry experienced a series of dramatic changes as developments in science and technology generated new opportunities for innovation. Each of these transitions forced existing firms to develop new capabilities. The authors examine the most recent such transition, the shift to molecular genetics and...
The dominant paradigm in business history has for many years been the synthesis developed by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. Like most paradigms that define a field of scholarship, Chandler's has attracted swarms of devotees and critics, and for some years, it was customary to perform a ritual bow toward his work in the first or second paragraph of any art...
Robert S. McNamara recently raised a stir about America's involvement in the Vietnam War. In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam , his personal apology for his role as Secretary of Defense (1961–68) during the first phase of the war, shot to the top of the best-seller lists. But the author was surely more interested in uncovering some fo...
The authors use an historical case‐study of a single line of therapeutic development (in vaccines and serum antitoxins) to bring out salient aspects of the shifting sources of innovation in the pharmaceutical industry during the twentieth century. Their emphasis is on the complex relationships that have evolved between three companies ‐ Mulford, Sh...
Using a Chandlerian strategy/structure framework for comparative purposes, the authors examine the early development of an important public institution, The World Bank Group. As they demonstrate, The Bank gradually evolved toward the model provided by the multidivisional or M-form corporation. In its early years, The Bank was a centralized organiza...
During the twentieth century, the scope of the responsibility of the Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of large US businesses
has expanded markedly. The change has taken place within firms as a result of their increase in size and in the complexity
of their operations; it has taken place as well outside these firms, where political constraints on fir...
Few journals have the opportunity, as the Review has today, of celebrating their 125th anniversaries. A more suitable occasion could hardly be found to highlight the publication's important contribution to the study of a broad range of subjects, including the Fundamental Principles of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, international humanitarian law,...
The record of long–term innovation at the American Telegraph and Telephone Company seems to defy conventional economic and social theories of the firm. The following essay, based on extensive research in the AT&T Archives, argues that CEO Theodore Vail made this possible by transforming the Bell System's orientation to innovation, its structure, an...
This volume collects Professor Parker's major writings on American agricultural and industrial history, including some previously unpublished essays. Taken as a whole, these essays give an account of why and how the United States grew rich in the nineteenth century, as well as a background against which to judge the present position of the economy...
I respond to these sessions and the whole program as one trained in history, whose work has been almost entirely on U.S. economic institutions in the period from 1880 to the present. Most of these institutions either were, or aspired to be, large-scale. Some of them failed. Most of these institutions involved a distinctive, and for their time relat...
The author traces and evaluates the major trends in the history and theory of the modern corporation: the literature dealing with market control, the New Business History that emphasizes efficiency, and recent developments by the Chicago School and the theorists of transactions costs. He concludes with an analysis of the recent problems U.S. corpor...
In the past century the American political system has changed in dramatic ways. A new national state has been created, and a substantial part of the nation's goods and services has been entrusted to its care. New administrative agencies allocate most of those resources, working in tandem with a multitude of private and other public organizations. C...
In the political economy of energy, World War II was a significant watershed: it accelerated the transition from dependence on coal to petroleum and natural gas. At the same time, mobilization provided an unprecedented experience in the management of energy markets by a forced partnership of business and government. In this 1985 book, Vietor covers...
This is a history of America's use of wage and price controls from colonial times to Richard Nixon's experiment with controls in the 1970s. It explores the impact of controls on prices and productivity, side-effects such as the growth of black markets and the expansion of government, and the relationship between controls and monetary policy. The ce...
In this suggestive essay, Professor Galambos surveys the large number of books and articles, published since 1970, that together point toward a new “organizational synthesis” in American history. Expanding upon an earlier, more tentative essay on the same subject published in the Autumn 1970 issue of the Business History Review, he contrasts the wi...
Almost unnoticed in the midst of revisionist attacks on progressive history and the rise of the New Left, an organizational synthesis has been emerging which offers much to the student of modern America. Professor Galambos presents a historiographical survey of this synthesis and concludes that its chief strength is a mode of analysis blending the...
Scholars interested in modern industrial economies have for years devoted substantial attention to the growth and performance of large-scale organizations. Many of their studies have been the intellectual heirs of Max Weber's brilliant analysis of bureaucracy, for it is the bureaucratic structure of authority which most often characterizes such org...
As we inch toward the end of the twentieth century, it is appropriate to consider that in the past five centuries we have discovered only two peaceful means of protecting ourselves from the institutions we create. When they become autocratic or inefficient, when they oppress us or fail to provide us with the goods, services, and jobs we need, we lo...
I am pleased to comment on Bill Lazonick's paper. I have been reading a number of his papers in recent years--including his interesting essay on "Theory, History, and the Capitalist Enterprise." I always learn something new from his publications and begin to see some familiar business developments in a different light. Today's paper is no exception...
Biografía de Roy Vagelos en que se destacan las tres grandes carreras por las que es reconocido: por un lado, como médico; por otro, como administrador científico, y por otro, como director de uno de los más importantes laboratorios farmacéuticos a nivel internacional, Merck.