Enterprise and Society Advance Access originally published online on July 10, 2006
Enterprise and Society 2006 7(3):462-468; doi:10.1093/es/khl007
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.
Comment: Extending the Demand-Side Turn Productively
NAOMI R. LAMOREAUX is professor of economics and history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Contact information: Department of Economics, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1477, USA. E-mail: lamoreaux@econ.ucla.edu.
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
JoAnne Yates is calling upon scholars interested in the history of business and technology to take a ‘demand-side turn’—to investigate the role played by firms that purchase goods from other firms in the development of new technologies. She recognizes that some historians have already done good work in this area but points out that most studies of the role of consumers in technological change have focused on individuals and have been written by scholars whose central purpose has been to document the socially constructed character of technology. Yates’ goal is to make the role of purchasing firms a more important part of the research agenda.
There is no question that her call should be heeded. If one sorts commodities into the two basic categories of final and intermediate goods, then the value of this research agenda becomes immediately apparent. The individual consumers upon whom the literature has focused are purchasers