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Enterprise and Society Advance Access published online on August 12, 2009
Enterprise and Society, doi:10.1093/es/khp034
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

English Commercial Banks and Organizational Inertia: The Financing of SMEs, 1944–1960

Mae Baker and Michael Collins

MAE BAKER, Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds, Woodhouse Lane, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK. E-mail: mb@lubs.leeds.ac.uk
MICHAEL COLLINS, Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds, Woodhouse Lane, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK. E-mail: mc@lubs.leeds.ac.uk

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

This article is a study in the strength of shared strategic beliefs amongst leading British clearing bankers in the years following World War II and how those common beliefs may have inhibited potential for market growth. The subject of the study is the performance of large British deposit banks with respect to the financing of industry. This behavior has long been criticized by economic historians as sub-optimal and, depending on the commentator, has been presented variously as evidence of entrepreneurial failure, the gentrification of the City, social schism amongst the economic and social elite, the political influence of City institutions, the external orientation of capital markets, or institutional sclerosis.1 However, in earlier studies we have offered a rational economic explanation of the banks’ behavior and practices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.2 We argue that firms adopted a type of "transaction bank" approach to corporate finance, partly as . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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