Scranton, Philip. Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865-1925. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997.

If there is a “New Labor History” that takes into account the lives of workers and their families and social class outside of factories in the United States, then Philip Scranton has written a book that would fit squarely within a “New Business History” that similarly takes previous narratives and seeks to contextualize them in the larger world of American business experience. In Endless Novelty, Scranton was determined to correct what he saw as a major shortcoming in American business history; namely, that it concentrated on the development of big business to the exclusion of all else. This concentration on the growth, business and organizational models, and attempts to control the market – the visible hand of management ala Alfred D. Chandler – was at its root only a part of the story, and yet historians such as Chandler had told it as the whole of the story, leading to the use of the criteria for evaluating business practices for such core firms as the de-facto criteria for the evaluation of all business – a fundamental analytical error.

In fact, Scranton named five different analytical problems with the familiar narrative of the history of big business, including the fact that such a narrative came from a fallacy of composition – that the questions and answers given within it did not come from a comprehensive review of all American business realities, and so could not hold for generalizations on American business history; that such a narrative was effectively teleological, circumscribing research efforts and conclusions through deterministic and functionalist views that privileged big business strategies as the goal of all; that it ascribed a fundamental rationality to the ways in which core firms emerged in the course of history, creating a an ever-deepening path of pseudo-analysis, or redescription, which disallowed other points of view, and finally, that this narrative limited analysis of the diversity of the processes of emergence even for core firms.

Instead of a single movement toward mass production, American business developed during the “Second Industrial Revolution” in four primary approaches, because not all products had similar end uses nor all customers identical needs. Those four different approaches to manufacturing included custom manufacturing, in which products whose market was not constant, predictable, or large were manufactured to specification by hand; batch manufacturing, or the making of various items in small groups to fit a certain market demand, and often involving some customization of the goods in question; bulk manufacturing, which was a process using general purpose machines to manufacture large amounts of various differing products for sale in a large quantity; and mass or flow production, the system that constituted the core industries’ use of economies of scale, and high levels of throughput and required a stable, consistent market. Each approach was different, and suited differing product and consumer needs. Each also had its own impact on the American economy, on solutions to manufacturing techniques, and even on the development of manufacturing within urban areas. One of the best examples of custom production is the building of railroad locomotives, which employed thousands of workers, but could not be undertaken on a mass production basis because the engines themselves were so large, because demand was unpredictable and stock was impossible keep.

The differences in size, manufacturing approach, product market, and numbers of employees meant that specialist companies employed different strategies from those of the core firms that have traditionally been the focus of business historians. Those strategies included differentiating products, the use of general purpose machines which could easily be re-purposed for the making of many different products, giving a manufacturer some product flexibility, a focus on quality of product or to meet complex specifications that allowed price to become a secondary consideration for customers, differentiating marketing strategies to help find a niche for specialty products, and the cultivating of skilled workers with shop floor problem-solving abilities that kept the manufacturing process nimble and maintained quality. As the specialist companies developed these business strategies, they also developed management techniques that helped to keep them profitable. These specialist companies often cultivated personal relations between management and employees, rather than the bureaucratic style of the large core firms. They also had to develop systems for tracking orders and itemizing costs because of the greater diversity of goods they manufactured. Marketing frequently required close contact with clients, and the process of manufacturing a final product might involve several smaller firms, making location within industrial districts preferable for reasons of communication and transportation.

Scranton looks at industries as diverse as book printing, engraving, locomotive manufacture, and machine tools. The geographical range of the study is impressive, too, taking into its view most of the American Northeast. This is an important book in the field of business history because it calls into question the dominant narrative in the field and elucidates a new set of strategies and structures for historians to consider while analyzing business history in the United States, opening the field for new and useful work.