Industrial History: the State of the Art (2000)

This is not very good. It was an "occasional" piece, and the occasion was a millennium-themed conference under the auspices of the Commonwealth Fund at University College, London. I always used to enjoy their conferences, especially when they used to provide free accommodation to all participants; and this particular conference had the additional attraction that its proceedings were due to be published, so that my contribution would turn into a potentially RAE (Research Assessment Exercise)-worthy item, the sort of opportunity a not very productive British academic can never afford to overlook. The task I was given was clear enough -- to produce a "state of the field" essay on my area of US history -- but it was up to me to define the precise field, and my working methods, so I chose something that was: at the same time quite wide-ranging, not just business or labor or economic history; likely to be useful to me, because it would bring me up to speed on a lot of recent literature; and also not too demanding (I did not have time, or access to a good enough library, to actually get hold of or read lots of monographs, which might have been the more usual and better way to do a "state of the field" piece). Anyway, the work got done, the talk was given, and the essay was published and, I think, included in the last (2007) RAE, a difficult one for me because it fell between two projects (Philadelphia etc., and stoves) so my submission had to be made up of a bunch of essays like this with only one really substantial item, "Between Convergence and Exceptionalism".

• The paper itself in preprint form -- the document was written in an older version of Word, so some features of it (e.g. my favourite form of punctuation, the double-hyphen dash) don't show, but I don't seem to be able to update it, or to translate it into Google Docs format, without losing the charts.
• The data on which it rests -- which could evidently have been improved with more work; I was surprised to see how many articles were not date-coded, probably because I would have had to read them in order to do so; or perhaps all that I can find is an unfinished version of the database I used for my crude content-analysis. Information about authors' rank or institution was also not collected systematically enough to be used (not where it wasn't included in brief bios with the articles). The reference sheet only includes the most frequently occurring SICs -- I'll need to find the document with the rest of them.