The Book-of-the-Month Club: A Reconsideration


Speaker


Abstract

The Book-of-the-Month Club, which was founded in 1926, was once among the most prominent of American corporations, a powerful force in its own line of business and conspicuous enough to the general public to have been an ongoing subject for cartoons in the New Yorker.  It also represents a business model of considerable Coasean interest and much studied but grossly misunderstood act of entrepreneurship.  Most of the academic literature about the Book-of-the-Month Club is written by Cultural Studies academics and concerns the development of twentieth-century American middle-class culture.  In this paper, I attempt to bring the company’s strategic and business history into better focus, reconstructing the entrepreneurial context, the economic logic, the venture’s resources and mobilization, and the emerging results.  I do this deploying the evolutionary approach to studying business history and strategy experience more generally sketched in the papers by Lamoreaux, Raff, and Temin in the American Historical Review 2003 and Enterprise and Society 2004.   The analysis that flows out of this suggests a rather different understanding of the origins and current strategies of Amazon.com than the one latent in the common MBA teaching materials (and in the minds of American MBA students) and also explains in resource-based terms the rise of the so-called category-killer firms in American distribution.
 
Biographical information:

Daniel Raff was born in 1951.  He was educated in the Society of Friends and at New College, Princeton, Oxford, and MIT.   He has held teaching positions at Oxford, the Harvard Business School, the business and law schools of Columbia University, and the Wharton School.  His Wharton teaching has included general management, competitive strategy, deal design, and American business history.  He is also Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research

Raff’s articles have appeared in the American Economic Review, the American Historical Review, the Business History Review, the Journal of Economic History, the Journal of Political Economy, the Strategic Management Review, and other scholarly journals and books.  He is co-organizer and co-editor of a series of three collective works on the economic approach to the evolution of the institutions of business published by the University of Chicago Press.  He edited and wrote an introduction to the chapter on the distribution sector of the economy in the new edition of Historical Statistics of the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).  His monograph on Ford and the Five-Dollar Day, Buying the Peace, will appear from the Princeton University Press.  His research book-projects- in-process are two, one concerning the development of the book trade and of the broader distribution sector of the economy and the other working out in far greater detail than the AHR article permitted an evolutionary economics account of how to think about writing business history in general and the business history of the United States in particular.   (He and various law school colleagues are also working on a textbook on deals.)

 
Contact information: 
Hugo van Driel
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