Learning by Doing in Markets, Firms, and Countries draws out the underlying economics in business history by focusing on learning processes and the development of competitively valuable asymmetries. The essays show that organizations, like people, learn that this process can be organized more or less effectively, which can have major implications for how competition works.
The first three essays in this volume explore techniques firms have used to both manage information to create valuable asymmetries and to otherwise suppress unwelcome competition. The next three focus on the ways...

This book is a collection of essays about the emergence of routines and, more generally, about getting things organized in firms and in industries in early stages and in transition.
These are subjects of the greatest interest to students of entrepreneurship and organizations, as well as to business historians, but the academic literature is thin. The chronological settings of the book's eleven substantive chapters are historical, reaching as far back as the late 1800s right up to the 1990s, but the issues they raise are evergreen and the historical perspective is exploited to advantage....