The Business of Metaphors

In their groundbreaking book Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argued that metaphors were not limited to poetic expression but formed an integral part of the way in which we understand and experience the world by seeing “one kind of thing in terms of another.”Footnote ⁶ Lakoff and Johnson distinguished between three types of metaphors: orientational metaphors (e.g., things are looking up for investors), ontological metaphors (e.g., Microsoft is the evil empire), and structural metaphors (e.g., market competition is a battle). Unlike the more simple orientational and ontological metaphors, structural metaphors “allow us…to use one highly structured and clearly delineated concept to structure another.”Footnote ⁷ Metaphorical structuring of this kind, Lakoff and Johnson asserted, allows those who use metaphors to create a system in which a complex and often abstract concept or set of relationships is described in terms of another, often more concrete and conceptually familiar one. In this way, structural metaphors allow us to “conceptualize the less clearly delineated in terms of the more clearly delineated.”Footnote ⁸

Business and economic historians have long used such structural metaphors to try to conceptualize the complex process of change over time. This has been particularly true of historians’ attempts to account for the sequential and cumulative nature of entrepreneurship and its relationship to historical change. Historical school economists of the nineteenth century critiqued classical economists for, among other things, (1) ignoring the will and agency of individual business people, and (2) focusing on equilibrating processes in stable markets rather than the dynamic, structural changes transforming capitalism.Footnote ⁹ But in seeking alternative explanations to classical and neoclassical economics, historians faced the problem that the first factor typically did not directly explain the second. Instead, empirical historical research and cases pointed to the fact that entrepreneurs, even those apparently “heroic” ones, often played only one part in a complex and contingent process by which a fuller sequence of entrepreneurial actions cumulatively changed industries and markets. Conceiving and explaining such complex processes and relationships over time rather than recounting the actions of heroic individual entrepreneurs, however, was challenging, not least because the consequences of such actions were mitigated by a host of institutional and contextual considerations. Conceptual metaphors provided a way to grasp such complex processes by relating them to more familiar, well-articulated domains of understanding.

Undoubtedly, the most famous of these conceptual metaphors was Schumpeter’s “gale of creative destruction.”Footnote ¹⁰ The metaphor first appeared in Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy (1942), but it built on decades of work on the relationship between entrepreneurial action and historical changes. McCraw points out that Schumpeter’s famous book was published three years after his Business Cycles, a flawed and massive tome in which the economist grappled with historical cases about the process of economic change in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany in the cotton textile, steel, railroad, automobile, and electric power industries. In the historical case studies that appeared in Business Cycles, as McCraw points out, Schumpeter delved into the competitive dynamics involved not only in the introduction of an innovation itself by an entrepreneurial firm but also the process by which rivals attempted to forestall, adopt, adapt, and imitate the innovation, a process that over time led to “competing down” the entrepreneurial profits of the initial innovators and the transformation the industrial order.Footnote ¹¹

Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy—and the metaphor at its center—was the conceptual expression of Schumpeter’s previous historical labors. Schumpeter’s metaphor sought to distill the complex processes he described in Business Cycles by drawing on the already familiar and long-established dialectical reasoning that was familiar to historical thinkers as a way of conceptualizing change.Footnote ¹² With the notion of creative destruction, Schumpeter proposed that innovative market competition took on a familiar dialectical form, in which the rivalry between the present and future was central to how new industrial orders emerged. While economists tended to focus on “competition within a rigid pattern of invariant conditions, methods of production and forms of industrial organization…it is not that kind of competition which counts but the competition from the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization” that mattered for explaining capitalism as an evolutionary system, Schumpeter asserted.Footnote ¹³ The metaphor emphasized not only that innovation was a strong competitive force (i.e., a gale) but also one that initiated a process (i.e., the dialectics of creative destruction) that could wipe away existing structural orders and create new ones.

Schumpeter’s colleague and unheralded successor, Arthur Cole, offered a more serene metaphor—the “entrepreneurial stream”—in conceptualizing the relationship between entrepreneurial action and historical change. In Business Enterprise in Its Social Setting (1959), Cole attempted to synthesize more than a decade of work on the relationship between entrepreneurship and change. Like Schumpeter, Cole was attempting to capture in his metaphor the “interaction of entrepreneurial units.”Footnote ¹⁴ Whereas Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” emphasized competitive dialectics as the defining aspect of these relationship, Cole’s “entrepreneurial stream” relied on an ecological metaphor that suggested inherent mutualism among entrepreneurs. “We want to learn, as it were, how the whole fraternity of log-riders manages to perform in a manner more productive than if each rode alone,” Cole asserted.Footnote ¹⁵ Anticipating Galambos and Amatori, Cole suggested that entrepreneurial actions build on one another in a sequence that created “propulsion of a form of multiplier,”Footnote ¹⁶ and he focused in particular on the production and dissemination of new information and knowledge through entrepreneurial action as a central characteristic of this flow. As with Schumpeter, the purpose of introducing the metaphor was to help conceptualize how individual action related to structural change by grounding it in a familiar comparison. “To historians and economists, the notion of such a stream offers a variant element in helping to explain economic change,” Cole concluded.Footnote ¹⁷

Galambos and Amatori’s construct of the entrepreneurial multiplier clearly fits within the historiographical tradition of trying to grasp the cumulative nature of entrepreneurship and its consequences for change through metaphor. Like the other metaphors, it compares entrepreneurial processes to a domain that both authors and readers find more concrete and well understood: in this case, the public investment multiplier in Keynesian economics. Like both Schumpeter and Cole, Galambos and Amatori seek to use the metaphor to articulate the nature of the linkages that tie together a sequence of entrepreneurial actions and that together explain economic change. Hence, the entrepreneurial multiplier “works directly through investment by forcing or incentivizing new investments in innovation,”Footnote ¹⁸ and it propels change primarily through economic growth. Following the structure of the metaphor, the entrepreneurial chain is essentially characterized as similar to an investment relationship that promises higher or lower returns based on a sequence of consequences.

Placing the entrepreneurial multiplier in historiographical context suggests how important (and powerful) conceptual metaphors have been in entrepreneurial history. Metaphors have been used as a form of theorizing the relationship between entrepreneurship and historical changes in a way that grounded a complex and quite indeterminate set of relationships in time in a comparison to a domain that is familiar, more clearly articulated, and widely accepted. As the differences in the metaphors above already imply, however, any one metaphor works to hide as much it reveals. “The very systematicity that allows us to understand one aspect of a system in terms of another,” explained Lakoff and Johnson, “will necessarily hide other aspects of the concept.”Footnote ¹⁹ Adopting and using the entrepreneurial multiplier as a construct in entrepreneurial history, therefore, requires attention to what it hides about entrepreneurial processes as much as what it reveals about them.

Metaphors of Business

Two perspectives allow us to identify what the entrepreneurial multiplier concept reveals and what it hides. The first involves comparing the focal metaphor (the multiplier) to others (creative destruction, the entrepreneurial stream) to understand what each allows us to see. The other involves comparing the metaphor to the evidence and narrative produced by Galambos and Amatori themselves to see where the story and its characters break from their assigned plot.

Table 1: Comparison of Conceptual Metaphors of Entrepreneurial Sequences.

A simple comparison is provided in Table 1. It identifies the target domain that grounds each of the three metaphors, as well as two key elements that give structure to the metaphorical comparisons: the nature of the relationship or linkages that tie together entrepreneurial actions into a sequence, and the character of the historical change it implies. Whereas Schumpeter drew on the domain of historical dialectics for his comparison and Cole on an ecological formation for his, Galambos and Amatori turn to economics as their source of inspiration. This is interesting, in part, because the authors themselves see the irony, and maybe even express some discomfort, in choosing to draw on the domain of economics: “Our approach to a subject that many economists avoided for decades nevertheless draws on economics for its central concept,” they explain.Footnote ²⁰ Implicit within the choice of the target domain is the unstated sense that economics, as a discipline, provides the soundest source for theorizing about economic phenomena and relationships. It is ironic to find Galambos and Amatori, both historians, turning to economics to ground their metaphor while Schumpeter and Cole, both notable economists, made their contributions to entrepreneurial theory and history by explicitly and vocally fleeing orthodox economic theory precisely because they did not find it a fertile domain for thinking about entrepreneurship.Footnote ²¹

Comparison also casts light on how each metaphor characterizes the nature of the linkages that tie together entrepreneurial actors and propels a sequence of actions, as well as their relationship to historical change. Schumpeter focuses on competitive dynamics as the essential characteristic that defines the relationship between entrepreneurial actions, and Cole finds an implicit mutualism that arises primarily from entrepreneurial actors’ reliance on information and knowledge about opportunities produced by others in the entrepreneurial stream. Galambos and Amatori’s chain of events are held together, in contrast, by the financial logic that one innovative event propels a sequence by “incentivizing or forcing investments” in subsequent ones.Footnote ²² The metaphors also suggest differences in the pattern of historical change. Schumpeter’s gale of creative destruction highlighted the fundamentally disruptive and halting nature of entrepreneurial change and the loss of old commercial habits, customs, and products as much as the creation of new ones, in contrast to Cole’s stream that depicted historical change essentially as a constant flow. Interestingly, Galambos and Amatori depict time and events as unfolding in sequential chains of action, some of relatively short length and others that are long and have more radical consequences.

Perhaps the greatest strength of the entrepreneurial multiplier metaphor vis-à-vis the other two is that it evokes a sense of the variable magnitude of entrepreneurial consequences and links these to differences in the length of the sequence of actions that an innovation allows. More so than Schumpeter or Cole, Galambos and Amatori draw attention to the notion that the magnitude of an innovation’s historical impact may be significantly larger than at first meets the eye, and that the magnitude is determined not only by the innovative event itself but also by the subsequent actions it catalyzes. The authors’ separation of relatively short and long chains offers a distinction that I think would be valuable as a basis for framing follow-up research in entrepreneurial history; and their claim that technological innovation creates the longest chains (and hence the greatest structural change) offers a useful hypothesis for subsequent discussion and evaluation. The distinction between short and long chains also creates opportunities for incorporating more modest innovations and those not limited to technology. This is what Galambos and Amatori seem to have in mind in saying that the multiplier would encourage business and economic historians to “look again to social, urban, and cultural histories”Footnote ²³—which I understood in part as a bid to argue that entrepreneurial history should be taken seriously within what American scholars in particular tend to call the history of capitalism. In these ways, and particularly in the language of short and long entrepreneurial sequences, the multiplier concept can spark some very productive followup research and thinking.

In a number of other ways, however, the multiplier metaphor hides important aspects of the entrepreneurial process that historians should not lose sight of as they reengage the project of entrepreneurial history. One such aspect is the inherent displacement of older commercial customs, habits, products, and organizations that entrepreneurial change entails, and that Schumpeter’s creative destruction metaphor highlights best. Galambos and Amatori are, of course, attuned to this; they are themselves too skilled and experienced as historians to let the metaphor blind them. They mention that “not everyone benefitted”Footnote ²⁴ from the entrepreneurial process, but still the multiplier metaphor only evokes the kind of loss that entrepreneurship entails, in a muted way. The authors write that “the balance sheet in this case clearly included liabilities as well as assets.”Footnote ²⁵ However, the application of accounting terminology to creative destruction robs both the character of the old industrial orders and its values of much of color and tenor. The terminology misses qualities of that loss (e.g., values, ideologies, emotions, and social relationships) that in some sense are incommensurable with the economic metrics of the authors’ balance sheet.

The economic logic of the multiplier metaphor also flattens the multidimensional qualities of the flows that link entrepreneurial actions along the sequence. Though Galambos and Amatori emphasize inducements (“incentivizing and forcing”) to investments that propel entrepreneurial sequences, both their evidence and their narrative suggest that these linkages are more complex and multifaceted. In a single paragraph, in fact, they mention the “several different ways” that sequences unfold, including by “encouraging emulation,” the creation of new “local opportunities,” the spillover of “capabilities and knowledge,” and the ways in which successful innovations “generated capital that begat further innovations.”Footnote ²⁶ The evidence and explanations suggest a more complex set of research questions: How do these different flows (in expectations, opportunities, resources, and capital) relate to one another and interact with each other? Does the nature of the flow lead to differences in the character of the link between entrepreneurial actors? Do some flows create more fundamental historical changes than others? These should not be lost by the multiplier metaphor’s implicit notion that what is being multiplied may be captured by a single investment metric.

The multiplier metaphor also elides complex path dependencies and contingent directionality in the chain of entrepreneurial action; entrepreneurial acts at one moment in time may make the pursuit of one kind of subsequent entrepreneurial opportunity more likely, but it may also make a path to a different kind of opportunity less likely or foreclose it all together.Footnote ²⁷ Entrepreneurial actions that create better and more efficient highways may spawn secondary and tertiary entrepreneurial consequences that catalyze improvements in cars, the organization of suburbs, and the proliferation of a host of suppliers and service providers. It may also foreclose or make it more difficult to engage in entrepreneurial actions to improve or modernize rail transportation or to foster businesses that depend on urban density. The multiplier metaphor itself lacks the conceptual robustness to capture this complex branching process in the chain of consequences, in a way that Cole’s entrepreneurial stream seems a little better at doing. As with the aspect of destruction and loss, Galambos and Amatori are clearly aware of this process and, I think, rightly drop their economics-inspired metaphor for a more arboreal one at times: “The path of these sequences resembles a great tree with many branches, rather than a single, linear trace.”Footnote ²⁸ This is a metaphor that Cole also occasionally evoked when the “stream” seemed insufficient.

However, the aspect of the entrepreneurial process most at risk of being elided by the entrepreneurial multiplier concept is its deep uncertainty. In retrospect, the sequences we see and document seem clear and ineluctable: the introduction of a new technology or product or organization destined to transform an industry or economy, and the magnitude of its effects is clear to the point of being nearly quantifiable. Prospectively, though, from the point of view of entrepreneurs themselves, the nature of entrepreneurial opportunities are fundamentally uncertain, and the sequences by which they unfold are a gauzy and ever-changing landscape of the future.Footnote ²⁹ In contrast, the Keynesian public multiplier not only suggests a magnitude to public action but also offers the lure of predictability. Galambos and Amatori, in explaining the Keynesian multiplier, offer the example that “if a society’s multiplier is three, for instance, the national income will be increased by a factor of three when government spending or a new technology prompts investment.”Footnote ³⁰ In contrast, it would be nearly impossible to offer an entrepreneurial multiplier for a given innovation with anything of the same certainty. In Knightian parlance,Footnote ³¹ the Keynesian multiplier involves certain risks that suggests a distribution of probable but knowable magnitudes around an expected value that could be statistically determined, whereas the entrepreneurial multiplier is subject to fundamental uncertainty in which determining an expected value and distribution—even if the expected number is positive!—is unrealistic. In applying the multiplier metaphor to entrepreneurial processes, the fundamental uncertainty of entrepreneurial futures that characterizes such sequences of actions is hidden, which risks giving these processes a magnitude and probabilistic character that they lack. In doing so, historians bring ourselves close to the point of robbing entrepreneurial actors of the will and contingencies that we have often charged is lacking in economic reasoning.

Monopolies of Meaning and the Market for Metaphors

All metaphors are, by their nature, incomplete. If a comparison between two domains yielded a completely identical structure, then the domains would in effect be the same, and a metaphor would be useless. Moreover, Galambos and Amatori themselves seem to implicitly recognize when their metaphor works and when it does not, and their narrative and evidence willingly points to some of the topics mentioned above that break the metaphor’s structure. So, why bother with the extensive analysis of the difference between metaphors of the entrepreneurial sequence and the inconsistencies that arise at times with the evidence and narrative? My main reason for pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of the multiplier concept is that such metaphors can become extraordinarily powerful conceptual constructs over time, shaping expectations and preconfiguring our understanding of evidence and archives. Metaphors can act as powerful conceptual devices to open up how we interpret the past but also to restrict interpretive possibilities and shut down alternative explanations.

Consider, for example, the ways in which certain conceptual metaphors have at times dominated organizational research. The use of the evolutionary biology metaphor, for instance, hardened thinking in some branches of management science and restricted how history was studied for decades. When such metaphors were first proposed, critics warned about the assumptions the evolutionary analogy transposed from the natural sciences to the human ones. In a stinging assessment, Edith Penrose called the application of the evolutionary analogy to business “downright obscurantism” because it failed to account for “the conscious willed decisions of human beings” and the ways in which firms are able “to adapt the environment to their own purposes.”Footnote ³² Nevertheless, the evolutionary metaphor became the most dominant lens through which history and historical evidence was seen in management research for decades, and historians have at times found themselves having to drop the term history to talk about how business evolves.Footnote ³³ The “price of metaphor” is that it can restrict the questions scholars ask and prefigure evidence as the metaphor comes to be seen as an ontological reality rather than as a conceptual device.Footnote ³⁴ Similar charges can be made about “institutional theory” in management and its dependence on Weber’s “iron cage” metaphor.Footnote ³⁵ Rather than using the metaphor to offer fresh insights and ways of seeing the world over time, scholars often extended and tweaked it under the justification of making “contributions to theory.” At such points, rather than the metaphor serving us as a fresh way of seeing the world, we serve the metaphor.

To keep metaphors “alive,” we need to be both reflexive about their nature as conceptual devices that carry associations and deploy them playfully to make sense of the past in new ways. Reflexivity about the tool-like qualities of metaphors allows us to be aware of the implicit associations they carry and hence how to better use them in crafting historical interpretations. Suddaby and Foster, for instance, have shown how varying assumptions embedded in implicit metaphors about history have shaped the explanations organization theorists have proffered about how things change.Footnote ³⁶ Theories of how metaphors work can also serve historians well as guides to using them skillfully. Cornelissen, for instance, provides a conceptualization of metaphors based not on comparison (i.e. seeing one construct as another) but as a form of creative interaction between two domains that creates an entirely novel third construct.Footnote ³⁷ Using metaphors reflexively, by engaging critically with their assumptions and associations and by considering them from different theoretical lenses, can thus allow historians to deploy them more flexibly and imaginatively.

The creative possibilities of metaphors in business history are also unleashed when we use them in playful ways to render new and varying interpretations of what we thought we knew. By play, I mean the act of engaging in historical interpretation primarily as amusement and joy – what Charles Peirce referred to as “pure play”Footnote ³⁸ – not for the explicit purpose of making justifiable scholarly claims. Philosophers of science have argued that playfulness and free association of this sort forms an integral aspect of the “context of discovery” rather than the “context of justification.”Footnote ³⁹ Metaphors, it seems to me, are inherently fun because of the kaleidoscopic ways they let us play with social reality in general and history in particular.

Godley and Hamilton’s recent study of the comparative development of the poultry industry in the United States and the United Kingdom illustrates well the value of playing with metaphors.Footnote ⁴⁰ Building on historian Reinhart Koslleck’s proposition that “time, as it is known, can only be expressed in spatial metaphors,”Footnote ⁴¹ they compare two temporal-spatial constructs in order to produce competing historical explanations for why British entrepreneurs had a higher propensity to engage in strategic partnerships than American ones. The first metaphor, time-as-structure, is assumed in such organizational theories as evolutionary theory, path dependence, and lifecycle theory; the second metaphor, the space-of-experience, is inherent in the scholarship on organizational identity, organizational memory, rhetorical history and the uses of the past. Laying the two historical interpretations side by side, they show how the metaphor of time-as-experience better explains the propensity to engage in partnerships than time-as-structure because of the role of memory in shaping entrepreneurs’ “images” of the market.

Metaphor-as-Theory

So far, I have stayed away from discussing “theory” explicitly, but our analysis of Galambos and Amatori’s metaphor brings us too close to the topic to avoid it. The role of metaphor in theorizing has been extensively examined in social science in general, and in organizational research in particular. In fact, much of the literature on “theorizing” in social science stipulates that the development and application of metaphors can form the core of the theorizing process.Footnote ⁴² If metaphors are such powerful engines of theorization and if historians use metaphor regularly in producing our interpretations, what does this imply about theorizing in history?

To date, business and economic historians have typically engaged in the theory debate by framing it as a question of whether historians should or should not theorize. This should-historians-theorize framing of the question underlay the methodenstreit of the late nineteenth century, the competing claims of business history and entrepreneurial history in the post-World War II period, the debate over new economic history in the 1970s and 1980s, and again today in historians’ engagement with management and organizational studies.Footnote ⁴³ Approaching the question in this way assumes that theory resides outside history; whereas history is understood as an enterprise focused on the sources, facts, and interpretations of the past, theory is seen as a separate and foreign endeavor.Footnote ⁴⁴ To historicize and to theorize are assumed to be categorically different processes. However, the widespread use of conceptual metaphors in historical interpretation suggests that the question of whether historians should theorize is simply the wrong question. The better one is how do historians theorize and how is this different from the theorizing that is common in the other social sciences.

The scholarship on “theorizing” in the social sciences typically depicts metaphor as a means to an end rather than an end in itself in the theorizing process. Swedberg, for instance, proposes the following four “basic rules of theorizing in social science:” (1) observe something interesting; (2) name and formulate a central concept; (3) build out the theory using analogies, metaphor, and comparisons; (4) formulate a model or tentative theory that incorporates explanation.Footnote ⁴⁵ While historical interpretation involves steps 1 through 3, it does not comfortably entail the fourth. Formalization and modeling imply the creation of rule-like claims and causal laws that separate theory from context and seemingly distort historical interpretation. This view of theory, based in natural science assumptions and Newtonian depictions of causation, is one that many historians reject as incompatible with historical interpretation.

But this is not the only understanding of theory in the social sciences. When understood from the perspective of pragmatism or phenomenology, social science theory is depicted not as an objective and abstract body of rules and explanations but rather as an extension of the normal sensemaking of everyday life.Footnote ⁴⁶ Theorizing happens as scholars take a reflexive stance and grapple with puzzling situations by developing constructs to explain the phenomena that puzzle them. Rather than a set of rules and explanations derived deductively or inductively, theorizing involves the development of a set of provisional claims arrived at abductively and based on practices that may vary from scholarly community to community.Footnote ⁴⁷

From this perspective, the development and use of conceptual metaphors can be seen as an intrinsic aspect of theorizing historically. Conceptual metaphors are constructs developed and used by historians to make sense of puzzling sets of associations and relationships. Moreover, conceptual metaphors allow historians to theorize within the bounds of historical practice – as they grapple with and make sense of particular historical phenomena and as an integral aspect of the historical narrative that is produced. Indeed, the nature of metaphor as “everyday language” allows historians to theorize within narratives without appearing to have theorized – in sharp contrast to the practice of theorizing in many other social sciences where theorizing announces itself in scholarly rhetoric. Historians can integrate conceptual metaphors without breaking narrative stride and without having appeared to have theorized. In the rhetoric of history, metaphor – like narrative – allows historians to write in a way that “events seem to tell themselves.”Footnote ⁴⁸

This does not mean that historical practices prohibit the explicit discussion of metaphor-as-theory. Historians often do discuss and critique the adequacies of particular constructs as depictions of historical phenomena, as I am doing here. And, there is no inconsistency in drawing out the implications of a historical metaphor explicitly as historians publish in fields where such theorizing practices prevail, as the article by Godley and Hamilton illustrates. But the understated character of metaphor-as-theory is important because it plays a crucial role in how historical theory penetrates into everyday life. Precisely because historical metaphors do not announce themselves as theories, they can move effortlessly into routine communications and practices.

Take, as a final example, a metaphor that has long been at the center of economic and business history: industrial revolution. Though the term was occasionally employed by Friedrich Engels and others in the middle of the nineteenth century, it only came into widespread use following Arnold Toynbee’s 1882 lectures on the topic to a group of students of modern history at Oxford University.Footnote ⁴⁹ The conceptual metaphor was clear in the title, the content itself, and in the way Toynbee addressed a student audience used to thinking of revolutions in political and intellectual terms. “The French Revolution has indeed profoundly modified our views of History, but much still remains to be done in that direction,” he explained. “If I could persuade some of those present to study Economic History … I should be indeed glad.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Toynbee's narrative was organized around how new technologies “destroyed the old world and built a new one.”Footnote ⁵¹ For Toynbee, the metaphor of industrialization-as-revolution was crucial for establishing the relationship between new technologies and deep changes in British society, particularly the relationship between employers and employees. Toynbee’s “industrial revolution,” explains Daniel C.S. Wilson, was both “a historical theory and an event.”Footnote ⁵²

Historians, as is well known, have extensively debated and critiqued the validity of the metaphor as a depiction of British industrialization.Footnote ⁵³ But the metaphor itself has proven extremely resilient and productive in historiography, in memory, and in practice as a “historical theory” of the relationship between new technologies and social change.Footnote ⁵⁴ Within the context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century ascendance of the United States and Germany in the new technologies of electricity, chemicals, and plastics, the conceptual metaphor gained new historiographical relevance as a way of puzzling over the rise and decline of Great Britain’s relative competitiveness. The notion of the “second industrial revolution” transformed the metaphor from a construct referring to a specific time and place to a theory of economic transformation more generally. In the post-World War II period the metaphor’s meaning was expanded once again by historians like Walt Rostow, who used it to draw out explicit policy claims about the relevance of technology for transforming emerging economies and societies in the context of the Cold War. And today, the historical metaphor has become part of everyday language to explain the intention and outcome of action, as entrepreneurs and investors in addition to policymakers explain their choices as part of a third or fourth industrial revolution.Footnote ⁵⁵ As a construct, “industrial revolution” has become a theory-in-use about technological novelty and social transformation with significant influence over practice in the everyday language of business in addition to a strong driver of historiographical development.

Ironically, then, the power of conceptual metaphors as a form of theorizing may be attributable precisely to the impression that one is not theorizing. Embedded in the everyday language of historical narrative, conceptual metaphors allow theory development in history while rejecting the rhetorical formalization it takes in some social sciences. Moreover, the seemingly common quality of metaphor allows its associated claims to seep into the everyday language of practice. One can talk of the “fourth industrial revolution” or the efforts of developing countries to “catch up” or characterize entrepreneurs today as engaged in “creative destruction” without a self-conscious sense of the historical theorizing that has been involved in seeing the world in these ways. And theory, at least of this metaphorical sort, can be understood as an integral part of moving a historiography forward.

A concluding metaphor—this one also offered by Schumpeter—may best capture how the creation and use of new conceptual metaphors works to advance research in entrepreneurial history. “Personally, I believe that there is an incessant give and take between historical and theoretical analysis and that, though for the investigation of individual questions it may be necessary to sail for a time on one tack only, yet on principle the two should never lose sight of each other,” Schumpeter wrote in a paper calling for the study of entrepreneurial history.Footnote ⁵⁶ The sailing metaphor reminds us that the development of a field like entrepreneurial history requires a moving back and forth between history and theory, and that each tack toward theory can only put wind in our sails to the extent that it allows us to see the history in new ways. Galambos and Amatori’s metaphorical multiplier is not only part of a longer tradition of this tacking back and forth but also offers an opportunity to see anew a process that historians have long sought to understand.