The Accidental Historian
By Meghan Laska
Wharton's Dan Raff Takes Us Through 60+ Years of Business History
Management Professor Daniel Raff vividly recalls discovering his passion for history. It was two weeks
before his wedding, and he was still a graduate student trying to figure out what work needed doing by
him. While poking around in the basement of the library on a Saturday morning, he ran into a former
teacher who asked Raff whether he could help "beef up" a paper that was going to be published about
Ford Motor Company's early management decisions. Raff agreed to do some sleuthing in Detroit on the
topic once he came back from his honeymoon. "The paper was intriguing, but the evidence – all from
published sources – was thin. I figured if I crawled through enough attics, looking behind the cobwebs, I
might be able to find some about the day-to-day operations of the firm that would shed decisive light on
the speculations in the paper," he says.
Within two-and-a-half days of getting to Detroit, he
knew he had found his niche. "I found I just had a knack for
identifying evidence among historical flotsam and jetsam of
business that could shed light on systematic questions," he
recalls. "This sort of primary research on the operating problems
and decisions of ordinary business life has helped me
understand how firms, institutions within firms, and competitive
conditions between firms have evolved over time."
Today, Raff is known as Wharton's resident business historian,
holding a secondary appointment at Penn's History
Department and teaching Management 101, with a strong
historical component, to Wharton undergraduates. While
the history of the automotive industry is still a favorite topic
of his, Raff, 50, also devotes much of his research time to a
project studying the development of the distribution side of
the economy over the long 20th century. He laughs, recalling
how he stumbled into this area as a research topic. "It
was two days before Christmas in 1986 when I entered the
first book superstore in the suburbs of Washington, DC,
in urgent need of a last-minute present for my distressingly
well-read father. I realized in an instant that I hadn't ever
been in a store quite like this, one that could support such
remarkably broad merchandising and still turn a profit," he
says. Raff recalls thinking that something about how the
book business was run had quietly changed, and he decided
to dig into the topic. "I've found that bookstores are the
proverbial historian's grain of sand in which you can see the
world. I've been working on the details, in the small and in
the large, ever since."
For our Reunion retrospective, we've asked Raff for his
observations on business trends since the 1940s. What factors
have had the greatest impact on the economy and challenged
Wharton graduates? What industries were hot? And
how does the automotive industry – not to mention bookstores
– fit into all of this? His answers follow.
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