Read the text and answer the PTE Reading Multiple-Choice question by selecting all the correct responses. You will need to select more than one response.
Understanding the development of business history as a discipline meriting its own aims, theories and methods is often understood as a transition from dominating themes of ‘company biography’, toward more analytical ‘comparative’ approaches. This ‘comparative’ trend enabled practitioners to underline their work with ‘generalist’ potential. Questions of comparative business performance have become a staple, featuring into the wider economic histories of nations, regions, and communities.
For many, this transition was first achieved by Alfred D. Chandler. Chandler’s successors as Isidor Straus Professor of Business History at Harvard Business School continued to emphasize the importance of comparative research and course development. In 1995 Thomas K. McCraw published Creating Modern Capitalism (Cambridge, MA 1995). This book compared the business histories of Britain, Germany, Japan, and the United States since the Industrial Revolution, and was used as the text of a new year MBA course at Harvard Business School.
Geoffrey Jones, who was McCraw’s successor as Isidor Straus Professor of Business History, also pursued a comparative research agenda. He published a comparative study of the history of globalization called Multinationals and Global Capitalism (Oxford, 2005). In 2010, Jones also published a comparative history of the global beauty industry entitled Beauty Imagined:
A History of the Global Beauty Industry (Oxford, 2010). More recently, Jones and the Business History Initiative at the Harvard Business School has sought to facilitate research and teaching on African, Asian and Latin American business history in a project called Creating Emerging Markets, which includes interviews with long-time leaders of firms and NGOs in those regions.
A trend in recent years has been to compare the business histories of individual countries. Geoffrey Jones (academic) and Andrea Lluch have published a comparative study of the historical impact of globalization on Argentina and Chile. In 2011 Jones and his co-editor Walter A. Friedman published an editorial in Business History Review which identified comparative research as essential for the future of business history as a discipline.
Answer:
Which of the following has been used as a basis for comparison?
A company biographies
B emerging markets
C countries
D societies
E provinces
Answer:
C countries
D societies
E provinces
Answer Explanation:
[…Questions of comparative business performance have become a staple, featuring into the wider economic histories of nations, regions, and communities…]
