Joe Lane
Joe Lane is a business historian and Lecturer in Strategy at Henley Business School, University of Reading. His work examines the organization and behavior of firms and industrial clusters, with a particular focus on innovation and knowledge. His current project surveys historical clusters at the firm level to examine their evolution over time. It also assesses how entrepreneurs responded to shocks and opportunities for knowledge creation and dissemination during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Address: London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE
Address: London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE
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PhD Thesis by Joe Lane
As a study of a craft-based, highly skilled industry without a legacy of formal institutions such as guilds to govern and protect access to knowledge, this thesis also offers substantial empirical and historiographical contributions to the study of knowledge and innovation during the period of the Industrial Revolution. It presents a new database of pottery patents alongside a variety of qualitative evidence such as trade literature, exhibition catalogues, advertisements and sales catalogues. Quantitative and qualitative analysis reveals the low propensity to patent in the North Staffordshire pottery industry, and provides a new typology of knowledge used in the industry. It argues that the types of knowledge being created and disseminated influenced the behaviour of producers substantially, and this typology of knowledge is far more complex than those established tacit/explicit divisions favoured in historical study and the social sciences more broadly.
The findings of this thesis allow us to answer numerous outstanding questions concerning the development of the North Staffordshire Potteries during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When brought together in such a way, the complementary strands of research and findings presented offer a coherent narrative of an extremely complex and dynamic cluster of production that both challenges and confirms traditional historiographical tradition concerning industrial districts.