Reviewing "The Business of Time" by Pierre-Yves Donze

Pierre-Yves Donze. 2022.  The Business of Time: A Global History of the Watch Industry. Manchester University Press. 216 pages. $85 USD (Hardcover).

Am I actually wearing a Swiss time piece as I sit down to review this history of the global watch industry?  Pierre-Yves Donze, a professor of Business at Osaka University, would like to argue that I am not. And it doesn't really matter what brand it is.

Terms like “Switzerland Made” conjure up romantic memories of a time when industries were subject to state led industrial policies. The creation of products, from their design, manufacture, financing, labor relations and intellectual property, was carefully managed in places in like Switzerland and Japan. This really did lead to some products having a distinct “national character.”  As Donze adroitly illustrates in this single volume history of the watch industry, that was not always the case. The “nationalization” of different watch industries was the product of economic, political, and technical concerns that existed at specific points in the time (basically the 1880s through the 1980s).  

In the current era of the globalized flow of investment capital, distributed production of specialized components and ever more complex forms of corporate ownership and distribution, it is impossible to talk about a purely Swiss, German, Japanese or even Chinese watch.  While we speak colloquially in these terms, they don’t accurately reflect the world that we live in.  And if you really want to understand the current watch industry, you first have to know how we got here.

That was the task that Donze set for himself in 2020 when this work was originally published in French. We are fortunate that Manchester University Press released a new English language edition of the book in 2022.  In another part of my life I am an academic who works with various scholarly and commercial presses and I feel like this was the perfect project for this publisher.  I doubt anyone was expecting a fairly expensive academic book on the watch industry to sell a huge number of copies. Yet it is a beautifully constructed, tightly focused, single industry case study that has important implications for various questions in business history.  And given the explosion of the watch industry in recent years, and the number of people who have become interested in it from an explicitly financial perspective, the timing of this book’s release could not have been better.

After a brief introduction in which the author lays out his theoretical commitments and thoughts on the perceived shortcomings of previous literature, this volume proceeds in a series of seven chronologically organized chapters.  In each of these Donze presents case-study style discussions of what was happening in the various nationally defined watch industries of the period.  Readers are given a high-level, but comprehensive, overview of developments in Switzerland, the USA, France and Germany.  Later in the study Japan, the Soviet Union/Russia and China join the discussion as their own national industries begin to develop. 

Each of these discussions takes the firm as its basic unit of analysis.  Thus we are getting the history of an industry as it may have appeared from the perspective of Omega, Hamilton or Seiko.  Looking at this work’s bibliography, it is clear that the author was working primarily from French sources, and he felt that this perspective was missing from most of the literature on business history. Whether this is true or not is another question (and one that I disagree with him on), but it is also hard to think of another vantage point that would have done a better job.

Still, that does not mean that the author’s perspective was perfect.  Taking the state and the firm as the central units of analysis throughout this work proved to be something of procrustean bed.  The model works fine in the middle of the story, but the extremities are an issue.

In the earliest periods one simply had watch makers who lived in France or Switzerland rather than truly distinct and autonomous national industries.  Those policies arose in responses to specific challenges at a later point in time. They were then rapidly abandoned during the 1980s and 1990s as global financial markets were increasingly liberalized.  Of course, Donze’s entire point was to demonstrate how the sorts of labels that dominate our imagination (Swiss made vs. Chinese, “in-house” vs. 3rd party manufacturing) came to be exercises in marketing or reinvention rather than a description of how watches (or anything else) are actually produced, financed and designed in the modern world.

The book itself is nicely produced for an academic volume.  It has a number of black and white illustrations, and is full of useful charts and figures.  It presupposes that its readers will have a background in economics or business, and that there is no need to describe what “foreign direct investment” is, or how companies used it to skirt protectionist trade policies in the 1960s.  It is not dry and it manages to keep the jargon to a minimum. But this is also an academic work written for that type of environment. 

It is never possible to do everything in a single volume.  And in this case I think a couple of critical perspectives have been underrepresented.  By focusing on the watch making firms as the central actors we lose perspective on other players in these industries.  As I read this I constantly found myself wanting to hear more about the banks who made critical decisions as to what they would finance, or not finance, at different points in time.  This had a huge impact on the development of Donze’s narrative, and yet it falls largely outside of this theoretical framework.

Likewise, the perspective of consumers in largely missing from this text.  We are told at certain points in time consumers might prefer a wrist watch to a pocket watch.  And these shifts in taste have not been without consequence. Indeed, they have determined the winners and losers of this story.  And so it’s something of an issue that the evolving taste of global consumers for Swiss or Japanese time pieces at different points in history was never explored. 

At the most basic level markets are made up of buyers and sellers.  Yet this is a history of the watch market that resolutely ignores the fact that someone is buying these pieces for unspecified and constantly shifting reason.  Instead Donze focuses mostly on the financial considerations of the firms doing the selling. Just as was the case with the finance industry, one cannot help but think that important, even critical, parts of this story remain to be told.

Still, Donze accomplishes what he sets out to do.  Drawing on firm level histories he shows us how wrist watches outgrew their national and parochial roots to become a truly global industry.  Any watch lover will find many points of interest in this volume.  While not the last word on the subject I hope that the translation of his work into English sparks further debate and research among those interested in this fascinating intersection of business history, fashion, design and finance.