...Where does the belief come from that railroads got into trouble "because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business"? It can be traced directly to an article entitled "Marketing Myopia" written by Theodore Levitt in 1960 in The Harvard Business Review. It was reprinted in the same journal in 1975, as a "classic," with a note that the publisher had sold more than 265,000 reprints of it. Levitt, who was a lecturer in business administration at Harvard at the time of the article's original publication, just throws out this observation on railroads as though it were self-evident. He provides no footnotes, no documentation, and no sources for it.
...Levitt simplistically asserts that railroads got into trouble because they did not fill transportation needs themselves because of "marketing myopia," he says and "not because the need was filled by others (cars, trucks, airplanes, even telephones)." This statement is sheer nonsense. Levitt's belief that railroads got into trouble "because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business" is both unsupported by its author himself and directly contradicted by a host of other, more scholarly analyses of railroad history. And yet the nonsense of Levitt's analysis is routinely held up as gospel truth in the field of information science.
...Levitt was, therefore, claiming to have evidence for his generalization that he in fact did not have. And the field of information science, in parroting Levitt's nonsense, is also thereby effectively claiming to have real historical evidence that it does not have in support of a further dubious proposition about libraries. In other words, bad scholarship and bogus claims to evidence are being used uncritically in support of a highly questionable claim. This is a recipe for disaster.