“Salt of the Earth:” ABF Freight and Entrepreneurial Processes in American Trucking

Applying the New Entrepreneurial History framework, this paper examines how ArcBest Corporation, an integrated logistics firm based in Fort Smith, Arkansas, became the last legacy less-than-load (LTL) carrier operating in the United States. It argues that the firm’s enduring viability is partially the product of an internal distributed agency among executives over a century that involved continual entrepreneurial processes: Envisioning and valuing opportunities informed by the multiplicative form of values, strategically reallocating and reconfiguring resources, and legitimizing novelty to stakeholders in response to profound market and regulatory shifts. These entrepreneurial processes, paired with the company’s commitments to a unionized labor force, informed executives’ strategic decisions that transformed the carrier from a regional hauler into a national, technologically sophisticated, integrated logistics provider. In applying the new entrepreneurial history to ArcBest, it considers how entrepreneurial opportunities are enacted within the context of a single firm over time.