Enterprise and Society - Advance Access

Lichtenstein, Nelson, ed. Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First Century Capitalism

Bailey, A. R. — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 06:21:04 PST

Comments on Comments, or the Richness of Dialogue

Godelier, E. — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:10:57 PST

Adam C. Stanley. Modernizing Tradition. Gender and Consumerism in Interwar France and Germany

Poulliard, V. — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:10:56 PST

Wim Klooster. Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History

Coates, T. J. — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 23:59:53 PDT

Dan Immergluck. Foreclosed: High-Risk Lending, Deregulation, and the Undermining of America's Mortgage Market

Quigley, J. M. — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 23:59:53 PDT

Tonio Andrade. How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century

Chang, W. — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 23:59:53 PDT

Dan Hagedorn. Conquistadors of the Sky. A History of Aviation in Latin America

Dierikx, M. — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 23:59:52 PDT

Ruth Wallis Herndon and John E. Murray, eds. Children Bound to Labor: The Pauper Apprentice System in Early America

Wood, M. E. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 08:21:56 PDT

United States Bank Rescue Politics, 2008-2009: A Business Historian's View

Rose, M. H. — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:00:48 PDT

First I describe my background in American historical scholarship. Thereafter, I assess the efforts of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama and their senior advisors to stabilize American financial institutions during the period 2008–2009. My fundamental contention is that state actors such as Bush and Obama structured financial industries and markets. Despite the ubiquitous presence of these state actors, however, American business and political leaders maintained the fiction that state and business were, and properly ought to remain, separate entities. In Part III, I return to my scholarly background and to a proposed scaffolding for historical scholarship focused on the political economy of U.S. financial institutions since 1970.

History, a Useful "Science" for Management? From Polemics to Controversies

Godelier, E. — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 07:48:44 PDT

The aim of this essay is to analyze the way management sciences and practices use history or at least the kind of research which they define as history. This reflection will lead to discussing the possibility and the opportunity that an historical approach might have in creating management knowledge, especially "workable" know-how. A quick look at present-day exchanges between the two communities could lead us to the conclusion that there were tensions in the past that have not entirely evaporated. Might they explain the relative modesty of the dialogue, at least in France?

Visual Analytics of an Eighteenth-Century Business Network

Haggerty, J., Haggerty, S. — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 06:33:23 PDT

Cameron McNeil, ed. Chocolate Sin Mesoamerica: A Cultural History of Cacao. Maya Studies Series, edited by Diane Z. Chase and Arlen F. Chase

Mahony, M. A. — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 11:53:59 PDT

Alison C. Kay. The Foundations of Female Entrepreneurship: Enterprise, Home, and Household in London, 1800-1870.

Miler, J. K. — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 09:40:13 PDT

James T. Wall. Wall Street and the Fruited Plain: Money, Expansion and Politics in the Gilded Age

Buder, S. — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 09:40:12 PDT

Elizabeth B. Jones. Gender and Rural Modernity: Farm Women and the Politics of Labor in Germany, 1871-1933

Stibbe, M. — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 09:40:12 PDT

Alvin Rabushka. Taxation in Colonial America

Ashworth, W. J. — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 04:27:36 PDT

Your Job Is Your Credit: Creating a Market for Loans to Salaried Employees in New York City, 1885-1920

Easterly, M. — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 05:46:17 PDT

Stanley Buder. Capitalizing on Change: A Social History of American Business

Wadhwani, R. D. — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 22:47:13 PDT

Economic Information on International Markets: French Strategies in the Italian Mirror (Nineteenth-Early Twentieth Centuries)

Stanziani, A. — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 22:21:23 PDT

During 1870–1914, business actors were concerned about the increasing uncertainty and occasional cheating in commercial relationships. In such situations, economic actors seek to improve the information they have, so as to benefit from strong comparative advantages over their competitors. This essay analyzes the acquisition and circulation of information and the actors and rules involved between 1870 and 1914, through a comparative approach (France and Italy). It considers individual trading firms, professional associations, information intermediating agencies, and state offices. We argue that these agencies (and therefore markets and institutions) acted much less as rivals than as complements in this era. Indeed, product information is different from information on the reputation of economic actors, the latter generating further distinctions between reputation for payment, respect of deadlines, and fidelity to the terms and objects of the contract. In turn, such kinds of situated micro-information differ from general statistics on market evolution and prices. We show that most economic actors were much more interested in the former (specifics) than in the latter kinds of information. To demonstrate this point, we compare the way traders, their associations, and private and state agencies intervened in the gathering, circulation, and interpretation of economic information in two countries, Italy and France, between 1870 and 1914. We argue that their opposite outcomes were not simply the result of different "mentalities" or attitudes to risk (as exogenously given), but rather can be traced to the different institutional settings and economic segmentation of the market for information in these two countries. In fact, unlike the Italian government, French ministries refused to provide their traders with micro-information on potential overseas correspondents and product characteristics. That is to say, "attitude to risk" and "animal spirits" are not exogenous and cannot be studied outside a given historical and institutional context.

Gabrielle Esperdy. Modernizing Main Street: Architecture and Consumer Culture in the New Deal

Stanger, H. R. — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 01:40:38 PDT

Susan Ingalls Lewis. Unexceptional Women: Female Proprietors in Mid-Nineteenth Century Albany, New York, 1830-1885

Baskerville, P. — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 01:40:38 PDT

Sarah A. Gordon. "Make It Yourself": Home Sewing, Gender, and Culture, 1890-1930

Boris, E. — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 01:40:37 PDT

Pharmaceutical Networks: The Political Economy of Drug Development in the United States, 1945-1980

Tobbell, D. A. — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 23:26:38 PDT

"Industrial Legislatures": Consensus Standardization in the Second and Third Industrial Revolutions

Russell, A. L. — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 21:24:18 PDT

My dissertation is a study of standardization in four communications networks: AT&T's monopoly telephone network, the Internet, digital cellular telephone networks, and the World Wide Web. A history of these networks that highlights standardization shows how engineers in industry committees replaced managers in monopoly hierarchies as the stewards of standards for communication networks. By the end of the twentieth century, the new networks—and the new institutions devised to sustain the standardization process—formed the technological and ideological infrastructure of the Third Industrial Revolution.

John Majewski. Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation

Wright, G. — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 05:49:20 PDT

English Commercial Banks and Organizational Inertia: The Financing of SMEs, 1944-1960

Baker, M., Collins, M. — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 21:24:18 PDT

Parading as Millionaires: Montana Bankers and the Panic of 1893

Petrik, P. — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 05:49:19 PDT

History, a Useful "Science" for Management? A Response

Popp, A. — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 05:29:20 PDT

In response to Eric Godelier's call for a partnership between business history and the management sciences I argue for a vision of business history as history. Whilst acknowledging the institutional and intellectual pressures to which the discipline is subject I argue such a turn is important for the continued health of the field. Such a turn will, however, also require engaging with fundamental questions of epsitemology.

Does History Matter in Business?

Tiffany, P. — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 05:29:19 PDT

In 2008 Professor Eric Godelier published a provocative essay in which he concluded that a positive dialogue between business historians and both management scientists and business management practitioners was possible. While the divide between these camps was not trivial, he nevertheless wrote that current events and scholarship was bringing them together, at least as he could observe these trends in the context of emerging French scholarship. In this current review, my own conclusion is the opposite. Management scholarship, in fact, continues to move away from the "soft" approach of the historian and more towards the "rigorous" and quantitatively biased methodology of the management sciences. My essay reviews the background of this development in terms of American business practice and scholarship, as it seeks to demonstrate how the evolution of management training in the United States brought us to the current state of affairs where "hard" drives out soft in almost every encounter. However, while I conclude that this is indeed the current reality, I do not imply any endorsement of this outcome. Rather, I end with a hope that some forms of rapprochement might be possible–yet with an acknowledgement that we will have no definitive answers to this question anytime soon.

Cooperative Networks in the Italian Economy

Menzani, T., Zamagni, V. — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 07:35:50 PDT

This paper analyzes cooperative enterprises’ networks in the Italian economy, in accordance with recent economic theory, to throw light on the causes of their success of in the last 30 years. We reference the vast literature about business networks to identify some interpretative lines that can be transferred to the cooperative world. On this basis, a typology of the Italian cooperative networks is offered, in order to evaluate the competitive advantages of each type of net, their governance methods, their evolution, and their impact on the recent flourishing of Italian cooperatives. Our conclusion is that the use of networks by co-ops has been very intensive and can still be strengthened, if Italian co-op umbrella organizations will merge. Building large cooperative corporations was often the result of networking, as was the creation of joint stock companies owned by cooperatives.

The Use and Abuse of History as a Management Tool: Comments on Eric Godelier's View of the French Connection1

Kobrak, C. — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 08:19:00 PDT

This short essay elaborates on two points raised by Eric Godelier's article about resolving divisions between management science and business history in France. It outlines the segmentation of French higher education, especially in the area of business studies, and discusses some long-standing debates over legitimizing historical studies.

The Birth of the North American Home Improvement Store, 1905-1929

Harris, R. — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 09:26:38 PDT

The idea, and to a lesser extent the reality, of the modern home improvement store was born in the first quarter of the twentieth century. After 1905 the manufacturers of mail-order kit houses soon grew to threaten the local monopoly of retail building suppliers. The most important of these suppliers were the lumber merchants who provided most of the materials and credit used by building contractors. At first dealers responded by mounting boycotts and by supporting trade-at-home campaigns, but these were successfully challenged in court. A survey of trade journals shows that after 1914 dealers began to act more constructively. Encouraged by the trade press, and helped by state and national associations, by the 1920s they were advertising more effectively and offering a widening range of goods and services to consumers, including house plans. Because many new customers were women, dealers had to hire more courteous staff, clean up their yards, mount better displays, build showrooms and, in time, relocate to more salubrious and heavily-trafficked parts of town. The emergence of the home improvement store is a significant chapter in the history of urban housing, and especially the marketing of housing services, in the twentieth century.

The Ups and Downs of Family Life: Det Norske Nitridaktieselskap, 1912-1976

Storli, E., Bregaint, D. — Thu, 07 May 2009 15:59:22 PDT

The current literature on international joint ventures pays considerable attention to why joint ventures are established or why they are dissolved, but we lack studies that give insight into their dynamic development. The aim of this article is to investigate the evolution of an international joint venture over time. We confront some of the theoretical insights developed during the last decades with the dramatic history of the aluminum producer Det Norske Nitridaktieselskap (DNN). The company was established shortly before World War I and was finally disbanded over seventy years later. For most of this time, DNN was an international joint venture with shifting ownership configurations. This gives us the possibility not only to discuss the motivation for why the company was established or why it was dissolved, but also to study the mid-life of the company. What was DNN's role within the general corporate strategies of the owners? Did this role change over time?

Editor's Introduction

Scranton, P. — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:01:37 PDT