Enterprise and Society - recent issues

Editor's Introduction

Lipartito, K. — 2008-01-27

The Accidental Business Historian

Hausman, W. J. — 2008-01-27

The Soul of the Service Economy: Wal-Mart and the Making of Christian Free Enterprise, 1929-1994

Moreton, B. — 2008-01-27

"The Soul of the Service Economy" explains the rise of Christian corporate globalism in the twentieth century, that always unfinished task of sanctifying capitalism and consumption under Christianity. As the biography of the Sunbelt service sector's "free enterprise" ideology, "The Soul of the Service Economy" is not an examination of Wal-Mart itself but an analysis of Wal-Mart's world—the interconnected commercial, religious, and educational institutions which both produced the world's largest company and then depended upon its patronage. This culture united Southwestern entrepreneurs, service providers, middle managers, students, missionaries, and even waged employees in an ethos of Christian free enterprise. On the basis of archival research in local and ephemeral sources, "The Soul of the Service Economy" uses the stories of people linked through Wal-Mart and its philanthropies to understand the shift to post-Fordist regimes in work, gender relations, education, and geography.

The Iron Horse Turns South: A History of Antebellum Southern Railroads

Marrs, A. W. — 2008-01-27

Making Tobacco Bright: Institutions, Information, and Industrialization in the Creation of an Agricultural Commodity, 1617-1937

Hahn, B. — 2008-01-27

The New England Cod Fishing Industry and Maritime Dimensions of the American Revolution

Magra, C. P. — 2008-01-27

Converting Academic Expertize into Industrial Innovation: University-based Research at Solvay and Gevaert, 1900-1970

Bertrams, K. — 2008-01-27

The question this article seeks to address relates to the strategies deployed by the chemical firms Solvay & Co. and Gevaert N.V.—two multinationals operating in a highly innovative sector and depending on Belgium's national system of innovation—by taking advantage from the research capabilities located in the surrounding academic landscape. The two companies adopted different methods to capture the knowledge produced in university laboratories, which corresponded best to the kind of research they wished to explore. It will be argued that, instead of conforming to any previous blueprint for linear innovation, industrialists and academics have sought to overcome their conflicting interests and cultural divergence by bringing out mutual opportunities that eventually led to unexpected forms of utilitarian cooperation. In the long run, informal linkages and social networks helped shaping the patterns of increasingly coordinated and elaborated procedures of innovation.

Bankers, Industrialists, and their Cliques: Elite Networks in Mexico and Brazil during Early Industrialization

Musacchio, A., Read, I. — 2008-01-27

The historiographies of Mexico and Brazil have implicitly stated that business networks were crucial for the initial industrialization of these two countries. Recently, differing visions on the importance of business networks have arisen. In the case of Mexico, the literature argues that entrepreneurs relied heavily on an informal institutional structure to obtain necessary resources and information. In contrast, the recent historiography of Brazil suggests that after 1890 the network of corporate relations became less important for entrepreneurs trying to obtain capital and concessions, once the institutions promoted financial markets and easy entry for new businesses. Did entrepreneurs in Brazil and Mexico organize their networks differently to deal with the different institutional settings? We examine whether in Mexico businessmen relied more on networks of interlocking boards of directors and other informal arrangements to do business than in Brazil. Our hypothesis is confirmed by three related results: (1) the total number of connections (i.e., the density of the network) was higher in Mexico than Brazil; (2) in Mexico, there was one dense core network, while in Brazil we find fairly dispersed clusters of corporate board interlocks; and most importantly, (3) politicians played a more important role in the Mexican network of corporate directors than their counterparts in Brazil. Interestingly, even though Brazil and Mexico relied on very different institutional structures, both countries had similar rates of growth between 1890 and 1913. However, the dense and exclusive Mexican network might have ended up increasing the social and political tensions that led to the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920).

Jealous Monopolists? British Banks and Responses to the Macmillan Gap during the 1930s

Scott, P., Newton, L. — 2008-01-27

By the end of World War I successive merger waves had produced an oligopolistic, tightly cartelized, English banking system, which was widely viewed as having restricted lending to small-medium-sized firms—the famous ‘Macmillan Gap’ in industrial finance. We explore the reasons behind the failure of market entry to bridge this gap. The clearing banks are shown to have acted as ‘jealous monopolists’, obstructing the activities of the Credit for Industry Ltd (CFI), the only significant firm established to breach the gap (rather than narrow its upper limit). By poaching many clients it had vetted and approved, the banks blocked CFI's growth, deterring further market entry, and thus, preserving their monopoly position.

Organizational Culture and Organizational Change: The Transformation of Savings Banks in Denmark, 1965-1990

Hansen, P. H. — 2008-01-27

In this article, I argue that organizations' historical narratives are a basic and important component of their culture and identity, and that these narratives can be resources as well as constraints. I combine a narrative approach with Joanne Martin's three perspective theory of organizational culture, and using the transformation of Danish savings banks as a case, I demonstrate how a narrative approach can provide a new and better understanding of organizational behaviour and change than mainstream economics and the abundant functionalist organizational culture literature. I demonstrate how, when change was called for by external pressures, the savings banks choice set was constrained by a shared narrative about their historical origins. This narrative, in turn, constituted the identity, image and organizational culture of savings banks and to a high degree restrained learning capabilities, created organizational inertia and delayed the adoption of a new strategy.

Paul Jobling. Man Appeal: Advertising, Modernism, and Menswear * Linda Welters and Patricia Cunningham, eds. Twentieth-Century American Fashion

Blaszczyk, R. L. — 2008-01-27

Jonathan A. Grant. Rulers, Guns, and Money: The Global Arms Trade in the Age of Imperialism

Carlisle, R. — 2008-01-27

David P. Billington and David P. Billington, Jr. Power, Speed, and Form: Engineers and the Making of the Twentieth Century

Hochfelder, D. — 2008-01-27

Warren Belasco. Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food

Miller, J. P. — 2008-01-27

Mary Frank Fox, Deborah G. Johnson, and Sue V. Rosser, eds. Women, Gender, and Technology

Cukier, W. — 2008-01-27

Gustav Schachter and Saul Engelbourg. Cultural Continuity in Advanced Economies: Britain and the US versus Continental Europe

Selva, S. — 2008-01-27

George Feifer. Breaking Open Japan: Commodore Perry, Lord Abe, and American Imperialism in 1853

Sylla, R. — 2008-01-27

Martin J. Iversen. GN Store Nord. A Company in Transition, 1939-1988

Buhrer, W. — 2008-01-27

Terry Gourvish. The Official History of Britain and the Channel Tunnel

Millward, R. — 2008-01-27

Graeme J. Milne. North-East England, 1850-1914: The Dynamics of a Maritime-Industrial Region

Salmon, M. S. — 2008-01-27

Deborah A. Symonds. Notorious Murders, Black Lanterns, & Moveable Goods: The Transformation of Edinburgh's Underworld in the Early Nineteenth Century

Jackson, L. A. — 2008-01-27

S. Max Edelson. Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina

Downey, T. — 2008-01-27

Daniel W. Hamilton. The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War

Noll, F. — 2008-01-27

Richard Abel. Americanizing the Movies and "Movie-Mad" Audiences, 1910-1914

Ross, J. A. — 2008-01-27

Ruth Crocker. Mrs. Russell Sage: Women's Activism and Philanthropy in Gilded Age and Progressive Era America

McCarthy, K. D. — 2008-01-27

John Patrick Diggins. Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and Making of History

Phillips-Fein, K. — 2008-01-27

A New Wave in the History of Corporate Governance

Herrigel, G. — 2007-10-13

The Expansion of the U.S. Stock Market, 1885 1930: Historical Facts and Theoretical Fashions

O'sullivan, M. — 2007-10-13

Based on an analysis of the leading trading markets for stock in the United States, I document the dramatic expansion that took place in the scale and scope of the country's stock market from the mid-1880s to the early 1930s. My analysis suggests that a broad-based stock market was a long way from being established even by the early teens. It took the impetus provided by World War I, plus the enthusiasm of the 1920s, to bring such a market into existence. I consider the capacity of today's fashionable theories, which link the development of stock markets to improvements in minority shareholder protection, to explain the growth of the U.S. stock market, and find that they cannot account for the historical patterns that I identify. However, I suggest that there are other arguments that are worthy of further consideration. First, there were factors, besides minority shareholder rights, that led to changes in the demand for corporate stocks during this period, especially an increase in the demand for stocks by institutional investors, notably banks and insurance companies, as well as the emergence of a retail market for stocks after World War I. Second, there were also important developments in the supply of corporate stocks after the War, including the issuance of stock to fund the expansion of young firms, but especially to facilitate mergers and acquisitions by established firms, which seem to have played an important role in driving the expansion of the U.S. stock market.

Business Groups and the Big Push: Meiji Japan's Mass Privatization and Subsequent Growth

Morck, R., Nakamura, M. — 2007-10-13

Paul Rosenstein-Rodan argues that economic development requires coordinated investment in many interdependent industries, and prescribes a flood of state-controlled investment across all sectors—a so-called big push. Widespread government failure defeated twentieth-century ‘big push’ schemes. But spillovers across firms and industries, and from public goods, hold-up problems, and capital market limitations are real, and justify coordinated growth across sectors if it can be done without government failures. Large, extensively diversified pyramidal business groups of listed firms dominate the histories of developed economies and the economies of developing economies. Arguing that such groups provided this coordination in prewar Japan after a state-run big push failed, we propose that pyramidal business groups are private-sector mechanisms for coordinating big push growth, and that competition between rival groups induces efficiency unattainable in a state-run big push. We postulate that a successful business-group led big push requires economic openness, basic public goods, rule of law, separation of the state from business, and a timely demise of business groups when the big push phase is complete. Where these criteria are not met, growth stalls and oligarchic families become too powerful to dislodge.

Does Civil Law Tradition and Universal Banking Crowd out Securities Markets? Pre-World War I Germany as Counter-Example

Fohlin, C. — 2007-10-13

This article poses three main questions: Does the civil-law tradition favor large, concentrated, universal banking systems? Does this sort of legal system work against the development of active securities markets? Do powerful universal banks (whether or not legal tradition lies at the root of bank power) replace securities markets or prevent them from operating efficiently? Based on evidence from Pre-World War I Germany, this paper argues that the answer to all three questions is "no."

Pioneering Modern Corporate Governance: A View from London in 1900

Hannah, L. — 2007-10-13

Around 1900 Britain was exceptionally suited to pioneering large scale enterprises because of the precocious development of its equity markets and London's experimentation with a more eclectic range of corporate governance techniques than the world's smaller and less cosmopolitan financial centers. Information dissemination, incentives, and reputation—developed by a serendipitous mix of legal compulsions and flexible voluntarism—set the scene for the growth of large, UK-based, national and international corporations in the twentieth century.

"The investment business is not with us as well developed or as well understood as it is in England."

W. H. Lyon, Capitalization (Boston, 1913), 207.

Putting the Corporation in its Place

Guinnane, T., Harris, R., Lamoreaux, N. R., Rosenthal, J.-L. — 2007-10-13

This article challenges the idea that the corporation is a globally superior form of business organization and that the Anglo-American common-law is more conducive to economic development than the code-based legal systems characteristic of continental Europe. Although the corporation had important advantages over the main alternative form of organization (partnerships), it also had disadvantages that limited its appeal to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). As a result, when businesses were provided with an intermediate choice, the private limited liability company (PLLC) that combined the advantages of legal personhood and joint stock with a flexible internal organizational structure, most chose not to organize as corporations. This article tracks the changes that occurred in the menu of business organizational forms in two common-law countries (the United Kingdom and the United States) and two countries governed by legal codes (France and Germany) and presents data showing the rapidity with which firms in each country responded to enabling legislation for PLLCs. We show that the PLLC was introduced first and most easily in a code country (Germany) and last and with the most difficulty in a common-law country (the United States). Late introduction was associated with prolonged use of the partnership form, suggesting that the disadvantages of corporations did indeed weigh heavily on SMEs.

Robert B. Ekelund Jr., Robert F. Hebert, and Robert D. Tollison. The Marketplace of Christianity

Roell, C. H. — 2007-10-13

John H. Lienhard. How Invention Begins: Echoes of Old Voices in the Rise of the Machines

Friedel, R. — 2007-10-13

Frederick H. Smith. Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History

McCusker, J. J. — 2007-10-13

Michael Redclift. Chewing Gum: The Fortunes of Taste

Rodriguez, V. J. — 2007-10-13

Robert Beachy, Beatrice Craig, and Alastair Owens, eds. Women, Business and Finance in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Rethinking Separate Spheres

Greenlees, J. — 2007-10-13

Samuel Tilman. Les Grands Banquiers Belges: (1830 1935) Portrait Collectif d'une elite

Cassis, Y. — 2007-10-13

Charles Loft. Government, the Railways and the Modernization of Britain: Beeching's Last Trains

Gourvish, T. — 2007-10-13

James Delbourgo. A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America

Neufeld, J. L. — 2007-10-13

Rowena Olegario. A Culture of Credit: Embedding Trust and Transparency in American Business

Moulton, L. — 2007-10-13

David M. Henkin. The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America

Gerber, D. A. — 2007-10-13

Mark H. Rose, Bruce E. Seely, and Paul F. Barrett. The Best Transportation System in the World: Railroads, Trucks, Airlines, and American Public Policy in the Twentieth Century

Grant, H. R. — 2007-10-13

Charles F. McGovern. Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890 1945

Matt, S. — 2007-10-13

Frank J. Byrne. Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820 1865

Green, J. R. — 2007-10-13

Robert E. Wright. The First Wall Street: Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, & The Birth of American Finance

Holt, D. — 2007-10-13

Elizabeth Alice Clement. Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900 1945

Kwolek-Folland, A. — 2007-10-13

Doing Business History in the Age of Global Climate Change

Meisner Rosen, C. — 2007-06-09

Extraction Not Creation: The History of Offshore Petroleum in the Gulf of Mexico

Priest, T. — 2007-06-09

Offshore development is one of the most important but least analyzed chapters in the history of the petroleum industry, and the Gulf of Mexico is the most explored, drilled, and developed offshore petroleum province in the world. This essay examines offshore oil and gas development in the Gulf of Mexico, highlighting the importance of access and how the unique geology and geography of the Gulf shaped both access and technology. Interactions between technology, capital, geology, and the political structure of access in the Gulf of Mexico generated a functionally and regionally complex extractive industry that repeatedly resolved the material and economic contradictions of expanding into deeper water. This was not achieved, however, simply through technological miracles or increased mastery over the environment, as industry experts and popular accounts often imply. The industry moved deeper only by more profoundly adapting to the environment, not by transcending its limits. This essay diverges from celebratory narratives about offshore development and from interpretations that emphasize the social construction of the environment. It challenges the storyline of market-driven technology and its miraculous ability to expand and create petroleum abundance in the Gulf.

Piercing the Corporate Veil: Cape Industries and Multinational Corporate Liability for a Toxic Hazard, 1950-2004

Tweedale, G., Flynn, L. — 2007-06-09

The ‘corporate veil’ refers to the separation of legal identity between parent firms and their subsidiaries, which gives the parent protection against the liabilities of its subsidiaries. Fearing that such liability protection would facilitate illicit activity, early twentieth century courts, especially in America, would sometimes ‘pierce’ the corporate veil. This article explores Adams v. Cape (1990), in which American plaintiffs attempted to persuade the English courts to lift the corporate veil and impose liability for industrial disease on Cape Industries, a leading U.K. asbestos manufacturer. This landmark case shows how corporate strategy can be closely intertwined with international corporate law and occupational health and safety issues. It also highlights how limited liability law and separate legal personality can result in significant injustice to claimants against multinational enterprises.

The Role of Pollution Regulation and Litigation in the Development of the U.S. Meatpacking Industry, 1865-1880

Meisner Rosen, C. — 2007-06-09

Business historians have treated the emergence of large, modern, vertically integrated meatpacking firms in the second half of the nineteenth century as the economically rational and inevitable product of the industry's search for ways to maximize profits through technological innovation, vertical integration, and the achievement of economies of scale and scope. This is only part of the story, however. Society's efforts to force the industry to abate its environmental pollution through government regulation and private lawsuits also stimulated and shaped these processes of modernization.

How did the Invisible Hand Handle Industrial Waste? By-product Development before the Modern Environmental Era

Desrochers, P. — 2007-06-09

A growing number of historians have turned their attention to the past behavior of industrialists toward their waste. Many have argued that the price system and competition typically fostered a short-term outlook that rewarded pollution rather than encouraging "loop-closing," a modern term that refers to the linkages between different industries in which the residual of one becomes the input of another. Others have identified precedents in this respect that are credited to Progressive Era reformers. Building on evidence that has, by and large, escaped the attention of the present generation of historical writers, this essay challenges both views by arguing that market institutions, which included both profit motive and property rights, actually resulted in the usage of industrial by-products. Although past industrial activities did create significant pollution problems, perhaps our ancestors should be given more credit than they generally are for the creativity and resourcefulness they displayed in profitably solving numerous environmental problems.

Negotiating Innovation in a Market Economy: Foodstuffs and Beverages Adulteration in Nineteenth-Century France

Stanziani, A. — 2007-06-09

In France, between 1870 and 1914, the business world was very concerned with the increase in "fraud" and "counterfeiting" in beverages and foodstuffs. This paper explores the origin and significance of this phenomenon. Three main products and markets are analyzed: wine, butter, and milk. On the basis of primary research, the paper contests the traditional interpretation according to which adulteration was linked to an increasing demand for food by low-income classes in highly imperfect markets. The paper adopts a radically different approach by questioning the way innovation is defined and perceived in a market economy: why is it common to speak of "innovation" for manufactures while evoking the term "adulteration" when food and drinks are concerned? The argument is that food and drink adulteration had its origins in technical progress (the introduction of chemistry into the food industry), urbanization, and the internationalization of the economy. As such, adulteration was a juridical category that was mobilized on occasions by economic lobbies in order to benefit from rents in the market, while continuously regulating innovation by agreement and compromise. One clear implication is that quality is not an objective, ahistorical category but that at different times different definitions of an item's quality compete with one another. It was only after the institutional and legal framework had been defined that social conventions and consumers' choices could take effect.

David A. Hanks and Anne Hoy. American Streamlined Design: The World of Tomorrow * Christina Cogdell. Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s

Porter, G. — 2007-06-09

Youssef Cassis and Ioanna Pepelasis Minoglou, eds. Entrepreneurship in Theory and History

Wadhwani, R. D. — 2007-06-09

John Brewer and Frank Trentmann, eds. Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges

Jacobson, L. — 2007-06-09

Richard Perren. Taste, Trade and Technology: The Development of the International Meat Industry since 1840

Horowitz, R. — 2007-06-09

Man-houng Lin. China Upside Down: Currency, Society, and Ideologies, 1808-1856

Rowe, W. T. — 2007-06-09

Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal and Zephyr Frank, eds. From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500-2000

McDonald, M. C. — 2007-06-09

Moises Arce. Market Reform in Society: Post-Crisis Politics and Economic Change in Authoritarian Peru

Jones, C. — 2007-06-09

Giorgio Riello. A Foot in the Past: Consumers, Producers and Footwear in the Long Eighteenth Century

Packer, N. — 2007-06-09

Martin Grosky and Sally Sheard, eds. Financing Medicine: The British Experience since 1750

Levine, D. — 2007-06-09

John F. Wilson and Andrew W. Thomson. The Making of Modern Management: British Management in Historical Perspective

Booth, A. — 2007-06-09

Marc J. de Vries, with contributions by F. Kees Boersma. 80 Years of Research at the Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium, 1914-1994

Lassman, T. C. — 2007-06-09

Hubert Kiesewetter. Industrielle Revolution in Deutschland: Regionen als Wachstumsmotoren

Schroter, H. G. — 2007-06-09

Hermann-J. Rupieper, Friederike Sattler and Georg Wagner-Kyora, eds. Die mitteldeutsche Chemieindustrie und ihre Arbeiter im 20. Jahrhundert

Fear, J. — 2007-06-09

Jeffrey J. Rossman. Worker Resistance under Stalin: Class and Revolution on the Shop Floor

Black, C. — 2007-06-09

Dimitry Anastakis. Auto Pact: Creating a Borderless North American Auto Industry, 1960-1971

Mordue, G. — 2007-06-09

Reed Hundt. In China's Shadow: The Crisis of American Entrepreneurship

King, B. — 2007-06-09

Nicholas Onuf and Peter Onuf. Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War

Friedman, G. — 2007-06-09

Edith Sparks. Capital Intentions: Female Proprietors in San Francisco, 1850-1920

Wallis, E. — 2007-06-09

Jason Scott Smith. Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933-1956

Hausman, W. J. — 2007-06-09

Elizabeth Fones-Wolf. Waves of Opposition: Labor and the Struggle for Democratic Radio

Stern, M. J. — 2007-06-09

Cynthia Lee Henthorn. From Submarines to Suburbs: Selling a Better America, 1939-1959

Miller, K. R. — 2007-06-09

Rachel Maines. Asbestos and Fire: Technological Tradeoffs and the Body at Risk

Tebeau, M. — 2007-06-09

Steven F. Wilson. Learning on the Job: When Business Takes on Public Schools

Jacoby, D. — 2007-06-09

Denise von Herrmann, ed.. Resorting to Casinos: The Mississippi Gambling Industry

Patton, R. L. — 2007-06-09

Fred Turner. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism

Bartholomew, J. P. — 2007-06-09