This article examines some of the institutional conditions that facilitated the development of equity markets in Brazil. A critical factor was the addition to corporate bylaws of protections for investors, which enabled relatively large corporations in Brazil to attract investors in large numbers. By availing themselves of this strategy, the firms generated a relatively low concentration of ownership before 1910. Archival evidence, such as company statutes and shareholder lists, reveals that the addition of voting rights to their bylaws, particularly maximum-vote provisions and graduated voting scales (which stipulated that less-than-proportional votes increase in parallel with shareholdings), allowed many Brazilian corporations to balance the relative voting power of their small and large investors. In companies that made such arrangements, the concentration of ownership and control was sharply lower than in the average company. Judging by the Brazilian companies examined for this article, it also appears that the concentration of control was significantly lower before 1910 than it is today.

In this article, we provide a synthesizing framework that we call the “dynamic trajectories” framework to study the evolution of multinational enterprises (MNEs) in host countries over time. We argue that a change in the policy environment in a host country presents an MNE with two sets of interrelated decisions. First, the MNE has to decide whether to enter, exit, or stay in the host country at the onset of each policy epoch; second, conditional on the first choice, it has to decide on its local responsiveness strategy at the onset of each policy epoch. India, which experienced two policy shocks—shutting down to MNEs in 1970 and then opening up again in 1991—offers an interesting laboratory to explore the “dynamic trajectories” perspective. We collect and analyze a unique dataset of all entry and exit events for Fortune 50 and FTSE 50 firms (as of 1991) in India in the period from 1858 to 2013 and, additionally, we document detailed case studies of four MNEs (that arguably represent outliers in our sample).

The introduction of container shipping in the late 1950s and early 1960s has received little attention from historians, but it represents a major technological advance with significant economic consequences. By dramatically lowering the cost of freight handling, the container reduced the need for factories to be near suppliers and markets and opened the way for manufacturing to move out of urban centers, first domestically and then abroad. This impact was particularly intense in New York City, where the container revolution began. Containerization had a devastating impact on New York City's economy, and was a major contributor to the collapse of its industrial base between 1967 and 1975.

One of the most difficult problems United States policymakers faced during the Marshall Plan years was balancing the national interest in European recovery with the private interests of U.S. companies with European markets. In this article, Dr. Painter describes how policymakers grappled with the often conflicting interests of the U.S. oil industry and war-ravaged Western Europe. In so doing, he provides a case study of the complex relationship of public policy and private power.

Edward L. Bernays was a pioneer in the development of public relations in modern America. For more than half a century he has advised a wide range of institutions, including government, corporations, trade associations, and many private organizations. In this memoir he gives his views of the proper role, methods, and principles of public relations and recalls some of his early experiences with businessmen and other clients.

The foreign economic policy of the United States in the aftermath of World War I was not isolationist, but selectively interventionist. With a group of very able American businessmen-diplomats in the lead, the nation pressured the French to accept the Dawes Plan, which, it was hoped, would solve the reparations problem, encourage healthy economic recovery and growth (which would embrace large sales of American capital goods to Germany), and ensure peaceful contentment in two nations that were more bitter enemies than ever. But, Professor Costigliola shows, a plan to rebuild Germany that was half private business and half foreign policy, and that was manipulated to both ends, could not succeed in the marketplace, where it had to live or die.

In half a century PolyGram expanded from two small Dutch and German companies to become the world's largest music multinational. It did so in the midst of a fast-changing business environment, in which relatively homogenous products and tastes gave way to differentiated outputs for segmented markets. Making use of strengths inherited from its owners Philips and Siemens, PolyGram integrated a continuous series of foreign acquisitions into one international organization while maintaining the creative identities and independence of the firms it acquired. To control and manage the resulting idiosyncratic configuration, it developed the federated form, a decentralized organizational structure that fit the shifting environment. PolyGram became what can be defined as a rightsbased multinational, and its structure showed similarities to multinationals in other rights-based industries.

Shareholders in corporations face two very different types of governance problems: expropriation by controlling shareholders or managers; and expropriation by greedy rulers or, more generally, by the state. The problem is that the more successful investors are in protecting their capital from the grabbing hand of the state, the less they are able to call upon the state to protect it from the grabbing hand of corporate insiders. Conversely, the more investors are able to call upon government to restrain insiders, the more they are vulnerable to expropriation by the state. Although the terms of this tradeoff have changed over time as modern democratic polities replaced absolutist monarchies, both types of threats are still very much with us.

In this article Dr. Jones traces the history of the Gramophone Company—an early British multinational—between 1898 and 1931. Drawing on hitherto untapped archival sources, he provides a detailed narrative of the firm's history while at the same time placing it within the context of British multinational expansion as a whole. Of particular interest is his discussion of the firm's “special relationship” with the American-based Victor Company—a relationship that demonstrates how restrictive international agreements could affect the dynamics of multinational growth.

During the 1950's, Fiat, one of Italy's most important manufacturing companies, grew at enormous speed. Two factors helped the car maker achieve this impressive performance: For one, a set of import barriers virtually denied foreign producers access to the Italian market until the founding of the European Economic Community (EEC). Moreover, Fiat managed to remain at the cutting edge of car manufacturing technology, enabling it to expand production, foreign sales and profits. Combining a reliance on trade barriers with technological change as well as an aggressive export strategy, Vittorio Valletta, Fiat's post-World War II general manager, bet on serving the more dynamic foreign markets from modern plants built with the help of Marshall Plan funds. From this basis he later sold into a growing domestic market, where Fiat was without serious competition.

In the first half of the twentieth century, most firms sought to reduce emissions, effluents, and other pollution-causing discharges only when it resulted in the recovery of valuable material or decreased the amount of money spent on damage and nuisance suits. However, this did not necessarily mean that engineers and technical managers saw themselves—or the firms that employed them—as polluters. Rather, they assumed that as they made industrial operations more efficient, they would also address pollution concerns. This article illustrates the initial success and ultimate failure of this efficiency-based ethic of self-regulation by examining efforts to eliminate the pollution associated with the disposal of oil field brines. Until the 1950s, it argues, efforts to address problems associated with the disposal of oil field brines reinforced the notion that economic incentives to increase the efficiency of industrial operations overlapped with efforts to fight pollution. However, by the late 1950s, economic incentives proved incapable of encouraging further reductions in brine contamination. Yet pollution concerns remained. Since then, the efficiency-based ethic of self-regulation has gradually been replaced by an ethic that most people—and most firms—now treat as legitimate: reaching consensus on environmental objectives and then regulating pollution-causing discharges to meet those objectives.

Since 1917, tax filers in the United States who itemize tax deductions have been able to subtract gifts to eligible charities from their taxable income. The deduction is especially valuable to successful entrepreneurs who donate corporate stock. Such philanthropy was seen as a close substitute for government spending until after the mid-twentieth century. In the 1950s and 1960s, high tax rates catalyzed the formation of large foundations from industrial fortunes and precipitated a national debate about the legitimacy of such giving. The midcentury debate preceded increased oversight of charities and foundations and a shift in the way U.S. lawmakers regarded the contribution deduction—from a subsidy by philanthropists of public goods government would otherwise provide to an implicit public cost.

This article looks at the evolution of the British chocolate industry from the 1860s to the 1960s, a period during which it was dominated by Quaker businesses: Cadbury, Rowntree, and their predecessor, Fry. It provides evidence of early forms of fair trade by these Quaker businesses, showing that, before the fair trade movement took off in the 1970s, they contributed to social change and to improvement in living standards and long-term sustainable economic growth in developing countries. This article argues that when the mechanisms for enforcing food standards were weak and certification bodies did not exist, the Religious Society of Friends acted as an indirect independent endorser, reinforcing the imagery and reputation of the Quaker-owned brands and associating them both with purity and quality and with honest and fair trading.

This paper updates an earlier article published in Business History Review that concluded that by the second half of the 1990s, there had been a profusion of new, purportedly practical ideas about strategy, many of which embodied some explicit dynamics. This update provides several indications of a drop-off since then in the rate of development of new ideas about strategy but also a continued focus, in the new ideas that are being developed, on dynamics. And since our stock of dynamic frameworks has, based on one enumeration, more than doubled in the last fifteen to twenty years, updating expands both the need and the empirical basis for some generalizations about the types of dynamic strategy frameworks—and strategy frameworks in general—that managers are likely to find helpful versus those that they are not.

There is general consensus that tax havens have long played a major role in the evolution of the capitalist system on a global scale. There is also no doubt that Switzerland is one of the first, if not the first, tax haven to have emerged, as well as one of the most important in the world. However, knowledge and understanding of the history, particularly the distant past, of tax havens remains lacking, despite the considerable volume of literature devoted to them. Therefore, this article attempts to make two innovative contributions. The first is an attempt to explain the emergence of the Swiss tax haven, by analyzing the processes and factors whose intertwining led to its emergence. It thus improves the general understanding of the genesis of tax havens at an international level. The second contribution is to show that already on the eve of World War I, the Swiss Confederation possessed the necessary characteristics for a tax haven.

I remember the first time I read Alfred Chandler's Strategy and Structure as a graduate student in the mid-1970s. I was taking a class on the sociology of organizations and finding that many of the assigned books and articles did not interest me. Corporations are clearly one of the dominant forces in our society, yet none of what I read seemed to capture what they do and how they do it. Reading the first eighteen pages of Strategy and Structure was like having the scales fall from my eyes. Here was a historical view of the largest corporations that placed them in their context and, most important, showed that real people with real purposes undertook to make these organizations work. Chandler's book opened the black box of the large modern corporation for me. Chandler realized that what was interesting about corporations was not that they made profits, but how they did so. In a single chapter, Chandler articulated much that I had found lacking in organizational theory.

For almost half a century, Alfred D. Chandler Jr. has enjoyed an enviable reputation as the most influential business historian in the world. Chandlerian business history is a mainstay of the “new” institutionalism that John Higham discerned over four decades ago in a justly admired survey of American historical writing; in addition, it has long been a cornerstone of the “organizational synthesis” that Louis Galambos championed in three widely discussed essays. Even in history departments that have shifted their primary focus from politics and economics to society and culture, Chandler remains required reading.

In the mid-1860's, Singer became the first American firm to produce and market extensively in Europe. Without using government aid, the company built an aggressive and effective organization which became a model for other overseas operations. Professor Davies traces Singer's foreign undertakings from their modest beginnings in 1854 to acknowledged dominance of the industry in 1889.

Many people today consider curbside recycling the quintessential model of eco-stewardship, yet this waste-management system in the United States was in many ways a pollutersponsored initiative that allowed corporations to expand their productive capacity without fixing fundamental flaws in their packaging technology. For the soft-drink, brewing, and canning industries, the promise of recycling became a powerful weapon for combating mandatory deposit bills and other source-reduction measures in the 1970s and 1980s. In examining the nexus of business, envirotech, and political history, this article explores how American corporations enrolled government agencies to construct resource reclamation systems in the United States that became models for waste management programs in municipalities around the world.

We invited John Quelch and Katherine Jocz, authors of Greater Good: How Good Marketing Makes for Better Democracy (2008), to discuss some of the articles they found most interesting and important from the past half-century of marketing journals.