Using the record books of M'Connel and Kennedy, a leading cotton-spinning firm in Manchester, this article traces the development of managerial strategies to elicit effort from workers during the Industrial Revolution. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the firm had difficulty in extracting effort from its workers, who were unwilling to increase output without capturing some of the gains through wage adjustments. Since spinners controlled the work organization, M'Connel and Kennedy had to accommodate workers' demands for stable piece rates, which were codified in the Manchester list of prices of 1829.

This study analyzes the evolution of organizational capabilities for assessing market growth and capital budgeting in the traffic management operations of the Bell System from 1900 to 1929. The initial impetus for developing the complex procedures that were integrated into this process was the need to enhance firm competitiveness, particularly in response to the threats to its survival during the financial panic of 1907. The resultant new organizational capabilities, however, also eventually proved vital in successfully guiding the firm's planning for system automation and in demonstrating compliance with regulatory mandates for efficient and economical service. Moreover, this study explains how probability theory became a key element in this managerial transition, thus, providing the Bell System with a powerful analytical tool useful for confronting uncertainty in budgeting and business planning.

The growth of the United States' economic influence in twentieth-century Canada was intimately related to the continuation of the “National Policy” of protectionist tariffs. Professor Scheinberg argues that Canadians initially welcomed America's consciously expansionist thrust, and that they eventually became entangled in the problems of seeking rapid economic growth along with economic independence from both the older imperialism of Great Britain and the newer variety represented by the United States.

In the years before World War II, New Zealand department stores became increasingly influenced by American ideas about salesmanship. This involved a shift away from British precepts about retailing, which discouraged initiative by sales-people and emphasized service. Stores that adopted American ideas were trying to become more competitive and began to appeal to working- and middle-class consumers. They imported the concept of “suggestion selling” and the idea of pushing complementary goods. New Zealand merchants modified American methods by relying on the use of manuals and bulletins to train salespeople and, unlike American stores, did not introduce commission payment schemes.

From 1900 through the 1920s, Singer put in place its proven selling system in Japan, despite making remarkably little adjustment to local conditions, and with a fair degree of success. But the company was hurt in the long run, with a turning point in the early- to mid-1930s, by its refusal to adapt—as its local competitors did—to the expectations of employees and the limited means of potential customers. Singer's dramatic rise and fall in Japan reveals ways in which practices of global capitalism are simultaneously transformed and transformative as they take root in particular locales.

Using a Chandlerian strategy/structure framework for comparative purposes, the authors examine the early development of an important public institution, The World Bank Group. As they demonstrate, The Bank gradually evolved toward the model provided by the multidivisional or M-form corporation. In its early years, The Bank was a centralized organization with functional departments and a unique check and balance system to control lending. Guided by signals coming from its development personnel, The Bank evolved incrementally until 1952, when a formal reorganization took place. In the years that followed, functional considerations continued to reshape this innovative institution. Then, under President Robert McNamara, The Bank acquired a new and broader mission that led to another formal reorganization in 1972. The authors analyze the cultural as well as organizational aspects of these changes, relating them to a series of long cycles of innovation at The Bank.

I am extremely grateful for the valuable and challenging comments of the contributors to this review colloquium on Scale and Scope. Their remarks have allowed me to clarify and to define more sharply the basic concepts, focus, and aims of the book. In discussing each reviewer's comments, I attempt whenever possible to place them in the larger context of my views on the development of industrial capitalism.

Scholars generally have studied the emergence of American film stars in one of two ways: as an aesthetic, cultural phenomenon or as part of the larger story of corporate consolidation in the film industry. This article combines these approaches, arguing that the early film star played two overlapping roles. Within the new long feature films, stars served as focal points for continuity across complex narratives; within the new vertically integrated film corporations, they became focal points for the coordination of production, distribution, and promotion. The article concludes by suggesting that the interconnections between aesthetic practice and industrial organization bear further examination.

“Gold is where you find it,” said the old prospector. It has long been recognized, in one way or another, that it belongs to him who can find it and extract it, and that the rules of land tenure and use formed in an agrarian society would serve poorly to define legal rights. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the demand for gold was particularly high. Its vital significance to American economic growth is revealed in the fact that the chronic foreign trade deficit of the United States in these years was balanced by two main elements: capital imports and gold exports. Professor Libecap shows just how pragmatic Americans could be about the impact of economics upon law under such circumstances, and draws a picture of a land use code that proved as malleable as the glittering metal it called forth.

Extremely successful both as an investment and as a commercial banker, Charles E. Mitchell was identified by contemporaries as the epitome of the unscrupulous “money changers” whose speculative dealings they felt played a major role in the Crash of 1929 and the ensuing economic collapse. This portrayal has been echoed and elaborated by historians and commentators down to the present day. In this article Dr. Huertas and Dr. Silverman demonstrate that Mitchell's activities, while sometimes ill-advised, were motivated by the economic“good sense” of the day and were not attributable to either rampant immorality or ungoverned greed. At the same time, they direct the attention of economic historians to the monetary policies of the Federal Reserve system in the 1920s and 1930s—in which Mitchell also played a role—and suggest that a more potent source of the Great Depression lies therein.

In the mid-nineteenth century, American wholesalers began increasingly to rely on credit-reporting agencies to provide information about customers in distant localities. The demand for dependable information, coupled with the dynamism and competitiveness of the American market, helped usher into place a business culture that favored transparency and open networks. This article examines one group of merchants—immigrant Jews—whose traditions stood in contrast to the business elite's growing demand for disclosure.

A mass of rhetoric proclaimed the Industrial Board as a Progressive measure to forestall a post-World War I depression through governmental price manipulation. After a closer look at the personalities and policies involved, Professor Himmelberg argues that the Board was, actually, an effort by organized business groups to force antitrust revision upon the Wilson administration.

Throughout the twentieth century, the role of workers in the management of business enterprise has been the subject of ongoing debate. Opponents of centralized, bureaucratic management have proposed a series of participatory alternatives—workers' control, industrial democracy, employee stock ownership, and more recently, employee involvement—that have sought to democratize workplace governance. Much of the literature on such initiatives, be it historical or contemporary, has implied that workers favor exercising greater responsibility over shop-floor matters but have been deterred by employer resistance and cautious labor leadership. This literature often fails to capture the complexity of workers' attitudes towards greater participation and the tensions felt by reform-minded business leaders seeking to share power and authority with their employees. It is in this context that the story of the Columbia Conserve Company, an Indianapolis-based producer of canned soups, assumes particular relevance as a pioneering attempt to implement workplace democracy. Between 1917 and 1943, Columbia Conserve's owner, William P. Hapgood, established a system of workers' ownership and management. However, workers at Columbia Conserve, while sympathetic to Hapgood's experiment, were reluctant to accept full managerial responsibility. Instead, they embraced a more familial concept that met their psychological needs for fellowship and security. William Hapgood's faith in worker self-management subsequently waned, revealing an authoritarian streak that undercut his democratic pretensions. The experience at Columbia Conserve illustrates the enduring problems involved in sustaining workplace democracy and illuminates the status of current efforts aimed at empowering workers on the job.

This article investigates the role of the private banking house of Thomas Branch & Sons of Petersburg, Virginia, in promoting entrepreneurship and economic development in the early United States. It argues that while Branch adopted many of the methods and practices of antebellum commercial banks in that he accepted and created deposits and followed a real-bills philosophy in his lending, he also differed from them by extending his services to a particular market niche. Many of his borrowers were young entrepreneurs who were just embarking upon their own commercial ventures. In addition, many of his customers had accumulated only limited wealth. If Branch's actions, then, can be considered indicative of those of private bankers more generally, this article reveals the importance of small town private bankers in supplying monetary and intermediary services to local communities, and moreover, helps clarify their place in the history of antebellum banking.

This article discusses the complex issues behind the relation between national and global economic histories and the challenges of a comparative approach. On examining different national approaches (Italian and English) to the management of the early modern maritime sector, it will argue that this comparison allows a privileged view into different varieties of capitalism, highlighting fundamental differences in attitudes toward wage labor and risk management that still influence different approaches to economic activities today.

This article argues that entrepreneurs, not governments or markets, shaped globalization during the early nineteenth century. The article concentrates on the trading and financial activities of London merchant bankers, and in particular on the different diversification strategies they followed. Although most London merchant bankers remained cautious and did not diversify their operations either geographically or in the products they traded during this period, Huth & Co. established an impressive global network of trade and lending, dealing with over six thousand correspondents worldwide in a wide range of products. This firm shaped globalization well before the transport and communication revolution of the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Once described as “neglected,” brands and brand history have benefited from a recent surge of work in business history, economics, and management studies. This research, however, remains relatively tightly focused. Most attention is given to successful, long-lived brands and to the entrepreneurs who developed them. As in the market, so in research, the attraction of successful brands is understandable. Nevertheless, such a focus only reinforces both the well-known tendency to read history through the eyes of the winners and the assumption that losers and also-rans have nothing to tell us. The authors of the articles in this special section share both the wish to look beyond such assumptions and the belief that one way to do so is by complementing the study of brands with the study of trademarks and of the related legal, economic, and business arrangements that stand behind brands and provide context for their development since the nineteenth century.

It may well be that the present will stand as a golden age in the historiography of American business and American law. Both fields have flourished – indeed, flowered – in recent years. Perhaps the best measure of this is the fact that the 1978 winners of the Bancroft Prize in American History were Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.'s The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business and Morton J. Horwitz's The Transformation of American Law 1780–1860, each a notable work in its own right, each a summation of sorts of the recent evolution of its field of historical inquiry.

Despite recent interest in the history of the American worker, relatively little attention has been paid to the evolution of corporate employment and labor relations practices, particularly in the nonunion sector. In this article, Professor Jacoby examines the employee attitude testing program at Sears, Roebuck and Company and places it in a larger historical context as well as in the narrower framework of developments in personnel relations. During the 1940s and 1950s the Sears program was one of the most innovative and sophisticated applications of behavioral science to workplace problems, and it served as a model for many other companies. Although the testing program was developed as part of an ongoing effort to forestall unionization, it also had a research component that made important contributions to a number of academic disciplines, particularly organizational theory and industrial sociology.