IBM has been the subject of considerable study by historians, economists, business management professors, and journalists. This essay surveys the various writings on the company, placing their contributions in a roughly chronological account of the company's history, from its early days in tabulating through to its dominance of global markets in computing. The essay includes well-known studies of IBM in addition to more obscure accounts. It emphasizes the need to consider the company's culture along with its technological and managerial changes in order to grasp the reasons for its longevity.

Recent literature on philanthropy and business has focused on the returns to businesses and entrepreneurs from giving. In this article, we show how historical context impacts the motivations and organizational forms created over time in philanthropic giving that effect and affect such returns. We do this through the prism of the changing ownership structures in the Scotch whisky industry in the twentieth century using an institutional theory lens. In doing so, we capture the story of three sisters who inherited a Scotch whisky business in the 1940s and transformed it into a hybrid philanthropic-commercial vehicle that remains in operation today. We present an extended theoretical model illustrating the interplay of context, motivation, and organizational structure over time on exchanges of capital in entrepreneurial philanthropy.

British electrical manufacturing provides important insights into international business history and demonstrates the key role of cross-border networks and agreements in its emergence. This article analyzes the factors that shaped phases in the industry's development and international operations. In doing so, the article reappraises electrical manufacturing's early decades in Britain; it shows how a changing political landscape transformed the strategies and ownership of firms, and reevaluates the industry's restructuring during World War I and its immediate aftermath. Further, the article questions accounts of British electrical manufacturing's failure in the 1920s and discusses the return to strategies of cross-border networks and agreements. Finally, it considers the lessons of British electrical manufacturing's emergence and subsequent consolidation, weighing the influences of firm-level, national, and international factors.

In the following article, Professors Brown and Philips examine two questions concerning wage payment systems. First, has the prevalence of incentive systems been affected by the rise of the modern corporate enterprise? Second, what has been the effect of institutionalized unionism on the prevalence of incentive systems? Brown and Philips explore these issues through a historical case study of the decline of the piece-rate system in the California canning industry, from which they conclude that in the context of Chandlerian industrial development piece-rate systems tend to give way to more complex incentive and hourly wage-rate systems. They explore this hypothesis further through an examination of historical data on wage payment systems for American manufacturing as a whole.

This intensive analysis of the Railroad Commission of Texas during the first half of the twentieth century focuses on the impact of personality and of regional and cultural characteristics on regulatory policy and outcomes. The article suggests that a “myth of power” and a “civil religion” of Texas oil, galvanized by a popular commissioner, both allowed cooperative control of oil production and obscured the real sources of power in the world oil industry.

This article presents a new list of France's 100 largest publicly-held manufacturing firms in 1913 and compares them to the 100 largest American, British, and German firms identified by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., in Scale and Scope. The largest French firms clustered in the same industries as the largest firms in the other countries. They were much smaller than their American counterparts, but in some industries they compared favorably with their German counterparts in size. More importantly, many of the largest French firms were behaving like the leading industrial firms elsewhere, developing cutting-edge technology, investing in state-of-theart production facilities, and putting professional managers in charge of operations. In contrast to the notion that France was a follower in the Second Industrial Revolution and eschewed the trend toward managerial enterprise in the early twentieth century, this article presents a picture of considerable dynamism, with France's leading industrial firms laying the organizational foundations from 1900 to 1930 for the managerial capitalism that would flourish in France in the post-Second World War era.

In the 1890–1907 period Populist-Progressive protests, public ignorance of the economic functions involved, and obvious abuses in the performance of those functions combined to produce a major peak of adverse opinion. Public protest shaped the course of stock exchange history through subsequent decades and yielded operator prototypes that have become classic Americana.

By the onset of the Great Depression, the big four tire manufacturers had long become the dominant force in the American rubber industry; yet they did not have a monopoly. A substantial number of smaller firms had managed to survive, however tenuously, although their decline had continued through the hard times of the 1920s and their plight grew worse with the onset of the Depression. Like their giant rivals, however, the small, unintegrated firms serving limited markets sought to survive at least in part through the help of new federal agencies as well as with the aid of traditional institutions. In this article, which analyzes the story of the McCreary Tire & Rubber Company, Professor Fricke presents a view of the economic crisis from the perspective of small enterprise. If the experience of this manufacturer can be generalized, as Fricke suggests, small business not only had a different attitude toward the expanded role of government but also emerged from the Depression changed in the ways that it did business, a result of its experience with the new federal agencies and the economic crisis itself.

Beginning in 1897, the American ceramics industry entered a period of stability and collaboration that emerged from an agreement by several leading firms to fix prices and discounts, exchange cost and price information, and begin close contractual relations with its workers' union, the National Brotherhood of Operative Potters. One issue, however, remained trouble-some: how to deal with occupational health issues in this disease-ridden trade. Should firms rely on state or private inspection? Should they be bound to one standard? Significantly, the companies and unions opted for private inspection systems that allowed them to maintain trade stability, even at the cost of health improvements. This arrangement remained in place until 1923, when federal antitrust actions shattered the trade association. Employers then faced a shift to state inspection and enacted a range of new schemes and private welfare plans to suit their designs.

Professor Morris' investigation of American railway management indicates that the railroads, which had been such innovative institutions in the nineteenth century, clung to ossified and outmoded managerial practices after the industry reached maturity. Inbred and inflexible systems of recruitment and promotion, he argues, were a noteworthy aspect of the economic decline of American railroads in the twentieth century.

The concepts of actual and potential competition as natural checks on trusts are examined through the literature which accompanied the framing and passage of the Chyton and Federal Trade Commission acts. The contributions of professional economists to these discussions are especially significant in the evolution of the public policies ultimately adopted.

The Electric Vehicle Company (EVC) and its affiliated operating entities (1897–1912), along with similar electric taxicab ventures in London and Paris, figured prominently in the early history of the automobile industry. Long dismissed as a quintessential instance of business failure resulting from the choice of inferior technology, the picture of EVC that emerges from new archival evidence suggests a different view. Seen within the continuing electrification of urban transit, traditional centralized approaches to transportation management, and genuine uncertainty about future automotive technology, EVC constituted a significant, if incremental, extension of traditional, service-based concepts of transportation. The goal of the owners of EVC was to offer an integrated, all-electric urban transportation service that included road- and rail-based components. The failure of EVC represented not simply the victory of internal combustion over electric propulsion but also the triumph of a decentralized, product-centered view of mobility, in which individuals owned and operated their own vehicles.

The oil industry in Nazi Germany provides an excellent focus for studying the interplay between economics, politics, and government policy in the Third Reich. In this article, Mr. Stokes brings to this subject a comparative approach, making comparisons both within the oil industry and with the industry's major industrial counterparts. He concludes that a variety of factors—including the degree of shared interest between individual firms and the government, the size and concentration of a firm's production facilities, and the political position of key firm personnel—explain the success as well as the eventual collapse of a given industrial sector.

As the Kress Library of Business and Economics approaches its fiftieth anniversary in 1988, it seems an appropriate time to reflect upon the library's origins. In this essay, Ruth Rogers explains how the foundation of the collection came to the Harvard Business School, what it encompasses, and how it has evolved over the years. Some major changes are evident at the close of the Kress Library's first half-century, but its perspective will always be rooted in the past.

As their enterprises expanded at the turn of the century, the leaders of two of the most famous Japanese zaibatsu worked continually to maintain the delicate balance between centralization and decentralization so essential to continued growth. Professor Morikawa chronicles and analyzes the most important organizational developments in these gigantic family firms.

Professor Carosso analyzes the impact of New Deal legislation upon the nation's investment banking community. Although some adjustments in banking methods resulted, the reforms did not effect any fundamental changes in the position of investment bankers in the American economy.

During the years 1918 to 1941, International Paper (IP) launched a massive product diversification effort. Engineered by three successive presidents, diversification turned the company from a newsprint producer based in the northeastern United States into an international manufacturer of southern kraft grades, Canadian newsprint, hydroelectric power, and specialty papers. With the exception of kraft paperboard and converted products, however, the new product lines failed to provide IP with a firm foothold in markets for consumer nondurables, where nimbler competitors thrived even during the 1930s. IP and firms in other “maturing industries” that clung to traditional products and stagnant markets contributed to the length and severity of the Great Depression.

In this article, Professor Stabile examines the experimentation with Frederick Taylor's principles of scientific management by managers at the E. I. du Pont de Nemours Powder Company. Despite their initial interest in efficiency, those managers quickly recognized that there was a direct relationship between efficiency and safety, an issue Taylor had not considered. When it was alleged that the efficiency methods had been a factor in two explosions, the emphasis in the company shifted to a more systematic approach to promoting safety. As a consequence, the company was able to manage a full-scale expansion of its production during the First World War with little disruption resulting from safety problems.

In this article Dr. Michie examines the origins and development of the Canadian securities market from its appearance in the mid-nineteenth century until the First World War. He traces the growth of Canadian-based and Canadian-owned joint-stock enterprise and the rise of a distinct Canadian investing public, which led to the establishment of a Canadian securities market, and he explains why so much Canadian business continued to be transacted on both the London and New York stock exchanges. Dr. Michie also discusses the rivalry between the Montreal and Toronto stock exchanges and its detrimental consequences for the creation of a strong and unified Canadian market. Finally, he argues that, despite Toronto's rapid growth, Montreal remained the financial center of Canada throughout this period.

Historians of the New South will find in Professor Killick's essay, based on the business archives of an important fin-de-siécle and early-twentieth-century cotton marketing enterprise, further powerful proof that the real story can only come from informed, sympathetic studies of what private men of affairs were accomplishing behind the dust storm of political demagogy that marked most public utterances, North and South, on southern problems in this era. Real entrepreneurship sprang up to give the marketing of the cotton crop a directness and an efficiency that ineffectual antebellum southern leaders had only dreamed of. This torch of enterprise was successfully passed, moreover, from a dying family firm to a more modern corporate organization, headed by even more skilled marketers who had learned well the lessons of their predecessors and were well prepared to flourish in the vastly changed post-1929 world. The stereotype of the prolonged backwardness of the South after 1877 is further discredited in this essay, which, significantly, is written from the far side of the Atlantic, where marketing of the cotton crop was always the most important aspect of its history.