This article examines key barriers to business sustainability discussed at a multidisciplinary conference held at the Harvard Business School in 2018. Drawing on perspectives from both the historical and business literatures, speakers debated the historical success of and future opportunities for voluntary business actions to advance sustainability. Roadblocks include misaligned incentives, missing institutions, inertia of economic systems, and the concept of sustainability itself. Overcoming these roadblocks will require systematic interventions and alternative normative concepts.

Examining the development of credit reporting in the United States, this article shows how new, formal methods of assessment of risk and trustworthiness came to mediate business reputations in the credit market over the past century and a half. It focuses on the conflicts over reputation provoked by the new means of assessment and how those conflicts were controlled through organizational procedures and routines as new methodologies were introduced. After World War II seemingly objective quantitative methodologies for evaluating credit worthiness were developed, but they did not eliminate the place of reputation in business decision-making.

German corporations are characterized as having been adaptable in the face of numerous traumatizing events during the twentieth century. This article explores how firms adapted their accounting information systems during the hyperinflation of the 1920s. It suggests that responses to the crisis focused on system elements identified as key to continuing operations. Initially, firms amended selling and purchasing arrangements, modified financial reporting, and shifted managerial reporting to nonmonetary information. As inflation accelerated, human resources were diverted to maintaining critical functions, especially those related to remunerating labor. While some elements of accounting systems fell into disrepair, there were also examples of innovation.

The za was a leading medieval Japanese economic institution, often likened to the European guild. Professor Yamamura analyzes the rise and subsequent decline of za from the eleventh through the sixteenth centuries, paying special attention to their influence on the development of commercial activity.

This study finds that the average degree of concentration in southern industrial markets was high in the period 1850–1860. Although the potential for monopolistic control existed, the authors argue, it does not appear to have been exploited systematically to gain rates of return exceeding those in less concentrated industries.

Despite attempts by the state legislature to fashion the charter of the Pennsylvania Railroad in such a way as to insure a high degree of managerial accountability to the board of directors and to make the corporation broadly accountable to the public, things turned out very differently. The volume and complexity of managerial decisions quickly brought a centralization of power in the hands of the road's professional managers as the board atrophied, and the economic and political power of the road and its dominant figures (J. Edgar Thomson and Thomas A. Scott) negated much of the principle of public accountability.

Historians have recently tried to explain why the century-long work-reduction movement ended in the 1940s. A history of Kellogg's Six-Hour day program reveals that the loss of business and management support contributed to this demise. Mainstream corporations such as Kellogg's once thought that managed work reduction would save capitalism, and they developed a capitalist vision of freedom from work remarkably similar to recent socialist writings. But Kellogg's management reversed course and ultimately opposed the Six-Hour day. Instead they developed more conventional corporate views: that industrial progress is defined by more work for more people, that increasing the number of jobs is a primary economic goal (but not the responsibility of the individual firm), and that work can be perfected to become the most satisfying part of life.

Though Canada was, in the opening decades of the twentieth century, a net capital importer, Canadian-based companies dominated the Mexican public utilities industry. In this article, Professors Armstrong and Nelles explain how this “curious capital flow” came about. Their explanation stresses the personal ties linking Canadian businessmen to the maverick American engineer-entrepreneur F.S. Pearson. In addition to detailing these ties, they describe the methods used to finance the promotions, speculate about the insiders' rates of return, and estimate the origins and magnitude of the capital involved.

Significant changes in the process of business innovation are suggested in this comparative study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century leaders in marketing.

In recent years the political turmoil in the Middle East, the activities of OPEC, and the threat of “the oil weapon” have created so many reverberations in the industrialized world that it is easy to forget that petroleum has long been a significant factor in international politics. A relatively early case in point is the controversy that emerged after World War I when British and American interests clashed over the control and exploitation of the great oil wealth of Iraq. While the problem was satisfactorily resolved—at least from the Anglo-American standpoint—the action of diplomats on both sides not only reflected the growing importance of Middle-Eastern petroleum but also brought out the differing British and American philosophies of what the international economic order should be. While some people may disagree with the interpretation offered in this essay, Professor Stivers clearly demonstrates that access to and control of petroleum resources lay at the heart of the contentious issues that altered and shaped the international order of the early twentieth century.

This article addresses the issue of whether large shareholders in Victorian public companies were active in the control of companies or were simply wealthy rentiers. Using ownership records for 890 firm-years, we examine the control rights, socio-occupational background, and wealth of large shareholders. We find that many large shareholders had limited voting rights and neither they nor family members were directors. This implies that the majority of public companies in the second half of the nineteenth century cannot be characterized as family companies and that large shareholders are better viewed as wealthy gentlemen capitalists rather than entrepreneurs.

This study examines the transplantation and evolution of business law in the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish republic, drawing broader implications for the economic and political determinants of legal transplantation for late industrializers. We show that the underlying political economy context was influential in shaping the way commercial law was transplanted and evolved in Turkey. Extraterritorial rights in the nineteenth century eroded the incentives to demand legal change by providing alternative legal rules to the non-Muslim commercial elite; the nation-building efforts of the twentieth century cultivated a new Muslim business class that was reliant on the state's goodwill for success and could not effectively push for more open access to novel forms of business organization.

This article recounts the birth of the clothing industry in the United States after 1815. It contends, in contrast to recent historical literature, that the clothing business was at the center of the American experience of industrialization. This was not because ready-made clothing was a novel commodity. Nor was it because of new production technologies, social innovations, or legal structures adopted by the industry. Rather, clothing entrepreneurs were significant because they integrated several important markets—a trans-Atlantic trade in cloth, an urban trade in labor, and a market for manufactured goods in the interior regions of the United States. This helped to make the ready-made clothing business among the country's largest industries by 1850.

By any measure, major-league baseball in North America surely qualifies as big business. The national pastime is a vital component of today's urban political economy, and baseball teams resemble other high-prestige businesses in that cities must compete for the privilege of hosting them—whatever their true worth. This article analyzes the transfer of the Milwaukee Braves baseball franchise to Atlanta in 1965 as the outcome of “competitive boosterism,” or the active participation of local elites in luring trade, industry, and investment from other cities for the purpose of economic development.

The abilities of Western grain merchants to adapt their business practices to changing market conditions are revealed in this analysis of mid-nineteenth century developments.

It was one of history's sardonic pranks that the forces deriding business efficiency and clamoring for regulation made Samuel Insull a favorite scapegoat. He had built his early electric system in Chicago with vision, administrative and political skill, and a conspicuously advanced concept of public relations. Insull espoused the “natural monopoly” principle, but he shocked contemporaries by insisting upon the corollary necessity for public control. He fought hard and effectively for state regulation, not as a radical theorist hut as a realist with a record of public service unsurpassed in the infant electric utility industry.

Business historians and students of political economy quite often analyze the success of foreign investors in the periphery in terms of the entrepreneur's competitive advantage and of the host country's beneficial economic policies. One cannot explain the extraordinary success of British engineer Sir Weetman Pearson in Mexico's early oil history according to such criteria, however, for his American competitors had experience in the technologically advanced U.S. petroleum industry and should have prevailed. Sir Weetman succeeded because Mexican politicians, pursuing their own internal political interests, willed and nurtured his success.

Rejecting the traditional explanation that the introduction of features and an increase in scandalmongering account for the growth of American newspapers following the Civil War, Professor Smith advances an interesting correlation between the introduction of wood-pulp paper and the lowered prices and increased circulation of the press.

This study of the working habits of early American businessmen focuses on long-forgotten details that help clarify methods of the day and suggest that business in colonial times had not yet become an end in itself nor a dominant means for self-expression.