The Chicago School of antitrust is often thought to have killed off antitrust enforcement beginning in the late 1970s. In fact, although Chicago school prescriptions were significantly more laissez-faire than the structuralist school Chicago replaced, antitrust enforcement did not die under Chicago's influence. Rather, by directing antitrust to focus on technical economic analysis, Chicago contributed to the creation of a large and entrenched class of antitrust professionals—economists and lawyers—with a vested interest in preserving antitrust as a legal and regulatory enterprise. Today, Chicago School's consumer welfare standard and specific enforcement prescriptions are coming increasingly under political pressure and may be replaced or supplemented in the near term. But Chicago's redirection of antitrust toward technical economic analysis and technocratic reasoning seems likely to remain a durable legacy.

The German pharmaceutical industry dominated global drug creation from the late nineteenth century to World War I. Most of the industry's products were based on extensive scientific research. However, the research intensity of products varied across companies and intensified over time. A main contribution of this article is thus to identify different groups of firms within the industry and provide an analysis of their product portfolios before 1914. This essay embeds scientific developments in a coevolutionary framework of science, firms, and institutions and shows that the industry's research capabilities were complemented by other important factors for corporate success.

This article compares two media multinationals that supplied different genres of news, political and economic. Most media companies provided both genres, and these categories often overlapped. Still, investigating two firms founded in twentieth-century Germany shows how product differentiation affects the organization, geographical orientation, and business models of multinationals. While political news had the greatest impact when it was free and ubiquitous, economic news was most effective when it was expensive and exclusive.

Small firms that operate in manufacturing sectors amenable to economies of scale are faced with particularly challenging strategic problems. This article on the Seiberling Rubber Company, a family–owned minor player in the U.S. tire industry, takes as its starting point the intersection between Michael Porter's typology of competitive strategies and the entrepreneurial theorists' views on the importance of the human factor. Against a detailed analysis of the changing structure of the tire industry over four decades, it examines closely the strategic decisions of one firm and its senior managers.

Between 1870 and 1910, big business established itself as a prominent feature of the American economy. American economists paid close attention to its rise and confronted the difficulties of integrating large firms into economic theory. The result was a theory that emphasized the importance of entrepreneurship, that enlarged the scope of competition, that distinguished profit from other forms of income, and that was compatible with large-scale enterprise. The insights of earlier American economists have been lost to modern economic theory, which extols the virtues of small firms.

This account of the activities of an energetic, highly diversified mercantile capitalist illustrates in some detail the world-wide flow of commodities and capital in the early nineteenth century. Aggressive merchandising and sophisticated administration were involved, and one by-product was a rich reservoir of investment capital for developing American industries.

The clothing trade in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provides examples across the spectrum of industrial organization, and it thus offers an opportunity to compare activities and to account for the adoption of different systems. This article, based on extensive archival research in the records of corset-making companies, shows clearly the relationship between the corset industry's ability to standardize production and the adoption of operations on a larger scale than was possible in other sectors of the women's garment industry.

Industrial standardization, when noted at all by historians, has usually been associated with the rise of large corporations in the late nineteenth century. In this article, however, Professor Seely contends that, in the highway industry, the introduction of uniform standards and specifications in the early twentieth century was spearheaded by federal engineers in the Bureau of Public Roads—the government's highway agency—through a variety of indirect and cooperative arrangements with state governments, trade associations, and professional organizations. Government leadership in the standardization of highway engineering practices and materials requirements, Seely concludes, suggests the significant role engineers played in the drive for uniformity. Linking nineteenth-century business-sponsored standardization efforts with the government-sponsored efforts of the twentieth century, engineers brought, despite a shift in institutional base, a singleness of purpose to the movement as a whole.

Silk manufacturing began in Lucca in the twelfth century and by the fifteenth century Italy had become the largest producer of silk textiles in Europe, nurtured by extensive domestic and foreign demand for the luxurious fabric. This essay explores the market for silk textiles, the organization of the silk industry, and the role played in it by guilds, entrepreneurs and their capital, and highly sought after artisans. Just as silk manufacturing was an important and lucrative business for entrepreneurs, this article argues, so was it a crucial strategic activity for the governments of Italy's Renaissance states, whose incentives, protections, and investments helped to start up and grow the sector with the aim of generating wealth and strengthening their respective economies.

Examining the efforts to restructure the electric power industry during the early 1920s, this article challenges the view that proponents of corporate liberalism shared a belief in the legitimacy of corporate capitalism and that conflicts among them involved only technical and managerial issues. It argues, rather, that corporate liberals could disagree about the goals of economic planning as well as about tactics and strategy and that they often held conflicting perceptions of the nature of corporate capitalism in American society.

Shrewd product selection allowed Spencer Love to build Burlington Mills into a large profitable firm in what most observers regarded as a declining industry, textiles. Using integration, diversification, and a multidivisional structure, he then attempted to have Burlington dominate its industry just as a few other large corporations controlled steel, automobiles, and chemicals. In textiles, however, powerful forces constrained and sometimes defeated these strategies. After the emergence of artificial and synthetic fibers, textile mills became dependent on large yarn manufacturers in the chemical industry such as Du Pont and Celanese. In addition, large size and diversification did not always protect a company's profits, and forward integration into the volatile women's garment industry proved to be especially dangerous. In the end, Love concluded that Burlington should remain a weaving and knitting company; when he died in 1962, textiles remained an industry in which small, specialized firms survived alongside the corporate giants.

Regulating environmental outcomes without stipulating the technologies to accomplish them is a characteristically American form of governmental intervention. This approach aims to encourage industry to address public-policy concerns while minimizing interference in its affairs. However, California's zero-emission-vehicle mandate of 1990 implied the development of specific technologies with highly disruptive sociotechnical effects. The most practical zero-emission vehicle of the day was the all-battery electric vehicle, a technology characterized by the temporal mismatch of its components. Batteries have shorter life-spans than electric motors, a durability dilemma that rewards battery-making. In response, General Motors and Toyota devised strategies to mitigate this risk that involved mediating the technology of the Ovonic Battery Company.

This article examines the attempts of several generations of manufacturers of cooking and heating appliances to manage competition in their very unconcentrated industry. They started with overt price-fixing, which soon failed, then moved on to a variety of more effective techniques—particularly joint regulation with the aid of a strong craft union, and the adoption of uniform cost-accounting and price-setting systems. The article illuminates the numerous ways in which a trade association could make cartel-like behavior work in an industry whose structural characteristics were apparently unfavorable and also the importance of state intervention to shaping and eventually limiting this strategy.

Professor Rosenberg describes an unsuccessful attempt by four international businessmen to obtain oil concessions in Iran during a period of concern about oil supplies. The incident illuminates some of the hidden politics of international business activity.

The increase in volume of explosives and other hazardous materials transported by rail during the nineteenth century resulted in a growing number of accidents. In response, the Pennsylvania Railroad developed some of the first regulations governing the transport of such materials. In the twentieth century, a combination of enforcement difficulties and competitive pressures led the company, working through the American Railway Association, to press for industry-wide rules and enforcement, which resulted in the Association's, Bureau of Explosives. Similar motives impelled the carriers to seek federal regulation, which began in 1908. The Interstate Commerce Commission provided the legal authority in this public–private partnership, whilethe bureau took the lead in inspecting shipments, encouraging improvements in shipping techniques, and developing rules that formed the basis of all modern regulations of hazardous shipments.

After World War II, Weirton Steel remained a critical barrier to the unionization of the steel industry. Weirton kept unions at bay through a plan of high wages, welfare, and company unionism, which it combined with an authoritarian style of management. Forbidden from using intimidation by the federal courts, Weirton substituted a celebration of Americanism that associated freedom with limited government and an absence of unionism. Foreseeing a union drive in 1950, Weirton staged a pageant to dramatize its version of patriotism. The steelworkers countered with a competing version that stressed trade unionism as a way to give workers a democratic voice. This article reveals how postwar patriotic pageantry was rooted in the struggle between labor and capital.