Public accounting practice and the nature of the accounting profession itself has, in the years under consideration, been shaped by a series of external forces. The Great Depression stimulated codification and regulation of practice. Further refinements of auditing procedures were introduced in the wake of the McKesson & Robbins case. The basic question of who was authorized to practice received almost continuous attention, and was the subject of much legislation and some important legal action. World War II introduced new practices, added responsibilities, and certain difficulties. And finally, the emergence of a strong national organization provided the profession with a means for achieving internal consistency and the capacity for co-ordinated reaction to rapid external change.

The Dutch company Philips succeeded in producing transistors early on. By the early 1950s, it had acquired a strong position in the European semiconductor market. However, by the end of the 1950s, it was being surpassed by competitors. In response to the developments in solid state electronics, Philips' management adjusted the company's research, development, and production capabilities, enabling the firm to bring point-contact and layer transistors onto the market and to develop its own high-frequency transistor. When demand for industrial transistors increased, Philips was unprepared, leaving it without an entrée to this new market. The company's exclusive contracts with IBM not only failed to produce the expected results; they also limited its ability to establish ties with other computer companies and most important it illustrated Philips' choice not to produce computers. Therefore, Philips did not build knowledge and expertise in the computer field. Philips' organizational structure hampered both its innovative capacity in the field of applications and its ability to adjust transistor requirements to suit customer needs. Thus, by the early 1960s, Philips found itself in a weakened position in the increasingly competitive transistor market.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) became an important subject among business leaders during the post–World War II era. Business leaders often used the idea of CSR to explain actions they took to prevent additional government involvement in their industry. They argued that because they were behaving in a socially responsible manner, further federal programming was unnecessary. The cases of health insurance and home mortgages demonstrate how this political approach frequently required business leaders to alter their profitmaking strategies in order to substantiate their argument before the public. Thus, the history of corporate social responsibility is critical for understanding a hidden facet of American political development.

Scholars have long linked medieval and early modern public debts to the rise of capitalism. This article considers one prominent case study in the development of permanent public debt: late medieval Genoa. Previous scholarship has focused on financial speculation and markets for shares as central to how public debts functioned. However, by considering complementary types of sources, this article demonstrates that inheritance strategies and patrimonial considerations operated in dialogue with markets in the development of urban public debts, both in Genoa and elsewhere in Europe.

Many products—from consumer electronics to children's toys—bear the CE mark, the symbol of conformity to the “essential requirements” of European standards. This article traces the development of CE marking from its origins in the European Community's (EC) efforts to relaunch the Single European Market in the mid-1980s to its full implementation in the mid-1990s across the European Economic Area (EEA). It focuses in particular on the reforms made to the “New Approach to Technical Harmonization” and the “Global Approach to Testing and Certification” and examines the ways business groups responded to the creation of common systems for assessing conformité européenne. This history offers an expansive view of regional market integration and a new perspective on the dynamic between companies and regulators in the European business environment.

The ways in which business–government relations influenced postwar liberalism in the American encounter with the Middle East are examined through the use of group biography. The linked careers of five internationalist oilmen who helped to formulate Harry S. Truman's domestic and foreign policies are tracked during and after World War II. Partly through the efforts of these influential men, the Middle East's vast oil resources became an important component of controversies about the direction of the New Deal. One conclusion to emerge from the study is that instead of simply studying liberal ideals in order to understand the American impulse to reform the world, historians also need to consider how global factors intruded into domestic reform debates.

The automobile industry was a leader in Germany's economic recovery after World War II. In the 1950s and 1960s, carmakers found a ready market for their products as mass motorization created a manufacturing backlog. But, by the 1970s, rapid changes in sales and the arrival of new competitors in the German market marked a transition from a seller's to a buyer's market. Additionally, the energy crisis intensified existing consumer reluctance to spend and altered buying preferences. German car manufacturers adjusted to the changing market conditions after 1973 by adopting different strategies. In order to generate economic success, they developed new marketing-management instruments that supported a fundamental change in the business paradigm, leading them to shift from their earlier emphasis on production to a stronger focus on consumers.

Standing between expanding productive capacity on the one hand and growing consumer demand on the other, the marketing middleman in our economy has been forced into a succession of adaptive measures, significant among which has been department store retailing. A study of the general developmental pattern in down state Illinois reveals a “spawning era” and identifies three generic antecedents for the department store. Case studies of individual firms reveal the external underlying forces and the innovating policies which made the department store necessary and possible in this geographic area. Since by many criteria the small cities of Illinois were typical of those elsewhere, a study of retail developments there has more than regional implications.

Like most speculative extravaganzas, the Western cattle boom was compounded out of a bona fide opportunity, exaggeration, gullibility, inadequate communications, dishonesty, and incompetence. There were some solid residual benefits, representing, in effect, an involuntary gift by British investors to their American cousins.

Teapot Dome has long stood in the public mind as a conspicuous symbol not only of political corruption but of degenerate business morality as well. An examination of the charges against Albert B. Fall, therefore, though necessarily concerned with political and personal rather than business data, touches the interest of students of business history, whose natural concern lies in identifying the factual basis for incidents which have become part of the folklore of American business.

In the 1920s, leaders of the lumber business tried to bring stability to their industry through vigorous trade association activity conducted with the encouragement of then Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover. Despite the optimism of association spokespeople and publicists, the hoped for stability was not attained because the associations were incapable of relieving the intra- and inter- industry competition lumbermen confronted. Nevertheless, the efforts of those involved threw into sharp relief attitudes in business and government about the nature of the political economy of the “New Era.”

In the manner of the Creole tradesmen of Louisiana, whose lagniappe to their patrons is legendary, the Editor offers a similar bonus to readers of the Review. Instead of trifling presents added to a purchase, however, our lagniappe will be notes and documents illustrative of the evolution of business enterprise.

Estimates of costs and revenues for steamboating in the Louisville-New Orleans trade indicate that after the 1820's the steamboat transport market experienced the long–run equilibrium characteristic of purely competitive industries.

Since the Business History Review's special issue on Latin America twenty years ago, many articles and monographs have been published utilizing archival sources. An examination of many of these studies and experience in archives suggest that the historian of Latin American business must use a variety of sources to study individual firms and the relationships between business and the national societies in which they operate. In this essay Professor Reber discusses eight types of archives found in the United States, Latin America, Great Britain, France, and Spain which hold manuscripts of interest to those studying both the economic and business history of Latin America. She also offers advice about bibliographic aids, guides, and, briefly, printed primary source materials useful in supplementing the often hard-to-find archival data.

Although Singer was the first American manufacturing firm to produce and market extensively in Europe, the American Radiator Company is perhaps more typical of the United States firms that expanded abroad in the nineteenth century. Professor Wilkins documents the evolution of this multinational enterprise and offers her study as a test of recent theories on direct investment abroad.

In 1993, four years prior to the publication of Clayton Christensen's highly influential book, The Innovator's Dilemma, the Business History Review published an article by Christensen titled “The Rigid Disk Drive Industry: A History of Commercial and Technological Turbulence.” The article relates the theory of disruptive innovation to Alfred D. Chandler's work on large vertically integrated enterprises. It was published during a pivotal era of scholarship on innovation, management practice, and industry evolution, much of which used the history of firms, industries, and technologies to build theory. I survey the impact and critiques of Christensen's research agenda, highlighting how it illustrates where the boundaries associated with the “lessons of history” should be drawn.