The Johnson Company was initially innovative in both a technological and a managerial sense, but its technically-oriented inventor-managers proved unable to provide creative leadership once the enterprise had passed through its early, technologically creative period.

Part of the eighteenth-century Spanish crown's attempt to restore national power through the promotion of trade and manufacturing was a campaign to eradicate the aversions of the nobility toward commerce and industry. Don Juan de Goyeneche was most often held up as the model of what the state expected of its noblemen. But Professor Callahan concludes that Goyeneche's significance lies more in symbol that in accomplishment.

In his last two major works, Inventing the Electronic Century and Shaping the Industrial Century, Alfred Chandler extended his well-known historical model put forth originally in Strategy and Structure, The Visible Hand, and Scale and Scope by drawing on insights from scholarship dealing with organizational learning and evolutionary economics. In the earlier works, he won high praise, as evinced by the awarding of the Bancroft and Pulitzer prizes for his contribution in advancing the understanding of history, economics, and sociology. His work presented a powerful alternative vision of businesspeople from the version usually communicated by the older Progressive school of history. Although practitioners of the latter brand of history generally acknowledged industrialization's material benefits, many worried that such change represented a Faustian bargain: they feared that concentrated economic power threatened the preservation of cherished democratic institutions and values.

Perhaps the most significant thing about the business man in folklore is that he is far from an important figure in it. From this we may deduce that among those people who have created what we call folklore the business man has either not played an important rôle or his function and contribution have not been understood. He is not, however, altogether missing; we might not recognize him, since he is a remote and shadowy figure compared with the business man as we think of him today. But he is there, and the very form and circumstances in which he appears have meaning.

In the late eighteenth century, the competitive position of French industry was seriously undermined by the sudden influx of inexpensive English goods—the products of the First Industrial Revolution. Responding to this challenge, French government officials established trade fairs—such as the Paris Industrial Exposition of 1806—to promote the introduction of commercially viable technologies. In this article, Professor Hafter takes a close look at this 1806 exposition. She discovers that, in addition to praising English-style machinery, the exposition's judges also praised traditional French production methods—a choice, she suggests, that reflected the uneven pattern of French industrialization.