Anecdotal evidence from the British Railway Mania and other historical financial bubbles suggests that many investors during such episodes are naive, thus contributing to the asset price boom. Using extensive investor records, we find that very few investors during the Railway Mania can be categorized as such. Although some interpretations of the Mania suggest that naive investors were expropriated by railway insiders, our evidence is inconsistent with this view as railway insiders contributed substantial amounts of capital, and their investments performed no better than those made by other experienced investors.

This article considers key issues relating to the organization and performance of large multinational firms in the post-Second World War period. Although foreign direct investment is defined by ownership and control, in practice the nature of that “control” is far from straightforward. The issue of control is examined, as is the related question of the “stickiness” of knowledge within large international firms. The discussion draws on a case study of the Anglo-Dutch consumer goods manufacturer Unilever, which has been one of the largest direct investors in the United States in the twentieth century. After 1945 Unilever's once successful business in the United States began to decline, yet the parent company maintained an arms-length relationship with its U.S. affiliates, refusing to intervene in their management. Although Unilever “owned” large U.S. businesses, the question of whether it “controlled” them was more debatable.

This article describes the problems faced by reorganizers of distressed railroads in the late nineteenth century and how they were addressed by a combination of judicial intervention and financial innovations. In particular, the judicial innovations of supersenior financing, the equity receivership process, and the setting of upset values permitted firms to raise funds. The private financial innovations of deferred coupon debt, contingent charge securities, and voting trusts made subsequent default less likely. The private innovations can be interpreted as responses to both the distress of the railroads as well as the intervention by the courts that emasculated prior debt contracts.

The following article examines the creation and development of a unique American business institution, the dime store chain. The essay focuses on the store managers—their ethnic, social, and educational background, the rules under which they worked, and the promotion ladder they climbed. It attempts to assess the advantages and disadvantages to the chains of relying on a system of “organization men.”

When studying retailing and its role in developing the American mass market, historians traditionally have focused their attention on large department stores. An analysis of the influence of small department stores in the growth of underdeveloped sections of the American West provides a different emphasis. The following article traces the history of T. C. Power & Bro.—a small, family-run department store in Montana—before the early 1900s. The article demonstrates that the firm's service was tailored to the economic and social needs of urban and rural settlers on the western frontier, helping to create a consumer society in the West.

This study of the Swedish-based mining company Boliden examines the proactive strategies it adopted to deal with the potential for severe environmental problems associated with the establishment of its large copper smelter in the 1920s. The article demonstrates how international networks, personal experience, and knowledge transfer from the U.S. copper industry help to explain the importance given to environmental issues by the Swedish industrialists. It is suggested that the main explanation for the proactive stance of the Swedish managers is that they perceived excessive pollution as working against creating a profitable and sustainable business. This case provides compelling evidence that firms pursuing an agenda focused on earning profits can still deliver environmental innovation and value to the local community, compatible with the concept of creating shared value.

The advent of high-technology industries around the turn of the century created the modern industrial research department and placed a new emphasis upon the search for patentable innovations. While some of this research led to advances in basic scientific knowledge, and much of it produced product or process improvements that were directly applicable to a firm's business, a great deal was undertaken to enhance firms' bargaining powers with each other in order to preserve monopoly positions. In the early years of radio, the structure of the industry changed repeatedly with every innovation in apparatus or circuitry, a situation that led, as Professor Reich shows, to heavy investment in “non-productive” research.

Scholars have studied innovation from various perspectives, but few have considered the interaction between big business and the fashion marketplace. This study examines the efforts of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company to create and expand the American synthetic-fibers market after World War II. DuPont described this work as transforming the “relatively simple ‘art’ of selling fabric” into the “complicated ‘science’ of marketing.” This process involved developing in-house marketing expertise and reaching out to sources as disparate as American fabric designers, Parisian couturiers, Seventh Avenue manufacturers, southern textile giants, and mass-market retailers. To promote the “wonders” of synthetic fibers, DuPont relied on “fashion intermediaries” to determine what customers wanted and how its fibers could meet those needs. This study suggests that the mass-market success of DuPont's synthetic fibers owed as much to creative marketing, styling, and performance as it did to industrial research and organizational innovation.

This examination of the social processes that inform cultural production asks how tastes are formed, transmitted, embedded, and reproduced across generations. These questions are explored through a study of William Morris, his working methods and products, and their impact on the decorative arts in Victorian Britain and beyond. Through the exercise of cultural leadership, Morris gave physical expression to the ideals and sentiments of Romanticism, and this in turn gave rise to a community of taste reaching across class boundaries and generations. Morrisian products and designs, through the agency of his disciples, became institutionally embedded, emblematic of refinement and good taste. A process model of taste formation is deployed to explore the economic and social dynamics at work in the Morris case and more generally.

Those who in the past twenty years have examined the historiography of industrial Italy cannot help but recognize its “backwardness” when compared to similar studies in other countries, particularly those of American entrepreneurial history. Various reasons have been given to justify this “backwardness,” such as the excessive humanistic tradition of Italian historical studies, the relatively scarce statistical data available on Italian industry, and the poor condition of industrial archives. But, above all, it has been observed that “enterprise,” “entrepreneurs,” and “entrepreneurship” are concepts not especially sympathetic to Italian historiographical culture. First, there is an ideological suspicion, which suggests that to investigate these topics implies per se a favorable attitude. Second, there is a diffuse conviction according to which it is necessary to utilize explanations other than free initiative, and, particularly to stress the role of the State, in order to understand Italian economic development.

Wolf Schneider has written that no other great industrialist of the nineteenth century “esteemed the personal freedom of his workers so little and their material well-being so highly” as did Alfred Krupp. Professor McCreary examines this counterpoint of humanitarianism and self-interest which produced some of Germany's “first steps toward industrial social responsibility.”

An examination of interlocking directorates in major American businesses since 1896 indicates that the incidence of interlocking has declined considerably in this century.

In 1909, the leaders of the American Association for Labor Legislation launched a campaign to eradicate phosphorus matches from the American market. Because phosphorus match workers often contracted a hideous disease called phosphorus necrosis (or “phossy jaw”), many European countries had already prohibited the poison matches from their markets. In the United States, nearly all interested parties supported legal abolition but found that the nation's federal system constituted a formidable obstacle. No state wanted to be the first to act (for fear of driving industry from its borders), and the federal government lacked the power to regulate intrastate economic activity. This article examines how, in order to circumvent the federalism obstacle, an alliance of academic reformers and business leaders worked to tax phosphorus matches out of existence—that is, to use the federal taxing power as a regulatory instrument.

The management scholar Henry Mintzberg has situated company strategies on a continuum that ranges from those that are the result of deliberate internal decisions, on one extreme, to those that emerge largely as a response to external forces, on the other. This framework is applied to the strategies of the Canadian aluminum producer Alcan, in Europe, from its origins as a spin-off from Alcoa, in 1928, until its acquisition by Rio Tinto, in 2007. Throughout this period, the company gradually moved from emergent to more deliberate strategies, although external forces continued to influence its decisions. The increasing centralization of Alcan's organizational structure paralleled its shift toward reliance on deliberate strategies.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the banking systems of England and New England were very different. England possessed a small number of large-scale clearing banks that had established extensive branch networks and dominated the domestic market. In contrast, New England banking was characterized by a large number of small-scale institutions. Yet, a century earlier, there were striking similarities between the two systems. An analysis of their evolution over the course of the nineteenth century provides an international and comparative perspective on the continuing debate over banking institutions, lending patterns, and economic growth.

An economic enterprise faces two, related, problems: effectively managing its activities and communicating to outsiders that it is, in fact, well run. The credit cooperative movement that grew up in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century had to wrestle with both. These cooperatives thrived, in part, because they adopted strategies first to obtain and then to harness the information they needed about the communities in which they were located, giving them an advantage over other lenders. Particularly effective was the tactic of using local people as managers, which helped to cement their ties with the community. Yet because few, if any, locals had banking experience and most were not even familiar with basic accounting methods, the managers created internal management problems, intensifying outside suspicion of the cooperatives as banking enterprises. The methods the cooperatives developed to overcome these problems drew on a combination of local initiative and regional assistance that was typical of the movement as a whole. The movement's ability to train its own talent suggests that it had a broader impact than has been captured by statistics on its membership or financial assets.

The debate about the idea of “varieties of capitalism,” which was formalized by Peter Hall and David Soskice in their 2001 book on the subject, has attracted the work of business historians, as well as of political scientists, and economists.

This article examines the attempts by the United States to export industrial and managerial techniques to Britain in the early post-war years. It analyses the types of technical assistance offered by the U.S., the mechanisms developed to deliver this assistance, and the response of both British industry and government. The conclusion offered is that whilst there were problems of “fit” between the techniques advocated by U.S. agencies and the conditions faced by British industry, overall the reluctance of the British to embrace American techniques did not reflect a rounded assessment of their applicability so much as a series of institutional blockages and hostile attitudes.

Historical narratives have enriched, and can even do more to enhance, the concept of corporate reputation by deepening our understanding of how reputation changes over time and among different stakeholders. This literature review highlights this theme of reputation for two audiences—business historians and corporate reputation theorists. By showing how different social and political contexts shape expectations for business behavior, historical study can add new dimensions to the study of corporate reputation.

Child labor in the U.S. economy declined significantly between 1880 and 1920. This case study of the fruit and vegetable canning industry examines variations in laws, technology, and income across states and time to assess the relative importance of legal and economic factors in reducing the employment of children. The authors find that economic factors, especially a technologically driven shift toward a greater demand for adult labor, were relatively more important. While economic development was often a precondition for legal restrictions on child labor, compulsory schooling and child labor laws restricted the employment of children in technologically backward canneries.