The current scholarly interest in contemporary Japanese businesses has somewhat obscured their equally fascinating early historical development. In this article, Professor Wilkins emphasizes both the extent and the variety of Japanese multinational enterprise before the First World War, and offers a basis for comparing its differences and similarities with the conventional American model.

In 1966 the Supreme Court expressed a desire to arrest consolidation of the brewing industry “in its incipiency.” This article argues that a national brewing oligopoly had already emerged by that date. In the 1930s and 1940s, restrained demand and regulatory pressure discouraged price and advertising competition and forced brewers to adopt cost-saving technologies. By the end of the Second World War, the largest brewers harbored unexploited economies of scale in processing. With relief from war shortages in the 1950s, large regional brewers expanded to pursue processing economies and secured their advantages with scale in distribution and advertising.

This study analyzes the changing role of pre-industrial family and bureaucratic traditions in the development of Germany's leading electrical manufacturing firm. The Siemens company developed a decentralized, multi-divisional structure ten to twenty years before duPont and General Motors pioneered a similar organization in the United States. The pre-industrial bureaucratic traditions, considered in a multi-national context, facilitated the development of efficient modern management in Germany and help explain the relative success of German industry in the two decades before World War I.

The vital task of measuring jobs in order to establish equitable incentive wage rates is usually accomplished by a combination of techniques involving both time and motion studies. Yet for many years a highly personal competition between leading exponents of each type of study prevented a union of techniques from taking place. In the early days of the scientific management movement, Frank Gilbreth was a fierce admirer of Frederick W. Taylor, but Taylor and his disciples rejected Gilbreth, whose micromotion techniques came into competition with the Taylorites' stop watches. Thereby scientific management was split into two antagonistic camps and the course of the movement decisively influenced.

In discussions of the fight for the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906, Harvey Washington Wiley is usually portrayed as the consumers' champion, the Whiskey Trust as their adversary. Messrs. High and Coppin argue otherwise. Wiley's correspondence from 1904 to 1906 reveals a deep split between whiskey producers, with the makers of straight whiskey lining up behind Wiley's pure food bill and the rectified whiskey producers fighting against it. The authors argue that both sides used the consumer only as a convenient focus for their rhetoric; their activities thus provide another example of regulatory legislation passed to further the goals of private interests rather than to protect the public interest.

Although the managerial function arises out of organizational needs imposed by market competition and technological development, managers' professional status has come in large part from legal conceptions that perceive the managerially run firm as an institutional bulwark for modern democracy. This article examines how the law, through its doctrines of trust and contract, has made and unmade management as a semi-public profession. The article explores the history of tender-offer regulation as a case study of this process.

In 1892, a group of Chicago's business leaders organized the Society for the Prevention of Smoke in the hope of persuading the city's business community to install equipment to control the black smoke pouring out of downtown chimneys and smokestacks. The following article uses an examination of the Society's activities to explore the diverse roles that business interests played in pollution control in American cities during the late nineteenth century. The episode reveals a panorama of business responses to smoke pollution which ranged from voluntary smoke abatement and strong support for regulation to indifference, reluctance, and organized resistance to efforts to impose controls. The author explores reasons why business interests responded in such diverse ways. She places the spectrum of responses evident in this episode within the broader context of business involvement in pollution control in Chicago and other cities in this period. She concludes by pointing out the need for additional research to explore the complex ambiguities of the role played by business in the history of the American environment.

Reiterating and broadening a theme broached by its author over a decade ago, this article seeks to redirect the attention of business historians to the central role of the individual entrepreneur in American economic history. In both giant corporations and small start-up firms, in the late twentieth century and the early nineteenth, it argues, the presence—or absence—of intelligent, organized, and creative entrepreneurs has determined the success or failure of companies much more clearly than has the nature of their organizational charts.

We define philanthropy as voluntary giving by households or corporate bodies to promote charitable causes, projects, and organizations or, alternatively, as “voluntary action for the public good.” Entrepreneurial philanthropy refers specifically to “the pursuit by entrepreneurs on a not-for-profit basis of big social objectives through active investment of their economic, cultural, social and symbolic resources.” Government projects financed by taxation and interfamily resource transfers are never philanthropic. Gifts only qualify as philanthropic when the donor is under no compulsion to give, when the gift benefits people with whom the donor is not directly connected, when the gift is made from the donor's own resources, and when the donor receives no direct economic benefit as a consequence of making the gift. In other words, philanthropists invest their own resources in causes they believe will benefit others and that yield no direct benefit to themselves or their families.

Multinationals experienced significant legitimacy challenges in less-developed countries between 1945 and 1970. Corporate responses to these challenges cover three distinct periods. Unsuccessful postwar attempts focusing on colonial welfare concerns were followed by pragmatic endeavors intended to repair corporate reputations by Africanizing senior management. By the 1960s, this had become a common approach to legitimization. The challenges of Africanizing ethnocentric multinationals led to organizational changes: internationally diversified multinationals were better able to decentralize subsidiary management, while the late 1960s saw regionally focused multinationals absorbed by more diversified multinationals. Organizational survival was directly linked to legitimacy advantages derived from Africanization.

The Nigerian Enterprises Promotion Decree of 1972, which was promulgated in Nigeria after the country gained its independence from Britain, put in place a framework for the varied transfer of equity ownership of expatriate businesses to Nigerians. The decree was replaced by a more stringent order in 1977. Despite the extensive research on the Nigerian indigenization episode, there have been few studies on the role of the British government in the entire exercise. This paper, using newly available evidence from the National Archives London, investigates the role played by the British government during the indigenization episode. Evidence in this paper suggests that the British government explored various strategies, orthodox and unorthodox, in its bid to protect British business interests in Nigeria during the period.

During the time period from 1870–1930, economic, social, demographic and educational forces interacted with the separation of accounting from bookkeeping. The result of this interaction was the changing genderization of the bookkeeping workforce. This paper suggests that this change process cannot be fully understood until both environmental forces and the emergence of accounting from bookkeeping are considered. Evidence of this interaction comes from Census data as well as historical documents.

Insurance is a business in which trust is the corollary of risk taking. One problem for the insurance industry in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain was how to bridge the gap between the world of business based upon personal trust, and the emergence of new commercial relations where moral hazard was mass produced and where a commanding knowledge of personal reputations was virtually impossible. This paper examines the imperfect methods devised by early life and fire insurance offices to assess both physical and moral hazard and postulates a relationship between the two. The responses to two particular moral hazard “problems” identified by contemporary underwriters–insurance by the Jews and the Irish–are explored.

Business historians have failed to recognize British women's participation in business. Beginning in the eighteenth century, English women overcame a range of socially constructed constraints to assume a more important role in financial and entrepreneurial activi-ties than has been hitherto acknowledged. Women's apparent affinity with the service sector in employment, self-employment, and business enterprise has encouraged a limited view of their activities, relegating them to a separate, female sphere, rather than viewing them as part of the masculine world of rational profit maximization. Several approaches drawing upon social and cultural ideas are proposed to rectify the prevailing blindness toward issues of gender. The eclectic methodological underpinning of British business history offers some hope that the topic of gender can soon be incorporated into the discipline.

The development of a national market was one of the key features of the nineteenth-century economy. In this process, innumerable institutions played a role, some large and well-known, others neither so large, nor quite so well-known, at least to the public at large. One such organization was the New York Cotton Exchange. It evolved in the aftermath of the Civil War, and over the years grew from an informal, even ad hoc organization into a formalized institution that served both public and private functions. This article by Mr. Lipartito explores the development of the Exchange and its place in the shifting national market for cotton.

Structural changes during the past two centuries shaped Spanish women's economic activity in firms, family businesses, and self-employment, reflecting women's adaptation to a social system that assigned gender-specific roles and rights. In response to the discriminatory effects of labor segregation, Spain's female workers specialized in the service-sector jobs that were available to them. Until the twentieth century, Spanish women's business initiatives in this sector were mainly in domestic service, retail distribution, and social services. During the 1900s, the cumulative impact of rapid industrialization, the growth of service industries, legal reform, and the shift to a democratic system in Spain during the 1970s paved the way for women to enter public and private firms as professionals. As a result, more women became self-employed or helped to run family businesses related to tourism, the hotel and restaurant industries, design, fashion, and the arts.

This article focuses on the construction of turnkey hospitals in Latin America by the German electromedical equipment maker Siemens-Reiniger-Werke (SRW) in the 1950s and 1960s. After World War II, SRW was unable to return to the overseas markets it had lost during the war through only the export of goods. Hospital construction was thus a way to reenter these markets, offering local governments a new form of service and product: a German hospital. In order to achieve this strategy, SRW organized and directed an informal association called Deutsche Hospitalia, which gathered together some thirty German manufacturers involved in the process of building a fully equipped hospital. This article argues that SRW, by diffusing a standardized hospital model in Latin America, contributed to the globalization of medicine.

Executives of today's public companies face a considerably different set of opportunities and constraints than did their counterparts in the managerial capitalism era, which reached its apex in the 1950s and 1960s. The growing importance of corporate governance featured prominently as circumstances changed for those running public companies. This article explores these developments, taking into account high-profile corporate scandals occurring in the first half of the 1970s and the early 2000s, the 1980s “Deal Decade,” the “imperial” chief executive phenomenon, and changes to the roles played by directors and shareholders of public companies.

This article explores the first attempt by American physiologists to assist employers with the stubborn problem of tired workers. It examines the work of Frederic Lee and the Committee on Industrial Fatigue, which was set up to increase productivity in the face of the long hours deemed necessary for war readiness. Despite the biomedical investigators' strenuous efforts and their incisive critique of Taylorism, however, corporate management found few practical uses for their findings and remedial proposals. Instead, industrial physiology helped to pave the way for rival consultants from psychology.

Founded in 1892, General Electric set out to dominate the American electrical industry. This article is an explanation of how the company accomplished this goal in the highly profitable electric lamp (“light bulb”) market. GE's techniques included technology leadership through in-house development and the purchase of patent rights, discriminatory agreements with suppliers based on market power, and cartel arrangements of various sorts, both foreign and domestic. The article shows how one company was able to use financial and market power, combined with early control of a rapidly developing technology, to gain and then hold a major American market for half a century.