This article explores the activities in Russia, between 1889 and the Revolution of 1917, of J. & P. Coats, the British multinational firm that manufactured cotton thread. The main motive for Coats's local manufacturing in Russia was to avoid import duties. Manufacturing facilities were secured by means of a joint venture and acquisitions in St. Petersburg, Riga and Lodz. The Russian business was under the full control of the headquarters in Paisley, U.K., and this policy contrasts with the more decentralized management style preferred by many other British multinationals of the day. Despite the unstable political situation in Russia, Coats's mills performed better than their competitors, and accounted for some 90 percent of the national demand by the time they were confiscated in 1917.

The first magnetic recorder, the telegraphone, was invented in 1898 in Denmark. Despite favorable publicity and considerable investment, the telegraphone was a commercial failure. This article uses the theoretical concept of “frames of meaning” to explain that failure, focusing on three factors in particular: Denmark's status as a technologically peripheral country, the telephone orientation of the telegraphone's inventors, and management failures by the firm set up to manufacture the machine.

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.

This article answers, in part, questions raised by new rural and agricultural historians concerning how farmers interacted with the rise of large-scale organizational society in the era after the 1896 Presidential election. It argues that California citrus growers reacted by bringing the revolution of corporate capitalism to Southern California, 1893–1920. The article tests the activities of California orange growers against the theoretical models of Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. and Martin J. Sklar. It concludes that a pro-corporate group of orange growers embraced corporate managerial capitalism at a time when most other American farmers were in open revolt against industrialization. In 1912, these growers appointed G. Harold Powell, pomologist with the USDA's Bureau of Plant Industry, as General manager of their mammoth California Fruit Growers Exchange. By 1920, Powell and the Exchange board of directors completed the corporate consolidation of the citrus enterprise, and by example the reconstruction of California's potent agricultural empire.

Analysts of the post-war German “economic miracle” (Wirtschaftswunder) have diverged sharply over its origins and dynamic. The well-known Olson thesis stresses the importance of a radical break in institutions and interests, while other historians have recently posited the centrality of continuities from the fascist era to the Bonn republic. This article examines the history of Volkswagen, the largest firm in the crucial automobile industry, to understand the balance between continuity and change and systemic and conjunctural factors in the impressive success of this firm. Tolliday rejects the Olsonian notion of institutional “cleansing” and argues that the legacies of both fascism and the British Occupation were vital but that during the 1950s overlapping institutional structures, argumentative interest groups and rival political coalitions at VW could well have choked off growth in the absence of quite favorable circumstances.

The company union movement in the United States during the 1920s cannot be understood entirely in terms of employers' efforts either to block independent unionization or to foster greater worker loyalty through the paternalistic provisions of “welfare capitalism.” Company unions were institutional mechanisms by which workers voiced their concerns about shopfloor conditions to employers instead of exiting the firm. Evidence suggests that company unions led to both enhanced shopfloor productivity and safety, and were thus mutually beneficial for labor and management. Interestingly, however, the process by which they emerged was filled with conflict, historical contingency, and unintended consequences. Company unions were neither an inevitable nor even an intentional replacement for voluntary quits as a mechanism for addressing workers' shopfloor discontent.

Using a Chandlerian strategy/structure framework for comparative purposes, the authors examine the early development of an important public institution, The World Bank Group. As they demonstrate, The Bank gradually evolved toward the model provided by the multidivisional or M-form corporation. In its early years, The Bank was a centralized organization with functional departments and a unique check and balance system to control lending. Guided by signals coming from its development personnel, The Bank evolved incrementally until 1952, when a formal reorganization took place. In the years that followed, functional considerations continued to reshape this innovative institution. Then, under President Robert McNamara, The Bank acquired a new and broader mission that led to another formal reorganization in 1972. The authors analyze the cultural as well as organizational aspects of these changes, relating them to a series of long cycles of innovation at The Bank.

By any measure, major-league baseball in North America surely qualifies as big business. The national pastime is a vital component of today's urban political economy, and baseball teams resemble other high-prestige businesses in that cities must compete for the privilege of hosting them—whatever their true worth. This article analyzes the transfer of the Milwaukee Braves baseball franchise to Atlanta in 1965 as the outcome of “competitive boosterism,” or the active participation of local elites in luring trade, industry, and investment from other cities for the purpose of economic development.

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.

The micro-scale businesses of independent craft producers have received little attention from historians. This article examines the links between the financing and use of capital by these businesses, and the ambiguous social position of the petit bourgeois business owners. A quantitative examination of the relative importance of the various sources of finance for these firms is assessed in the context of the generally accepted picture of financing for British industry, revealing differences in the pattern of funding for micro-scale enterprises. The ambiguous social relationships between the micro-scale business owners and the larger bourgeoisie, and with the working class, are partly explained by the underlying economic relationships. In particular the supply of trade credit by larger firms, and the use of credit and infrequent wage payments in their relationships with the working class, are identified as important elements.

By the 1930s, the American Locomotive Company (ALCo) and the Electromotive Company (EMC) controlled the diesel locomotive industry. Although ALCo enjoyed sound financial status, decades of experience in steam locomotive production, and close ties with its customers, it quickly lost ground to the newly established EMC. Electromotive's founder, Harold Hamilton, emphasized the importance of marketing, including post-sales support services, and his strategy helped Electromotive to surpass ALCo's diesel locomotive production by 1935. ALCo continued to neglect its marketing capabilities, and remained a poor second to Electromotive until it ceased production altogether in 1969. ALCo failed in large part because it could not modify its corporate culture, which was superbly equipped for steam locomotive production but ill-suited to the diesel locomotive industry.