This paper presents a reading of British literary representations of commercial travelers between 1800 and 1939. Three forms of representation are used: nonfiction representations by others, travelers' self-representations, and fictional representations. We find remarkable continuity in representations of commercial travelers across this long time period, particularly in terms of a sustained tension between the image of the disreputable “drummer” and the more respectable “model” salesman. These readings and findings are used to address two debates: one concerned with the timing of any transition to “modern” selling and salesmanship in Britain; and the second having to do with the processes whereby British society accommodated itself to modernity, commercialization, and the birth of a consumer society.

Richard Rumelt, Dan Schendel, and David Teece are clear: “The foundation of strategic management as a field may very well be traced to the 1962 publication of Chandler's Strategy and Structure.” For these three doyens of strategy, Alfred Chandler was a fundamental influence on the shape of the strategic-management discipline that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet, unlike the two other pioneers they identify, Kenneth Andrews and Igor Ansoff, Chandler stood firmly outside the discipline, working as a business historian, not as a strategist. Remarkably, it is Chandler's work that resonates most strongly in the discipline today and, I shall argue, still offers the most powerful inspiration for scholarly work in the future.

In this survey of the trajectory of Latin American business history, the focus is on its development over the course of the past twenty years, when the discipline began to be recognized as a field of specialization within historical studies. The first section is a consideration of the origins of business history in Latin America, from the 1960s to 1985. The second section, covering 1985 to the present, is an analysis of the institutionalization of Latin American business history as research expanded and practitioners in the field began to adopt a more professional approach to their work. In the third section, the focus is on the topics that have attracted the most attention during the previous two decades, identifying research trends that have transcended national differences as well as some notable traits of Latin American business. The last section, a consideration of how Latin America can contribute both to business history and to comparative studies, concludes with proposals for a new research agenda.

Recently, a number of groups sponsored large international research projects that are concerned with business history. Harm G. Schröter's group investigated the European integration that followed the Treaty of Rome in 1957 in order to discover whether it had led to the appearance of a characteristically “European” corporation. Franco Amatori, Camilla Brautaset, and Youssef Cassis coordinated an analysis with the ambitious title “The Performance of European Business in the Twentieth Century.” The projects shared some common “Chandlerian” features: they were problem-oriented, comparative studies of the long-term development of large enterprises, and their goal was to propose illuminating generalizations. Such Chandler-inspired studies are likely to undergo a renaissance in the next couple of years. Still, as the term “renaissance” implies, Chandler's impact on European business studies has undergone upswings and downturns over the past four decades.

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.

In recent years, business history has become a rich and varied terrain for research in Latin America. In this essay, I will present an overview of key aspects of banking history in the region, with an emphasis on the sources that are available in Argentina and Mexico. The extensive archives that have been built up in both countries offer historians the opportunity to study an array of topics: histories of individual banks; the evolution of banking systems; the relation between banking firms and industrial and agricultural development; the role of banks in government finance; the unique historical trajectories of central banks; the rise and relative decline of state-development banks; and the complex history of foreign banks in Latin America from the nineteenth century to the present.

The work and ideas of Alfred D.Chandler Jr. have enriched the field of Japanese business history and our understanding of that nation's industrial development. Chandler's studies about the rise of the large, professionally managed, multidivisional firm in the United States highlight factors critical not only to the United States' capitalist system but also to Japan's. Indeed, large firms played a dominant role in Japan's economic takeoff in the late 1800s. As these companies grew, they were transformed into professionally managed corporations. Managers, operating in a clear hierarchical chain of command, built up huge companies, such as Nihon Denki (NEC), Toshiba, Mitsubishi Electric, Hitachi, Nippon Steel, Matsushita, and Toyota. In Japanese as in U.S. firms, the visible hand of management was critical to controlling the flow of work, from the input of raw materials to the production of finished goods.

We invited John Quelch and Katherine Jocz, authors of Greater Good: How Good Marketing Makes for Better Democracy (2008), to discuss some of the articles they found most interesting and important from the past half-century of marketing journals.

Once upon a time, in the 1950s, Alfred Chandler was a student of history, doing what most young, untenured assistant professors of history do. He was applying for a grant. His aim was to conduct research on the 1927 reorganization of the Standard Oil Corporation of New Jersey for a chapter in a forthcoming book that was to become Strategy and Structure.