Coca Cola is frequently used to signal the large-scale transformation from socialism to capitalism in eastern and middle Europe, which began in East Germany in the autumn of 1989. In the famous German Wende-movie Goodbye Lenin, the caffeinated drink figures prominently. The main character in this movie is a middle-aged woman who has fallen into coma during one of the mass demonstrations in Berlin, in November 1989. When she finally wakes up, about one year later, her country no longer exists. Her children successfully hide this fact from her, surrounding her with the material remnants of the past. One day, when she gets out of bed, she sees people attaching a huge banner of Coca Cola to the large flat in front of her apartment bloc. The scene marks the beginning of her awareness that the world in which she used to live is definitively gone.

Foreign direct investment entered into the Ottoman Empire to support and develop foreign trade. Europeans who wanted to sell their manufactured products and acquire raw materials were instrumental in the construction of trade-related infrastructure in this country. Therefore, the first French investments, like those of other countries, were made for constructing railways and ports. The growth of raw material production in primary commodities, finally led to an increase in the number of foreign service companies such as banks and insurance providers that served these transport and production facilities. The initial motivations of French investors were mainly economic as they tried to find new markets and secure a viable share in these markets before their international competitors. Motives gradually became political as the opinion about the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire got stronger by the end of the nineteenth century. The French government assisted its investors in obtaining important concessions for investments in Anatolia, the Balkans, and the Arab provinces of the Empire.

In many countries governments and labor unions have contested the post-war rise of temporary agency work, arguing that this innovation infringed on workers' rights and security. We investigate the rhetorical strategies used by Dutch temporary work agencies (TWAs) to gain legitimacy for their business between 1961 and 1996. Our conclusion is that the TWAs' trade association ABU developed a sophisticated rhetoric of “self-restraint” to legitimize the deployment of a non-standard labor arrangement. The core message was that – if applied properly - agency work did not threaten permanent employment. The complexity of the inclusive nature of this rhetorical approach, aiming to acknowledge the concerns of multiple stakeholders, was reflected in ABU's difficulty in aligning its claims of socially responsible behavior with an effective defense of the sector's economic interests. Still, the consistent focus on restraint lent credibility to the claimed function of “allocating” workers to their jobs that eventually gained the TWA industry fundamental acceptance as a responsible labor market actor.

Although medieval pilgrimage has been the subject of extensive historical research, the economic and financial dimension has been somewhat neglected. This paper is an attempt to provide a synthesis of published and unpublished work on pilgrimage, focusing on the business management and promotional aspects of pilgrimage shrines. From the literature reviewed, it is clear that many ‘modern’ business practices were being widely used by pilgrimage centers throughout Europe in the middle ages. Examples can be found of active brand management and promotional techniques adopted by shrines operating within a highly competitive market for pilgrimage services.