This article challenges the idea that the corporation is a globally superior form of business organization and that the Anglo-American common-law is more conducive to economic development than the code-based legal systems characteristic of continental Europe. Although the corporation had important advantages over the main alternative form of organization (partnerships), it also had disadvantages that limited its appeal to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). As a result, when businesses were provided with an intermediate choice, the private limited liability company (PLLC) that combined the advantages of legal personhood and joint stock with a flexible internal organizational structure, most chose not to organize as corporations. This article tracks the changes that occurred in the menu of business organizational forms in two common-law countries (the United Kingdom and the United States) and two countries governed by legal codes (France and Germany) and presents data showing the rapidity with which firms in each country responded to enabling legislation for PLLCs. We show that the PLLC was introduced first and most easily in a code country (Germany) and last and with the most difficulty in a commonlaw country (the United States). Late introduction was associated with prolonged use of the partnership form, suggesting that the disadvantages of corporations did indeed weigh heavily on SMEs.

We provide here a complement to recent work on family business, which has demonstrated the need to go beyond the generic definition of the family firm to place personal capitalism in an appropriate institutional, historical, and cultural framework. By focusing on the nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century experiences in Britain, Spain, and Italy, we challenge the notion that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there was anything so simple as a Mediterranean model for family business. Rather, we demonstrate the need to consider family businesses in national and regional contexts if we are to understand their various capabilities and characteristics. We use similarities and differences in the experiences and responses of families and firms in the three countries to support this claim.

This paper analyzes cooperative enterprises' networks in the Italian economy, in accordance with recent economic theory, to throw light on the causes of their success of in the last 30 years. We reference the vast literature about business networks to identify some interpretative lines that can be transferred to the cooperative world. On this basis, a typology of the Italian cooperative networks is offered, in order to evaluate the competitive advantages of each type of net, their governance methods, their evolution, and their impact on the recent flourishing of Italian cooperatives. Our conclusion is that the use of networks by co-ops has been very intensive and can still be strengthened, if Italian co-op umbrella organizations will merge. Building large cooperative corporations was often the result of networking, as was the creation of joint stock companies owned by cooperatives.

The future matters to business history, because the adoption of new technology and new organizational forms has often been driven by acceptance of a collective sense of what the future will be. Investments are made and strategies set on an industry-wide basis, influenced by the predictions of business consultants, industry groups, and futurists. To explore the part played by the future in shaping the past, we focus on the establishment and early acceptance of the idea of a rapid and inevitable transition to a “cashless society” in the US retail financial services industry during the 1960s and 1970s. Our aim is thus to advance a methodological point rather than to arrive at a definitive conclusion about the future of money.

Traditional kinship relations denied African women access to property and cash income. As they moved out of the traditional sector to urban centers, women created opportunities for independent earnings, and they displayed remarkable entrepreneurial spirit in undertaking informal economic activities. One of their tactics was the utilization of a type of rotating credit and savings organization (ROSCA), the stokvel, to mobilize savings outside the formal financial structure. This article brings together scattered research on stokvels, traces their past and present uses by African women, and concludes with an exploration of the reasons for the persistence of these forms despite the development of sophisticated financial structures in modern South Africa.

Paul Rosenstein-Rodan argues that economic development requires coordinated investment in many interdependent industries, and prescribes a flood of state-controlled investment across all sectors—a so-called big push. Widespread government failure defeated twentieth-century ‘big push’ schemes. But spillovers across firms and industries, and from public goods, hold-up problems, and capital market limitations are real, and justify coordinated growth across sectors if it can be done without government failures. Large, extensively diversified pyramidal business groups of listed firms dominate the histories of developed economies and the economies of developing economies. Arguing that such groups provided this coordination in prewar Japan after a state-run big push failed, we propose that pyramidal business groups are private-sector mechanisms for coordinating big push growth, and that competition between rival groups induces efficiency unattainable in a state-run big push. We postulate that a successful business-group led big push requires economic openness, basic public goods, rule of law, separation of the state from business, and a timely demise of business groups when the big push phase is complete.Where these criteria are not met, growth stalls and oligarchic families become too powerful to dislodge.

Based on an analysis of the leading trading markets for stock in the United States, I document the dramatic expansion that took place in the scale and scope of the country's stock market from the mid-1880s to the early 1930s. My analysis suggests that a broadbased stock market was a long way from being established even by the early teens. It took the impetus provided by World War I, plus the enthusiasm of the 1920s, to bring such a market into existence. I consider the capacity of today's fashionable theories, which link the development of stock markets to improvements in minority shareholder protection, to explain the growth of the U.S. stock market, and find that they cannot account for the historical patterns that I identify. However, I suggest that there are other arguments that are worthy of further consideration. First, there were factors, besides minority shareholder rights, that led to changes in the demand for corporate stocks during this period, especially an increase in the demand for stocks by institutional investors, notably banks and insurance companies, as well as the emergence of a retail market for stocks after World War I. Second, there were also important developments in the supply of corporate stocks after the War, including the issuance of stock to fund the expansion of young firms, but especially to facilitate mergers and acquisitions by established firms, which seem to have played an important role in driving the expansion of the U.S. stock market.

Corporate elites have been all-male bastions until the twenty-first century. The recent inclusion of women in the corporate elite needs explanation because it is an abrupt change in recruitment practices. We consider female presence in corporate boards as a sign of the democratization of elite social networks. Building on a case study of the Netherlands that covers the last four decades, we show that the corporate elite has become more open to nonmembers of traditional elites. In the process, women have also entered the boardroom. Initially, these were predominantly female politicians, but more recently many large corporations have recruited foreign females. We argue that the incremental feminization of the corporate elite was in the beginning—that is in the 1970s—initiated by the state but was subsequently pushed forward by the internationalization of corporate governance. We have traced the professional background of all female board members of the largest firms in the Netherlands over the period 1969–2011. We show that the female board members do not form a homogeneous group. The first wave of female directors had a political background, the second wave had an academic background, whereas the third wave was recruited from within the corporations. In this third wave, foreign female directors became predominant. Elites open up their ranks and privileged positions to women, but they do so reluctantly and under outside pressure.

Around 1900 Britain was exceptionally suited to pioneering large scale enterprises because of the precocious development of its equity markets and London's experimentation with a more eclectic range of corporate governance techniques than the world's smaller and less cosmopolitan financial centers. Information dissemination, incentives, and reputation—developed by a serendipitous mix of legal compulsions and flexible voluntarism—set the scene for the growth of large, UK-based, national and international corporations in the twentieth century.

“The investment business is not with us as well developed or as well understood as it is in England.”

W. H. Lyon, Capitalization (Boston, 1913), 207.

In a series of recent essays, including their contributions to this symposium, Richard N. Langlois and Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Daniel M. G. Raff, and Peter Temin (hereafter LRT) present interesting but contradictory views of the decentralized or vertically disintegrated post-Chandlerian economy from whose vantage point they seek to reconceptualize business history. Starting from an orientation that uneasily combines Adam Smith’s ideas about the division of labor with organizational learning, Langlois sees the current situation as dominated by the modularization of production. This modularization and the arm’s-length transactions it facilitates create a world reminiscent of the antebellum United States, although today’s highthroughput differentiated exchanges are underpinned by a set of market-supporting institutions, notably standard interfaces or design rules. Starting from an orientation toward Oliver Williamson and the minimization of coordination costs, LRT in contrast see a world of collaborators joined by long-term, largely informal relations of a distinct type reducible neither to markets nor hierarchies.

In this article, I argue that organizations' historical narratives are a basic and important component of their culture and identity, and that these narratives can be resources as well as constraints. I combine a narrative approach with Joanne Martin's three perspective theory of organizational culture, and using the transformation of Danish savings banks as a case, I demonstrate how a narrative approach can provide a new and better understanding of organizational behaviour and change than mainstream economics and the abundant functionalist organizational culture literature. I demonstrate how, when change was called for by external pressures, the savings banks choice set was constrained by a shared narrative about their historical origins. This narrative, in turn, constituted the identity, image and organizational culture of savings banks and to a high degree restrained learning capabilities, created organizational inertia and delayed the adoption of a new strategy.

The sewing machine was one of the first standardized and mass-marketed complex consumer durables to have been diffused widely around the world before 1920. This global diffusion was almost the sole responsibility of one firm, Singer. Despite its American origins, Singer’s success lay principally overseas. New data provide insight into the company’s international marketing strategies. Although the firm had a reputation for marketing sophistication, Singer did not depend on price discrimination, extensive advertising, or loss-leading expansion of retail networks in its overseas markets. Rather, its success was due to the characteristics of consumer demand for sewing machines, features that combined with its strategic investments in market support services and in its selling organization to create Singer’s enormous competitive advantages in foreign markets.

Historians generally agree that modern brands arose from the vertically integrated corporations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and were used as competitive weapons between like firms. Looking at the alcoholic beverage trade and drawing on trade press, court reports, newspaper advertising, business records, and accounts of consumer behavior, I suggest that, on the contrary, supply chains made up of small firms played both an earlier and a significant part in the genesis of modern brands. In these chains, firms used branding not only to fight direct competitors but also to discipline and subordinate other links in the chain over whom they had no direct control and with whom they had to cooperate.

Both business executives and management scholars have, in recent years, focused a great deal of attention on the theme of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Calls for business leaders to expend resources on behalf of “social good” tend to downplay, if not ignore, what is fundamentally an ideological question: just what is a “good” society and who defines “goodness”? The ideological underpinnings of social responsibility and its relationship to the “good” society can be explored through an historical perspective. The roots of the CSR movement trace back to the early years of the Cold War. Led by Donald K David, Dean of the Harvard Business School and supported by other academics and executives given voice on the pages of the Harvard Business Review, advocates urged expanded business social responsibility as a means of aligning business interests with the defense of free-market capitalism against what was depicted as the clear-and-present danger of Soviet Communism. Today's enthusiastic calls for business to “do well by doing good” could benefit from a similar critical analysis not just of the goals of CSR but also the ideological assumptions, often unacknowledged, that underlie those goals.

By taking note of new developments in economic theory and cultural theory, business historians have the opportunity to lead a reintegration of mentality and materiality in the study of history. This task will require rethinking the field’s traditional approach to strategy, structure, organization, and culture. An emerging literature of practice theory and the shift from a linguistic to a practice based model of culture offer to business historians, and to all interested in the economic past, a way to conduct this integration. The new approach will complement but go beyond the economics of information, institutions and behavior. Though the task will require some new methods and approaches, the result will bring the study of business and economic history to the forefront of history.

Relationship marketing has received little attention from business historians who have favored the study of branding, associational advertising, market research, and the role of marketing agencies, particularly in relation to modern consumer manufacturing. Although the term relationship marketing is of recent origin, we analyze its practice under a different guise, “connections,” over several centuries: we draw on the extensive archival evidence of a rural business services industry in Australia and New Zealand. Relationship marketing's emphasis upon close and enduring individual customer relationships mitigated uncertainty of performance and behaviour, on both sides of the transaction, created by a long and geographically extended supply chain. The success of these relationships contributed to the primary industry-led economic development of both nations.

Founded in 1956, the Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI) was established with the objective of professionalizing management in post-colonial India through training, research, and consultancy. It was modeled on the Administrative Staff College at Henley-on-Thames (Henley), in the United Kingdom. Like Henley, ASCI used syndicates for its management training programs. Between 1958 and 1973, ASCI received more than $1.26 million from the Ford Foundation, part of which was used to finance the development and use of the case method in ASCI’s training programs, and later more widely in its research and consultancy. This article traces the ways by which the Ford Foundation––as a dominating institution––stigmatized Henley and ASCI, their institutional practices, and the wider Indian society; and legitimized the case method pioneered at the Harvard Business School. Imbricated in the Cold War’s geo-politics, Ford Foundation’s interventions in Hyderabad should be understood as part of the emergence of the United States as the dominant neo-colonial power, which required the displacement of Britain, its institutions, and their practices as the template for India’s post-colonial management institutions.

In 1977, when Alfred D. Chandler's pathbreaking book The Visible Hand appeared, the large, vertically integrated, “Chandlerian” corporation had dominated the organizational landscape for nearly a century. In some interpretations, possibly including Chandler's own, The Visible Hand and subsequent works constitute a triumphalist account of the rise of that organizational form: the large, vertically integrated firm arose and prospered because of its inherent superiority, in all times and places, to more decentralized, market-oriented production arrangements. A quarter century later, however, the Chandlerian firm no longer dominates the landscape. It is under siege from a panoply of decentralized and market-like forms that often resemble some of the “inferior” nineteenth-century structures that the managerial enterprise had replaced.

The historiographies of Mexico and Brazil have implicitly stated that business networks were crucial for the initial industrialization of these two countries. Recently, differing visions on the importance of business networks have arisen. In the case of Mexico, the literature argues that entrepreneurs relied heavily on an informal institutional structure to obtain necessary resources and information. In contrast, the recent historiography of Brazil suggests that after 1890 the network of corporate relations became less important for entrepreneurs trying to obtain capital and concessions, once the institutions promoted financial markets and easy entry for new businesses. Did entrepreneurs in Brazil and Mexico organize their networks differently to deal with the different institutional settings? We examine whether in Mexico businessmen relied more on networks of interlocking boards of directors and other informal arrangements to do business than in Brazil. Our hypothesis is confirmed by three related results: (1) the total number of connections (i.e., the density of the network) was higher in Mexico than Brazil; (2) in Mexico, there was one dense core network, while in Brazil we find fairly dispersed clusters of corporate board interlocks; and most importantly, (3) politicians played a more important role in the Mexican network of corporate directors than their counterparts in Brazil. Interestingly, even though Brazil and Mexico relied on very different institutional structures, both countries had similar rates of growth between 1890 and 1913. However, the dense and exclusive Mexican network might have ended up increasing the social and political tensions that led to the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920).

The social conditions that affect innovation change over time and vary across productive activities. Hence theoretical analysis of the innovative enterprise must be integrated with historical study through the use of what I call a historical-transformation methodology—a methodology that stands in sharp contrast to, but can nonetheless be complemented by, the constrained-optimization methodology favored by conventional economists. In surveying some major attempts to analyze the role of the business enterprise in generating superior economic performance in the advanced economies, including the works of Oliver Williamson, Alfred Chandler, Edith Penrose, and resource-based theorists, I explain what a historical-transformation methodology is and why such a methodology is needed for understanding how and under what conditions business enterprises can in fact be innovative enterprises.