The three companies whose history forms the subject of this article became leaders in a sector of the British economy—consumer goods—generally regarded as one of the most successful in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Product innovation and development, achieved internally or through acquisition, enabled these firms to become market leaders. We therefore analyze the processes of product development within the three firms, using a systematic framework that allows us to offer generalizations about the process of product innovation and development in the consumer goods sector in Britain. We conclude that gradual modification, rather than revolutionary innovation, was characteristic of product development in the household goods trade, and that technology was less important for success than marketing skill.

The electromechanical vibrator originated in the late nineteenth century as a device for medical therapy. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, however, marketing of vibrators as consumer appliances became pervasive. Ads appeared in the pages of The New York Times and Scientific American and plastered street cars. Companies marketed vibrators to grandparents, mothers, infants, and young adults. Vibrators are widely sold today, however, as instruments for masturbation, a use that was rarely mentioned but well known before World War II. How was vibrator advertising able to become so ubiquitous during the early twentieth century, despite draconian antiobscenity laws and antimasturbation rhetoric? This article argues that companies achieved this result by shaping the meaning of vibrators through strategic marketing. This marketing overtly portrayed vibrators as nonsexual while covertly conveying their sexual uses through imagery and the sale of phallic, dildo-like attachments.

Companies positioned vibrators within two major consumer product categories in the early 1900s: labor-saving household appliances and electrotherapeutic devices. By advertising the vibrator as both a labor-saving household appliance and a sexualized health panacea, companies could slip vibrator ads past the censors, while supplying user manuals that clued consumers into specific sexual uses. In household appliance ads, companies drew on traditional gender roles to present vibrators as emblems of domesticity and motherhood, whereas in electrotherapeutic ads they presented vibrators as symbols of progressive gender roles, the sexualized new woman and the body-conscious “self-made man.”

With few exceptions, historians have argued that in the nineteenth century women were excluded from most retail activities. In Europe women became increasingly concentrated in small-scale, undercapitalized, and short-lived stores. The “separate sphere” ideology in its different guises underlay this evolution. In North America, on the other hand, women capitalized on this ideology to carve a niche for themselves in trade and retailing. Women were not marginalized or segregated everywhere in Europe, however. In northern France the expansion of retail trade and overall improvements in standards of living provided women, especially married ones, with opportunities they were not reluctant to grasp. Though the activities of married women remained subordinated to the needs of their families, female retailers were neither particularly impoverished nor segregated in sectors deemed appropriate for persons of their sex.

A new conceptualization of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is presented as a means of asserting and maintaining corporate control in the face of political, economic, and social challenges. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) applied different strategies to maintain control of its Iranian assets in the face nationalist demands—political and covert mechanisms, market based, resource access controls, and CSR programs. This paper investigates the third, and least explored, strand of their strategy. It identifies managerial strategies for CSR engagement with respect to three corresponding interest groups: politicians and diplomats, shareholders, and local employees, drawing on a variety of previously unused archival sources. From prior studies it is unclear whether the AIOC's CSR programs, for example, in employment and housing, were motivated by social improvement, its business agenda, or responses to legislative pressures from the Iranian government. A detailed examination of CSR policy and private correspondence between AIOC's senior executives about their negotiations with the Iranian government shows that they engaged in and reported voluntary CSR activities to strengthen their reputation and negotiating position but refused to compromise on aspects of CSR that threatened the existing managerial hierarchy of control. This interpretation is supported by a content analysis of the company's annual reports in the years before and after nationalization, revealing a choice of topics and language intended to support its self-presentation as a socially concerned employer. The results of this study have wider implications for understanding CSR reporting as a corporate strategy to enhance negotiating and bargaining positions.

In response to Eric Godelier's call for a partnership between business history and the management sciences I argue for a vision of business history as history. Whilst acknowledging the institutional and intellectual pressures to which the discipline is subject I argue such a turn is important for the continued health of the field. Such a turn will, however, also require engaging with fundamental questions of epsitemology.

Historians have become increasingly interested in networks as an analytical tool for eighteenth-century commerce. In much of the historiography these networks are treated as inherently beneficial for the wider economy and the actors themselves. Recently, however, historians have started to problematize networks and to complicate our understanding of them. Indeed, the quote above stresses that a network is not simply the actors within it, but the relationships between them. Realizing this facilitates an understanding of how such networks function.

The article reconstructs the history of the Italian state-owned holding Finmeccanica, which since its birth in 1948 lived through a number of corporate reorganizations (shipyards, automobiles with Alfa Romeo, energy) and is now one of the leading European companies in aerospace and defence. With reference to the history of the Italian state entrepreneurship, this case may be paradigmatic of the advent of a new era, characterized by partially privatized enterprises in sectors considered strategic which are successful in the international arena (Finmeccanica, ENI). The article shows that the aeronautics, space and electronics divisions began in the 1950s and as a result of their technological characteristics were kept relatively free from political interference, with a strong propensity to pursue internationalization and thus competitiveness. The conclusion is that, under certain conditions, state ownership may result effective in ensuring not only adequate financial resources, but also a proper managerial governance.

Contemporary sub-Saharan Africa presents a puzzle to many observers, and has generally been perceived as a hostile environment to modern business. It is indeed difficult to make sense of politics and business on the continent without understanding how African colonies turned into independent countries since the late 1950s, and how they evolved into postcolonial states from the 1970s onwards. Imperial business was witness to these fundamental changes in African societies and deeply affected by it. Although some economic indicators in the 1970s were relatively favorable (many commodity prices were high), this was the decade when the severe decline of Africa, both in relative and absolute terms, began.

This article looks at the early development of the temporary help industry in Britain. It focuses on the activities of one of the largest suppliers of temporary workers, Manpower, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Drawing on material from The UK National Archives, the article examines Manpower's efforts to gain access as a genuine employer to the state employment exchange network to advertise their temporary vacancies. The article reveals the incremental changes in attitude within the government towards Manpower's activities and argues that this gave the company a competitive advantage over other employment agencies, facilitating their development of relations with the government and the trade unions in Britain over the 1970s and 1980s. The main conclusion of the article is that explicit attention needs to be paid to the actions and strategies of agencies themselves in order to develop an adequate understanding of the growth and development of the temporary help industry.

At the present time, the Norwegian state owns a large number of business enterprises. The state controls around 35 percent of the total values on the Oslo Stock Exchange, and five of the seven largest listed companies are partially owned by the state, ranging from 34 to 64 percent. This article traces the background of state ownership from the formative phase of state involvement in the modern economy, and it demonstrates how this ownership provided growth in state enterprises after 1945. The broad support for large state enterprises is explained by ongoing national, political, social, and economic contexts. There is a high level of trust in the state, which is perceived as a protector of common interests. Broad support is also based on the fact that there is a lack of private investors and a strong inclination to restrict foreign influence in the domestic economy.

This article examines the “state of the art” and the current debates on the subject of women entrepreneurs, presenting some preliminary observations and hypotheses regarding the role of business-women in Italian economic development. Reasons for the new historiographic interest in female entrepreneurship are identified, and the primary methodological difficulties encountered in its historical study—starting with establishing the definition and the statistical parameters of the woman entrepreneur and discussing her social and juridical “invisibility”—are summarized. Finally, suggestions are made about possible directions for research on key historical trends important in shaping female entrepreneurial abilities in the Italian context.

This article considers how the joint-stock banks established trust within the local marketplace. We undertake a new investigation of pictures of senior bank management. Building on the expansion of the art market in the nineteenth century, joint-stock banks used portraits as a public and visual mechanism to commemorate their successes and accomplishments. Portraiture, as a well-established art form, provided enterprises with a historical legacy that for many did not, as yet, exist. Through the use of portraiture, banks attempted to solidify their identity and add to the sitter’s social standing, as well as signal the new organization’s reputation for high culture, prestige, and professionalism to those who viewed these artworks. These illustrations personified the company and gave a human face to the early joint-stock economy.

This article places the British and American postal telegraph movements in the broader context of a transatlantic reform tradition. More specifically, British nationalization in 1870 gave American reformers both a rallying point and a rationale for postalizing the telegraphs. The legacies of both movements were mixed. In Britain, the postal telegraph provided inexpensive and accessible service, but it soon ran a large deficit and retarded the development of the telephone industry. In the United States, reformers failed to nationalize the telegraph or to secure a place in historical memory, but they succeeded in pressuring Western Union to provide better service, and they provided the impetus for the municipal ownership movement of the Progressive Era.

This paper compares the corporate network strategies between multinational corporations of two different origins (United States and Spain), business groups, and state-owned enterprises in the public utility sector of a developing country going through economic and political transitions. The transitions we consider are from an import substitution industrialization model to an open market economy and from a democratic regime to a dictatorial one and back to democracy. We analyze the Chilean telecommunications sector between 1958 and 2005 and find that during a democratic regime all firms sought to build more networks with each other, while incentives decrease under an authoritarian regime. In the protectionist era, US investors built links with Chile’s corporate elite, while in times of an open economy, Spanish investors built these links with the government. State-owned corporations did not attempt to build links with other actors at any time, and business groups sought to build most networks among members of the group. Our findings challenge two commonly held assumptions: first, that open economies decrease incentives for domestic actors to build links with each other and, second, that close political regimes increase incentives to build networks among economic actors.

Business is commonly regarded as one of the powerful actors in the world today. However, this position is neither as straightforward as often believed nor particularly new. Nevertheless, business historians have not focused on the topic of business power to date, often leaving it as something lurking in the background of their analyses. There are signs that this may be beginning to change with the growth of studies on the history of capitalism, but this revised presidential address encourages business historians to engage more fully and explicitly with the concept of power and to recognize the different ways in which the concept can be used to enlighten the study of business history.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, British society experienced a rise in real incomes and a change in its composition, with the expansion of the middle classes. These two factors led to a consumer revolution, with a growing, but still segmented, demand for household goods that could express status and aspiration. At the same time technological changes and new ways of marketing and selling goods made these goods more affordable. This paper analyzes these themes and the process of mediation that took place between producers, retailers, and consumers, by looking at the most culturally symbolic of nineteenth century consumer goods, the piano.

In this article the organization of early modern trade is analyzed through a case study of the business of Hans Thijs, an Antwerp merchant who worked in Danzig and Amsterdam in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. His career demonstrates how early modern merchants combined markets, personal relations, and firms to govern their transactions. The complementary relationships among these institutions helped to minimize information and enforcement costs. A comparison of Hans Thijs' business organization in Danzig (1585–1595) and in Amsterdam (1595–1611) shows that trade was governed more efficiently in markets of greater scale and scope.

In this article, the authors interrogate legal and economic history to analyze the process by which the Chicago School of Antitrust emerged in the 1950s and became dominant in the United States. They show that the extent to which economic objectives and theoretical views shaped the inception of antitrust law. After establishing the minor influence of economics in the promulgation of U.S. competition law, they highlight U.S. economists’ caution toward antitrust until the Second New Deal and analyze the process by which the Chicago School developed a general and coherent framework for competition policy. They rely mainly on the seminal and programmatic work of Director and Levi (1956) and trace how this theoretical paradigm became collective—that is, the “economization” process in U.S. antitrust. Finally, the authors discuss the implications and possible pitfalls of such a conversion to economics-led antitrust enforcement.

Narratives of flexible specialization as an alternative to mass production are largely absent from the industrial history of twentieth-century Britain. In this article, I challenge the notion that we should relegate small firms and industrial districts to a marginal place in the historiography of this period. Drawing from a range of sources, I explore the history of Birmingham's jewelry makers to show how they adapted the traditional productive system of the district to respond in a dynamic way to the challenges of rapid product market differentiation. As jewelry increasingly became a commodity for mass consumption, the firms in the Birmingham district used a combination of specialty and mass production as a strategy to both satisfy and create demand.