This article examines how globalization shaped work and employment in the German shipbuilding industry in the second half of the twentieth century. Official documents show that, as a response to global competition, originally large and labor-intensive shipyards in the northwest of Germany evolved into lean and nimble high-technology companies across four decades. Oral history interviews with former migrant and nonmigrant staff of two leading shipyards reveal that this large-scale industry transformation is a hitherto hidden history of labor mobility, migration, and evolving dimensions of diversity in the workplace. Migration is a lens through which to understand how corporate responses to global developments led to persistent patterns of social exclusion and inequality between and within groups of workers with and without migrant backgrounds that have not been documented before, namely: social divisions, unequal access to vocational training and retraining programs, unequal career opportunities, unfair redundancies, and unequal impact of precarious work.

Chocolate is a Sucre trademark, one of the few products that this Bolivian city regularly markets to other parts of the country. Despite Sucre's long history of chocolate production, however, the city's chocolate industry at the turn of the twenty-first century remains small, unable to export, and generally uncompetitive with products from neighboring countries. Yet Sucre's chocolate-making enterprises have not disappeared; they continue to produce on a small scale in the face of mass-produced, imported brands. In this article, the history of Sucre's chocolate industry is examined to shed light on larger issues of industrial development and “underdevelopment” in Sucre and on the roots of the city's strong artisan identity.

This dissertation summary introduces a new perspective on the legal and economic history of patents in the late nineteenth century. Through a case study of the early telephone industry in Britain and the United States, the dissertation explores interactions between business strategies and national legal regimes, and proposes a revised view of the multi-layered relationship between patents and industrial organization.

In the early 2000s, California-based Guayakí popularized the caffeinated drink, yerba mate, among young people and creative types. With revenues of $100 million, Guayakí dominates the U.S. market where it is synonymous with yerba mate. This essay explores how Guayakí transformed a foreign product with deep local meaning, widespread popularity, and a long history in southern South America from a shared beverage and social practice into a healthy energy drink. Typically, localization entails multinational companies and local consumers adapting and giving new meanings to an exotic foreign product or brand. In contrast, local entrepreneurs radically changed yerba mate while preserving part of its narrative. Guayakí promotes product authenticity based on a narrative of South American Indigenous origins, stimulating qualities, and health benefits that fits with superfoods, while a narrative of green capitalism promotes brand authenticity. But that was not enough to popularize yerba mate. The product had to be adapted to consumer taste preferences and values that challenge the foundational ideas of superfoods and green capitalism. As a result of consumer input acquired through grassroots marketing, Guayakí transformed a shared infusion into something closer to a soft drink—a pre-prepared, individual-sized beverage served in a single-use bottle or can with flavoring and sugar levels tailored to U.S. consumers. The essay exposes the role of local entrepreneurs and consumers in shaping product development and localization. It complicates our understanding of product authenticity and brand authenticity while exposing the limitations of green capitalism, ethical consumerism, and activist entrepreneurship.

By providing fresh insights into the development of Egyptian corporate networks and business groups between the early 1920s and late 1940s, this article extends the geographical ambit of an expanding field of study. Data from contemporaneous sources were analyzed through social network analysis techniques, in the search for an improved understanding of both the nature of and motivations behind networking in Egypt. In conducting this exercise, this article assesses the success with which the state acted to stimulate local entrepreneurship in its search for greater economic independence. By linking the Egyptian case to a wider literature on corporate networks, the article reveals similarities with other cases of how developing economies responded to the challenges of that era.

This essay examines the role of working-class consumers in public debates over the public regulation of food and fuel markets in Philadelphia in the years leading up to the Panic of 1837. As price spikes in these necessities inflamed the cries for state authorities to insure fair prices for these goods and to put an end to the growing scale and scope of free market capitalism, these pleas went unfulfilled. Instead, urban residents saw many of the longstanding measures designed to protect less affluent Americans from devastating price swings—regulated marketplaces for meat, traditional fuel markets, and the bread assize, for example—had eroded as policymakers offered a vision of a free market economy that pushed aside longstanding assumptions about the role of public officials in the marketplace itself.

This article argues that the embeddedness of Chinese enterprises in Singapore society explains the limited success of the nationalist movement in Singapore. To respond to the economic crisis in the 1930s, Chinese business elites employed nationalist rhetoric to appeal to their compatriots in the British colony to support Chinese “national products.” With dual allegiance to both British rule and Chinese national identity, Chinese business nationalists took a transnational approach. Because Chinese business communities in Singapore were organized along subethnic lines, Chinese transnationalism failed to surmount these social divisions.

Recently, there has been increasing academic interest in the historical foundations of the pornography business. However, these studies tend to focus on individual national contexts rather than exploring the transnational relationships that exist, or have existed, between these countries. This article considers how a transnational approach can further understandings of entrepreneurship in the pornography business. It suggests the need for an interdisciplinary framework to examine transnational enterprise in the pornography business, combining ideas from enterprise alongside criminology and economic geography to frame the enterprise history of the Netherlands-based company Your Choice. Based in Amsterdam, but run by British entrepreneurs, Your Choice’s activities can be dated back to the 1970s, specializing in the transnational distribution of hardcore pornographic films to customers in Britain, where the sale of such material is legally problematic. Drawing on ethnohistorical research, which includes primary interviews, workplace observation, and archival and doctrinal research, I use Your Choice as a case study to show how transnational entrepreneurship in the pornography business can create opportunities as well as help to manipulate restrictive laws and regulations. I also suggest that negotiating such legalities carries risk, as does the need to respond and adapt to ongoing shifts in the market.

The Brazilian economy before the First World War has been generally characterized as an economy specializing in the production of primary goods for the international market—chiefly coffee for export. The emergence of the first industrial factories has been seen as closely connected to the performance of the export sector. The first cotton mills established in one province of Brazil, Minas Gerais, were not connected to the export sector, however. Minas Gerais was different in key respects from other regions. This article describes the peculiarities of the Mineiro economy during the 1870s and investigates the establishment of the first cotton mills there. It considers the location, size, and financing of the mills, as well as the structure of ownership and relations between partners. The results show that the emergence of the textile industry in Minas Gerais was independent from the performance of the foreign sector of the Brazilian economy.

The problem of action is the problem of both identifying and explaining it. The two aspects are not as distinct as this formulation might suggest, and the present paper focuses on the first, bringing in only as much of the second as is absolutely necessary. (A companion paper focuses on the second in a similar way.) Because business history is for all practical purposes a history of organizations and because action in and by organizations generally implicates those organizations’ routines, addressing the problem of action as business historians encounter it requires discussion of relatively recent literature on the relationship between structure and agency. That discussion raises questions about the meaning of agency in human conduct and in historical analysis. After exposition of some helpful ideas drawn from the sociology literature, this paper draws out implications for writing the business history of firms and industries.

The Italian Clothing Industry Association (AIIA) was the first employers’ association founded to protect the interests of the nascent Italian ready-to-wear industry. According to the literature on the subject, there were three factors that allowed business interest associations (BIAs) to operate effectively at a meso-organizational level: their internal organizational structure, the activities of bureaucratic support of companies and lobbying in defense of entrepreneurs’ interests, as well as the ability to adapt to the more general context in which they worked. Based on a detailed empirical analysis, this article examines what the AIIA accomplished in each of these three areas. There are two objectives: (1) analyzing the circumstances that led the AIIA to fail in its purposes of representing the Italian ready-to-wear industry, and (2) investigating, in a typical creative industry, the hidden costs in terms of competitiveness of BIAs’ planning efforts and their consequences for the creation of an efficient and internationally competitive fashion system.

From a European perspective, what sets apart the Swedish return to the gold standard at prewar parity in 1924 is not only that it occurred before that of every other nation, including the United Kingdom, but also that it could be made by politicians without interference from the central bank. Against this background, it is argued that this decision may be related to the combined impact of two political positions that affected policy making in a crucial way. In a domestic policy context in which minority governments needed support from other parties to realize their political ambitions, the Social Democrats and Conservatives both developed separate positions in favor of an early return of the gold standard during the first part of the 1920s. Because these parties together formed a majority in both chambers of Parliament, a stable political support for a return of the gold standard could thereby emerge.

This study analyzes the variables that influence international competitiveness, both in industrialized and developing countries. Based on rich archival resources, the study explains the intense international competition between European and North American publishers in pursuing Latin American book markets throughout the course of the First Global Economy. The case of Spain provides an opportunity to study the patterns of the internationalization process of a nonleading country and compare them with the strategies developed by German, U.S., French, and British companies. This research sheds light on the importance of social networks and national cultural influences in the internationalization of this singular industry.

The history of Indian management education is overwhelmingly focused on the period from the 1950s and 1960s onward. This article traces the hitherto underexplored history of how, from the 1860s until the 1950s, Indians thought about and implemented education and training for managers. In particular, it demonstrates how Indian nationalist politicians articulated the nation-building utility of managers and managerial training, and how business education became yoked to nationalists’ broader visions of India’s economic regeneration. Beginning in the early twentieth century, Indian nationalists championed commercial education, advocating its evolution out of its vocational roots into something more scientific and specialized for producing skilled indigenous managers. The precise evolution of Indian commercial education exercised long-term influences on postcolonial management programs. First, Indians established a tradition of surveying the latest pedagogical methods and institutional models from around the world and adapting them to Indian conditions. Second, Indian advocates of commercial education carved out an important role for the state, working on commercial education endeavors with British officials in the colonial era and, later on, placing management education within the ambit of centralized state planning. Management had a fundamentally political valence in India. For this reason, commercial and management education programs in India, unlike in the West, largely avoided questions about their legitimacy.