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.

Amidst other major changes to the food system, America witnessed an extensive transformation of marketing within the postwar era. Specifically, the concept of convenience quickly became a favorite of corporations across the food chain. However, despite the favorable market conditions and an outwardly receptive customer base, companies quickly found that they needed to negotiate with public perceptions of food, cultural ideals, and social realities. Using primarily corporate sources, this paper explores the development and use of convenience by food marketers. It investigates how processors sought to exploit postwar tensions between labor and gender. The project also examines how companies grappled with customer expectations of product quality. Ultimately, companies that successfully leveraged their ability to offer quick, quality meals further embedded themselves into consumer choices and lifestyles. By cultivating and marketing a specific message, corporations used convenience to make themselves appear indispensable to living and eating well in the postwar era.

This article traces the history of foreign direct investment in China’s electricity industry from 1882 to 1952 through the conflict between colonialism and nationalism. China’s electrification started with foreign direct investment in colonial enclaves: settlements, annexed territories, and leaseholds. Foreign direct investment contributed the majority of China’s power supply, but the penetration to China’s hinterland had faced the hurdle of nationalism on the part of both the Chinese government and the business community. Exceptions in Taiwan and Manchuria were related to Japanese colonialism, which peaked during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). After World War II, domestication was implemented by the Chinese government. This article provides a new perspective on multinationals by delineating between inward and expatriate foreign direct investment in the Chinese context.

America’s entrepreneurial culture is important because it promotes the search for new opportunities for innovation. Here, the author traces that culture through two industrial revolutions and focuses on the growing tension between entrepreneurship and bureaucracy inside and outside of the nation’s twentieth-century firms. Business histories are explored using categories adapted from behavioral economics. Particular attention is devoted to some of the important exceptions that throw light upon the stereotypes of the static government agency and the slow-moving industrial firm. Still, the author concludes, following World War II the economy had to be pulled out of its bureaucratic doldrums by new science- and social science-based industries that invigorated the nation’s entrepreneurial culture and promoted a wave of significant biological and digital innovations. The article concludes with a glance at the future of the bureaucratic and entrepreneurial cultures.

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.

At International Harvester, a 1902 merger, the defining feature was discord. A J. P. Morgan financier by the name of George W. Perkins and a formal agreement initiated changes to mitigate stress and struggle. Existing research dates improvement to 1906. This paper extends the analysis and documents that, among changes, entrepreneur William Deering and his children parted with some holdings, helping to diminish tensions. Meanwhile, the McCormicks agreed to a stock dividend.  This action helped mellow strife and augment their power. How did discord affect efficiency? The conventional answer centers on management along with expansion abroad, but that analysis is enhanced through study of seven brands and their local factories, pricing, and an antitrust consent decree. When a voting trust ran out its clock in 1912, conflict at International Harvester was receding. The firm’s record suggests various governance formats could yield efficiency and profitability.

Beginning in the 1870s and 1880s, many British companies relied on transnational business networks and global associations. However, the tensions produced by World War I created an environment in which consumers, journalists, and politicians actively promoted economic protectionism and consumer nationalism through various Buy British movements. Entrepreneurs under scrutiny took a variety of approaches to manage this hostile environment and avoid the financial, political, and cultural ramifications of suddenly having their and their family members’ valid citizenship questioned and outright attacked in the public sphere. During the war, neutral, passive, or absent patriotism drew suspicion. Any suspicions about loyalty could spark an avalanche of attacks, with each one being exponentially more difficult to defend as fear built in people’s minds. Citizenship was more than a legal matter; it was a layered set of dynamic activities and enterprises in which corporate actions became tied to expression of loyalty. People were judged by their cultural behavior, political associations, legal citizenship, and business decisions. I argue that some firms reacted by defining themselves, their products, and their services as “British,” erasing their “foreignness” as a defense against attacks on their citizenship and loyalty.

This study analyzes why and how department stores lost their dominant status in China’s apparel retail industry. It examines the history of the apparel distribution mechanism. The analysis finds that this loss is due to irrationalities in the distribution mechanism that developed to support apparel enterprises’ marketing efforts. Furthermore, the loss also resulted from the strategic changes among apparel enterprises and department stores to cope with these irrationalities. Apparel firms developed diversified channels and weakened the stores’ buying power by introducing multiple brands and getting involved in stores’ capital. Although department stores sought to change their disadvantaged status by reforming their purchasing patterns, they could not expand their scale to address their difficulties. Eventually, department stores ceased to be the main retail channel for apparel, and the value chain changed from being driven by department stores to being driven by apparel enterprises.

This article explores the efforts of Dallas businessmen, especially the leadership of Texas Instruments (TI), to build a science and research sector to facilitate new types of capital accumulation for Dallas and North Texas in the 1960s. The creation of the Graduate Center of the Southwest (GRCSW), and its subsequent transformation into the public University of Texas at Dallas in 1969, offers new perspectives on science and research, urban growth strategies, and the relationship between business and government in the postwar Sunbelt. TI leaders envisioned the center as a way to become more competitive in the microelectronics industry and also to direct urban growth and, ultimately, create a city and region that better reflected the private, growth-oriented interests of the Dallas business community. However, when the center began to falter economically in the mid-1960s, TI leaders sought out the state to take it over and transform it into a science and technology graduate school branch of the University of Texas system (UT). The exchange, although mutually beneficial, demonstrates how powerful businesses coopted the resources of the state to further their own ends.

Hail insurance in Britain emerged as a product by and for farming communities, expanding as wheat production rose in the mid-nineteenth century before declining in the latter decades of the century amidst wide-scale conversion from arable to livestock farming. Drawing on detailed research conducted in the remaining archives of the three major hail insurers in this period, we demonstrate the challenges of establishing a new insurance product for farmers. We argue that to make hail insurance effective, the insurance company’s central office collated and circulated information, rules, and paperwork to enable it to govern farmers, agents, and valuers at a distance. Such networks were fragile and required continual maintenance, whether to enhance reputation, manage farmers’ requests for new products, enforce rules, or tinker with rates in response to perceived risks and competitive pressures. Conceptualizing this emerging insurance business as a fragile network is a useful device demonstrating that paperwork, the governing of actors, and personal rivalries are as important as broader economic changes in explaining the development of a novel insurance product in this period.

This article analyzes the transfer of tacit knowledge between countries and continents, based on a case from the shipbuilding industry. The South Korean shipbuilder Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) was established in the early 1970s and had by the late 1980s become the world’s leading shipbuilder. Aided by foreign loan capital, HHI acquired technology through foreign licenses and imported equipment. However, shipbuilding is about more than hardware. This article presents and analyzes another important means of knowledge transfer: the acquisition of tacit knowledge in the form of shipbuilding skills, including shipyard processes and operations. This transfer was mainly accomplished through the “import” of foreign managers and the dispatch abroad of South Korean employees. One important element, which we investigate in detail, was the Korean personnel that HHI sent in 1972 to the Scott Lithgow shipyards in Scotland to observe and learn. Based on archival sources and interviews, we detail the manner in which tacit knowledge could be transferred across language and cultural barriers.

While the first business organizations to reach large size in the late nineteenth century did so through the route of vertical integration—formal ownership of assets and direct employment of workers—mid-twentieth-century franchising firms pioneered a new path to bigness, relying on restrictive contracts rather than formal integration to control their business organizations. Franchised chains replaced formal ownership and employment with contractual mechanisms known as vertical restraints (contractual controls on separate firms, such as price and supplier restrictions) to achieve uniformity and control over their outlets, without directly owning them. While most existing accounts of franchising focus on efficiency reasons for the evolution of the business form, this paper identifies a policy and legal mechanism: the relaxing of antitrust prohibitions on vertical restraints. These policy and legal changes were heavily lobbied for by franchising firms themselves. Whatever the efficiency implications of franchising, the increasing legalization of vertical restraints also had the benefit for franchising firms of allowing them to pull in the legal boundaries of the firm, leaving workers and other stakeholders outside. At the same time that they pursued franchising as a kind of vertical integration by other means, franchisors lobbied to preserve the legal benefits of having franchisees considered separate firms under a variety of laws, such as access to Small Business Administration loans and exclusion of workers at franchised establishments from access to collective bargaining and other rights against them.