The department store is often seen as a revolutionary force: transforming retail practices, shopping experiences, and the high street. It is variously lauded for its role in the democratization of luxury, the introduction of price ticketing and unfettered browsing, and the creation of a fantasy world of goods. As is so often the case, reality is more complex than the image, especially when we move away from the bright lights of the metropolis and start exploring the high streets of provincial towns. Based on a thorough trawl of trade directories, I explore the regional distribution of stores in their 1930s heyday and examine how this distribution developed over time, pushing the discussion back to consider the varied origins of provincial department stores. I then turn to the spatial organization, selling practices, and shopping experience of small samples of stores, questioning the extent to which they formed a monolithic retail type.

This article reflects on foreign direct investment (FDI) and intellectual property rights (IPRs) over the long term, and analyzes the case of Spain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although the interactions between IPRs and FDI have attracted significant research efforts in distinct economic and business areas, the results lack permanent answers. Our findings demonstrate that, from a macro-level perspective: (1) FDI and IPRs are effectively related over the long term; (2) weak IPR protection does not seem to have stopped FDI; and (3) the countries with major FDI in Spain were less worried about IPR management than were other countries with less FDI.

In the beginning of the twentieth century, as Americans erupted in righteous indignation over the flagrant abuses of monopoly utilities, utility executives responded by developing several strategies to improve public opinion, rein in regulation, and thwart public ownership. One of the most widely used and successful of these strategies was selling gas, electricity, and telephone company stock directly to customers. To reach these local customers, utility managers required their employees to peddle stock directly to their friends, family, and customers. Using this method, utilities reached a large number of Americans who would not normally have set up a brokerage account or been solicited by a securities sales agent. By farming these interstitial regions of America’s financial landscape, utility executives harvested millions of dollars in capital, but as executives explicitly made clear, the goal of customer stock ownership was not to raise capital but to raise political support. By the crash of 1929, utilities directly sold stock to 20 percent of the total number of stockholding Americans directly through customer stock ownership programs and not through traditional brokerage firms. This article situates the development of customer stock ownership in the political economic context from which it emerged as an organizational response, reveals the social and organizational processes by which utility monopolies sold stock, and appraises the effect of customer stock ownership on antimonopoly sentiment in America.

This article addresses two questions: Why do firms centralize, and what determines the success and failure of technology transfers? First, it argues that centralization decreases the costs of technology transfers, especially if knowledge is tacit, by reducing transaction costs. Second, it argues that an important factor for the success of a technology transfer is the capacity of a firm to mitigate agency problems. The English East India Company (EEIC) is mostly studied as a trading body. This article analyzes the company’s attempt to become a producer of raw silk in Bengal. In order to improve the quality of Bengal raw silk and thus increase the silk’s trading potential, it decided to apply Piedmontese reeling technologies that relied on a centralized system of production, which significantly decreased the transmission costs of the technology transfer and was thus the key for its success. However, because the EEIC’s management system involved in silk manufacturing was not innovated, the transfer’s effectiveness was diminished.

The city of Kyoto witnessed Japan’s first public-owned electric utility and first hydraulic station for general supply, and was the first Japanese city in which every household became electrified. Behind these achievements, the interaction between the privately owned Kyoto Electric Light Company and the government-owned Kyoto Municipal Electric Works were important. By exploring their origin, collusion, competition, and demarcation between them from 1887 to 1915, this article addresses business–government relations in the history of Japanese electrification through the case of Kyoto.