This article analyzes recent developments in a burgeoning American consumer industry in the light manufacturing sector during the 1970s and 1980s. In terms of demand, soft-toy, or “plush,” production provides insights into impulse buying by a variety of income groups in a postindustrial economy, and it suggests the volatile nature of American consumer interest in low-value, disposable commodities. On the supply side, plush offers a particularly good example of an industry that has been sensitive to changes in cost, moving production around Third World countries while using information technology to improve distribution and to retain design control at home. The industry thus illustrates the response of American entrepreneurs to the internationalization of both supply and demand.

Common misperceptions notwithstanding, Japanese foreign direct investment (FDI) in Europe has a long history. Such investment first penetrated European markets in the 1870s, and it has since evolved through a number of important historical phases. In quality, sectoral composition, location, motivation, and several other characteristics, Japanese FDI in Europe exhibited striking continuities during its first century of development. In more recent years, however, each of these characteristics has undergone substantial change as compared to earlier times.

This article argues that Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, despite some shared characteristics in their approach to technical problems and a common interest in electric power, pursued distinct markets for innovation. Edison sold novelties to upper-class urbanites, whereas Westinghouse provided equipment to railroads and other industrial customers. As a consequence, the two entrepreneurs consistently exhibited different attitudes toward the process of innovation and different inclinations as businessmen. Westinghouse, more than Edison, foreshadowed the coming of corporate research and development.

Founded in 1892, General Electric set out to dominate the American electrical industry. This article is an explanation of how the company accomplished this goal in the highly profitable electric lamp (“light bulb”) market. GE's techniques included technology leadership through in-house development and the purchase of patent rights, discriminatory agreements with suppliers based on market power, and cartel arrangements of various sorts, both foreign and domestic. The article shows how one company was able to use financial and market power, combined with early control of a rapidly developing technology, to gain and then hold a major American market for half a century.

Historians have recently tried to explain why the century-long work-reduction movement ended in the 1940s. A history of Kellogg's Six-Hour day program reveals that the loss of business and management support contributed to this demise. Mainstream corporations such as Kellogg's once thought that managed work reduction would save capitalism, and they developed a capitalist vision of freedom from work remarkably similar to recent socialist writings. But Kellogg's management reversed course and ultimately opposed the Six-Hour day. Instead they developed more conventional corporate views: that industrial progress is defined by more work for more people, that increasing the number of jobs is a primary economic goal (but not the responsibility of the individual firm), and that work can be perfected to become the most satisfying part of life.

The following article provides a thorough chronicle of the microcomputer industry. That industry is a striking case, in which industrial growth took place through the creation of “external” capabilities—that is, capabilities produced by and residing in a specialized market network rather than in large organizations enjoying internal economies of scale and scope. In the microcomputer industry, the most successful products were those that took the greatest advantage—and allowed users to take the greatest advantage—of the market; and the greatest failures occurred when business enterprises bypassed the external network and attempted to rely significantly on internal capabilities.

When studying retailing and its role in developing the American mass market, historians traditionally have focused their attention on large department stores. An analysis of the influence of small department stores in the growth of underdeveloped sections of the American West provides a different emphasis. The following article traces the history of T. C. Power & Bro.—a small, family-run department store in Montana—before the early 1900s. The article demonstrates that the firm's service was tailored to the economic and social needs of urban and rural settlers on the western frontier, helping to create a consumer society in the West.

This article employs previously unused accounting data and manuscript censuses to determine the impact of the Great Depression on Brazil's most important cotton textile manufacturers. It argues that the Great Depression, when viewed at the level of the individual business enterprise, had far more serious consequences than the previous literature, which relied on aggregate statistical data, suggests. The analysis presented here leads to the conclusion that Brazil's major cotton firms were in serious trouble prior to the 1929 Crash and that they took longer to recover than most other studies of Brazilian industrialization have indicated.

Child labor in the U.S. economy declined significantly between 1880 and 1920. This case study of the fruit and vegetable canning industry examines variations in laws, technology, and income across states and time to assess the relative importance of legal and economic factors in reducing the employment of children. The authors find that economic factors, especially a technologically driven shift toward a greater demand for adult labor, were relatively more important. While economic development was often a precondition for legal restrictions on child labor, compulsory schooling and child labor laws restricted the employment of children in technologically backward canneries.

Although the managerial function arises out of organizational needs imposed by market competition and technological development, managers' professional status has come in large part from legal conceptions that perceive the managerially run firm as an institutional bulwark for modern democracy. This article examines how the law, through its doctrines of trust and contract, has made and unmade management as a semi-public profession. The article explores the history of tender-offer regulation as a case study of this process.

This article deals with the diffusion and standardization rivalry between two similar but incompatible formats for home videocassette recorders (VCRs): the Betamax, introduced in 1975 by the Sony Corporation, and the VHS (Video Home System), introduced in 1976 by the Victor Company of Japan (Japan Victor or JVC). Despite being first to the home market, the Beta format fell behind the VHS in market share during 1978 and declined thereafter. By the end of the 1980s, Sony and its partners had ceased producing Beta models. This study analyzes the history of this rivalry and examines its context—a mass consumer market with a dynamic standardization process subject to “bandwagon” effects that took years to unfold and that were largely shaped by the strategic maneuvering of the VHS producers.

The record of long–term innovation at the American Telegraph and Telephone Company seems to defy conventional economic and social theories of the firm. The following essay, based on extensive research in the AT&T Archives, argues that CEO Theodore Vail made this possible by transforming the Bell System's orientation to innovation, its structure, and its culture. He also gave the System a cadre of leaders who sustained over the long term Vail's strategy of blending adaptive and formative innovations to promote network efficiency.

The capture and protection of returns from research investments have always been issues in business; in the modern era, they have most often been dealt with through copyright and patent registration. In the chicken–breeding industry, however, the laws of nature served to safeguard the hybridization process and to provide a biological “lock” on specific strains. As new techniques of genetic manipulation came into play, chicken breeders, like others in bio–technology industries, had to reassess their use of intellectual property protection. The following article provides a history of the interplay among the tools for such protection, genetic research, and industry structure.