As in other countries, textile and apparel production in Germany is considered a victim of globalization. Domestic production and employment declined dramatically after its postwar peak in the late 1950s. Research has often attributed this trajectory to the trade liberalization policy of the German governments. However, this interpretation is puzzling. German trade policy was not as liberal as is claimed, nor did the industry disappear. This article addresses the issue using statistical evidence as well as archival material. The West German textile and apparel industry was using outward processing strategies comparatively early and was supported in that by German politicians starting in the early 1960s. As a result, the industry moved up the global value chain of textile production.

The ability to combine technological innovation with innovation in product design has been recognized by business historians as an important characteristic of a successful business. This article examines the use of product design as a source of competitive advantage by leading firms in the Manchester cotton, Macclesfield silk, and Staffordshire pottery sectors in the period 1750–1860. Four design strategies are identified: copying (direct imitation and adaptation), commissioning, capacity building, and collaboration. Distinction is made between proactive firms, which innovated whenever there was an opportunity, and reactive firms, which innovated only when necessary.

Using internal debates and surviving account books, this article traces the eighteenth-century history of the Norwegian glass industry, created to exploit Norway's immense natural resource wealth, and of the chartered company that would later become Norway's iconic Christiania Glasmagasin. The investors in the company, many of them among Norway's “founding fathers,” were individually responsible for its losses and it operated, remarkably, at an annual loss for nearly five decades. The article asks why, beyond the anticipation of a royal import ban on foreign glass, private investors might have continued to accept such losses. It focuses on tensions between cameralist and liberal ideologies in the creation of an important national industry, and on older (and perhaps more sustainable) ways of thinking about profitability.

We examine the factors leading to the onset of organizational rigidities in the dominant vacuum cleaner firms of the 1920s, Hoover and Eureka. Strategies aimed at strengthening organizational commitment, in conjunction with low levels of organizational diversity—owing to managerial hierarchies dominated by men recruited from the sales force—restricted organizational flexibility and adaptability while accentuating resistance to change. In conjunction with core competencies that largely reflected conditions in the previous rapid-growth phases of both firms, organization rigidity left them vulnerable to the new conditions of the Depression, including product and value chain innovation by a new entrant, Electrolux.

Like many other American corporations, Intel was outcompeted in manufacturing by Japanese firms in the late 1970s and the first half of the 1980s. By 1985, it became clear that the corporation's weakness in production endangered its long-term survival. Responding to the Japanese challenge, Intel's upper management instigated a fundamental reform of manufacturing. At their behest, production engineers and managers adopted Japanese manufacturing technologies and operating procedures. They put microchip fabrication on a scientific footing. They developed new ways of transferring processes from development to production and standardized the firm's factories. This major transformation enabled Intel to reach manufacturing parity with Japanese chipmakers by the early 1990s.

This research note uses the case of nineteenth-century Chile to argue that the phenomenon of early green entrepreneurship was not confined to the United States and Europe. It focuses on Chile-based inventors who pursued intellectual-property protection in solar, tidal, wave motion, water flow, and wind power. The backgrounds and careers of these inventors are examined. The case contests the popular assumption that knowledge always originated in the developed North and flowed southward. Instead, at least in the case of renewable energy, knowledge emerged endogenously in Chile and sometimes even flowed northward. This research note argues that the circulation of knowledge was strongly linked to the mobility of individuals rather than to the mobility of patents between North and South.

Despite the fact that several Chilean companies have experienced great success in recent decades, becoming some of Latin America's largest international enterprises, the field of business history has lagged behind in Chile relative to other Latin American countries. “There is no tradition of business history in Chile,” the editors of these two volumes acknowledge in their introduction (1:13). This gives their publication greater relevance, since it will certainly foster more interest in the field in Chile, which will enable the field of business history to gain more of a hold in Chile in the near future.