Business History articles from January 1992

Business History archives from January 1992

Managerial enterprises and competitive capabilities.
January 1, 1992... For the past century large managerial enterprises have been engines of economic growth and transformation in modern economies. These enterprises were created and continued to grow in much the same ways; and the pattern of creation and growth...

Corporate strategy and accounting systems: a comparison of developments at two British steel firms, 1898-1914. (South Durham Steel and Iron; Cargo Fleet Iron)
January 1, 1992... Alfred D. Chandler Jr.'s comparative analysis of how organisational innovations within large-scale firms contributed to variations in international competitiveness has naturally encouraged accounting historians to investigate how new accounting...

Marketing in the second industrial revolution: a case study of the Ferranti Computer Group, 1949-63.
January 1, 1992... It is 40 years since the first commercial electronic digital computer was delivered - a comment on an astonishing rate of technological advance, and an event which a few insightful individuals at the time predicted would launch a second...

Industry structure as a competitive advantage: the history of Japan's post-war steel industry.
January 1, 1992... The rapid growth of the Japanese economy in the post-World War II decades revived a controversial debate concerning the role of the state in economic development.[1] On one extreme are those who attribute much of the growth of the Japanese...

Regulatory responses to the rise of the market for corporate control in Britain in the 1950s.
January 1, 1992... On both sides of the Atlantic the post-war years have seen |the coming of an institutionalised market for corporate control'.[1] For the first time it became possible for the ownership of public companies to be determined simply by stock market...

At the Sign of the Plough: Allen and Hanburys and the British Pharmaceutical Industry, 1715-1990.
January 1, 1992... The origins and early days of the business which became Allen & Hanburys - in the Quaker apothecary's shop established by Silvanus Bevan at Plough Court - are well-known from earlier and more hagiographical works. Dr Tweedale recounts them in a...

Child Labour and the Industrial Revolution.
January 1, 1992... As Nardinelli observes, child labour, whether in the British Industrial Revolution or in late twentieth-century Third World industrialisers, is an emotive issue. Critics, in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have deplored the...

Banks and Industrial Finance in Britain: 1800-1939.
January 1, 1992... Dissatisfaction with Britain's relative economic growth has generated interest in identifying the features of more successful economies that were absent from Britain. In the context of Industrial finance this concern makes the role of banks...

Politics, Shipping and the Repeal of the Navigation Laws.
January 1, 1992... The repeal of the Navigation Laws has always played a secondary role to the repeal of the Corn Laws in histories of Britain's commercial policy. Dr Palmer has set out to redress the balance. Her two basic aims are first to examine the political...

Technical Education and the State Since 1850: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives.
January 1, 1992... This book deals with the causes of the poor quality of technical education in the United Kingdom since the late nineteenth century. It does not attempt to deal with the effects of inadequate technical education on the performance of the...

British Culture and Economic Decline.
January 1, 1992... Almost a decade after the first edition of Martin Wiener's English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, the five essays assembled here critically re-assess the |Wiener thesis', and its partial amplification in Corelli Barnett's The...

Capitalists and Christians: Business Leaders and the Churches in Britain: 1900-1960.
January 1, 1992... The role of religion in modern industrial society is a seriously under-researched subject, not least from the perspective of British business history. It is true that some attention has been devoted to the role of religious nonconformity as an...

Protectionism and Economic Revival: The British Interwar Economy.
January 1, 1992... In 1931, after nearly a century in which Britain had been the principal exponent of the free trade doctrine, a combination of sectional interests and special economic and political circumstances brought about the imposition of a general tariff....

Innovating for Failure: Government Policy and the Early British Computer Industry.
January 1, 1992... For nearly a century it has been widely held that the British economy has performed inadequately; that its performance could be improved; and, that steps should be taken to ensure that it did. Suggested remedial policies range from advocations...

The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350-1750.
January 1, 1992... The Centre for Early Modern History at the University of Minnesota is to be congratulated on assembling a group of distinguished scholars in 1987 to discuss the development of international trade, largely in the period before 1750. The...

German Professions: 1800-1950.
January 1, 1992... This collection of 16 essays makes a major contribution to the increasingly popular field of professionalisation history. The contributions are, fittingly, professional enough, drawing a wide range of primary and secondary evidence from a...

The Fruits of Fascism: Postwar Prosperity in Historical Perspective.
January 1, 1992... Formally this is a study of the (mainly) post-war history of four motor car producers, two British and two German. But, as is the way with such studies, the conclusions drawn are, despite numerous disclaimers, applied to the whole of the motor...

Regulating for Competition: Government, Law and the Pharmaceutical Industry in the United Kingdom and France.
January 1, 1992... This is the most recent volume in the series on government-industry relations edited by Maurice Wright and Stephen Wilks. In it Leigh Hancher develops themes proposed in a previous book in the series, Capitalism, Culture and Economic...

Wirtschaftliche Strukturen am Vorabend der Industrialisierung: Der Regierungsbezirk Trier, 1820-1850.
January 1, 1992... In 1973 Helmut Hahn, Wolfgang Zorn and collaborators published economic maps for the Rhineland (Historische Wirtschaftskarte) for the year 1820. This very large undertaking, still unsurpassed in German historiography, provided a detailed...

Patriotism for Profit: Georgia's Urban Entrepreneurs.
January 1, 1992... The traditional view of the pre-Civil War South is that the planter elite had created social barriers to the industrial diversification of the South's economy, thus perpetuating a |pre-bourgeois' society. DeCredico suggests that this view has...

Making America Corporate: 1870-1920.
January 1, 1992... Olivier Zunz has identified a gap in the historiography of the American corporation. On one hand, there are the traditional histories of controlling elites, modified somewhat by the more structural Chandlerian school. On the other hand, social...

Regulating a New Economy: Public Policy and Economic Change in America.
January 1, 1992... This is a very detailed history of public policy in the US in response to the rise of what the author calls the |new economy' of early twentieth-century America, characterised as including the rise of big business, large-scale technological...

The Development of the Pacific Salmon-Canning Industry: A Grown Man's Game.
January 1, 1992... Even the most successful collections of documents sometimes disappoint as well as satisfy. This may well be the case with the volume under review, for it tends to fall, somewhat uneasily, between business history and biography. The...

The Climax of Capitalism: The US Economy in the Twentieth Century.
January 1, 1992... This volume outlines the growth and relative decline of the most powerful capitalist economy in the world. Starting in the nineteenth century, but with most emphasis on the period since 1920, the author has produced a chronological account...

Services in Canada.
January 1, 1992... This collection of articles, which previously appeared in the Services Industries Journal in October 1989, was brought out in book form by Frank Cass & Co. to reach a wide audience than the subscribers of this very specialised journal. This...

Studies in the Economic History of Southern Africa, vol 1, The Front-Line States.
January 1, 1992... The ambition of this collection of essay is to synthesise the mass of research which has appeared on the economic history of Southern Africa over the past decades, but its achievements fall short of such an objective. Neither |Southern Africa'...

The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress.
January 1, 1992... Joel Mokyr examines the long term historical evolution of technology development from classical antiquity onwards. He is particularly concerned with comparisons of the strength of technological creativity across countries, regions or societies,...

Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor.
January 1, 1992... Lazonick contrasts the relationships between technology, the organisation of work, and labour relations in Britain, the United States, and Japan between the 1840s and the 1980s. His central theme is the consequences for productivity of the...

Public Enterprise at the Crossroads: Essays in Honour of V.V. Ramanadham.
January 1, 1992... This collection of essays, compiled in honour of Professor V. V. Ramanadham, a distinguished student in the field of public enterprise, is wide varying both in its geographical scope and its choice of themes. Its essential purpose is to examine...

Industrial Training and Technological Innovation.
January 1, 1992... In 1988 the Anglo-Japanese Business History Conference, devoted to technical education, was held at the London School of Economics. Participants, who included the reviewer, will be pleased to see those valuable papers brought to a wider...

Multinational Corporations.
January 1, 1992... This book is a collection of recent papers on the multinational enterprise. With only a very few exceptions the papers were published in the ten-year period 1978-88. According to Casson's introduction, |both the quatity and quality of research...