Business History articles from January 1998

Business History archives from January 1998

Windows of opportunity in the textile industry: the business strategies of Lancashire entrepreneurs, 1880-1914.
January 1, 1998... The decades immediately preceding the First World War offered important opportunities to businesses in Britain's vanguard export industry. The challenges of the second industrial revolution and the rise of overseas competition were, according to...

Kinship and business: paternal and maternal kin in Chaozhou Chinese family firms.
January 1, 1998... It is often said that Chinese businesses depend on networking, especially the variety of networking that is closely related to family and lineage. Family relations, according to Maire Bergere, provided the basis for finance, management and...

Welfare policy in German big business after the First World War: Vereinigte Stahlwerke AG, 1926-33.
January 1, 1998... According to A.D. Chandler, Jr, the model of 'cooperative managerial capitalism' has been typical for the structure of business in Germany since the nineteenth century and was decisive for the international economic success of German industry...

Balancing business and the regions: British distribution of industry policy and the Board of Trade, 1945-51.
January 1, 1998... If it can be assumed that the industrialist himself has made a just appreciation of economic advantages of different sites open to him, it must be supposed that manufacture on an alternative site which he has not chosen will in general be...

International business strategies at Ferranti, 1907-75: direction, managed and performance.
January 1, 1998... It is a feature of the international business history literature that both the multinational strategies pursued by British manufacturing firms, and the organisational forms employed to co-ordinate activity across parent and subsidiary, have...

Dress, Culture and Commerce: The English Clothing Trade Before the Factory, 1660-1800.
January 1, 1998... The dependence of the garment trades on a bouyant supply of cheap female labour, a symbiosis of centralised and outwork production and a pronounced gender division of labour has a long and less than illustrious history as this impressive...

The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680-1780.
January 1, 1998... This is a most discerning and clear-sighted study of the emerging commercial (but not professional) middle class in the eighteenth-century, totally free of jargon, fair in its judgements, and refreshingly original in viewing the, mostly urban,...

Elites, Enterprise and the Making of the British Overseas Empire, 1688-1775.
January 1, 1998... The publication by Cain and Hopkins of their British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688-1914 (1993) is widely accepted to have offered a major reinterpretation of British imperial history and the metropolitan forces that helped to shape...

The Industrial Revolution in Scotland: New Studies in Economic and Social History.
January 1, 1998... To say that I welcomed this small book is something of an understatement. Pondering over a new course of lectures on nineteenth-century Scotland, I was bemoaning the lack of anything of much substance relating to the debate over how revolutionary...

Co-operative Culture and the Politics of Consumption in England: 1870-1930.
January 1, 1998... Peter Gurney's exciting and well-informed study marks a significant shift in the ways in which British historians have studied the Co-operative movement. Acknowledging the debt owed to labour and social histories of the sphere of production,...

Art, Enterprise and Ethics: The Life and Works of William Morris.
January 1, 1998... William Morris, the Victorian poet, artist, publisher, manufacturer and socialist, has received a great deal of attention in the last 50 years from historians in all the fields his polymath activities encompassed. His business activities, long...

The Property Masters: A History of the British Commercial Property Sector.
January 1, 1998... Property development and the mechanism by which businesses obtain and finance real estate assets has been strangely neglected by academics, given their centrality to the establishment and expansion of many firms, the recurrent booms and slumps in...

France and the International Economy, from Vichy to the Treaty of Rome.
January 1, 1998... Focusing on the relatively short (but crucial) period in French politics of 1940-57, Frances Lynch has explored not only the roots but also various aspects of the Fourth Republic's international economic policy. The volume demonstrates her...

Histoire de l'Electricite en France: Tome Troiseme. Une Oeuvre Nationale: L'Equipement, la Croissance de la Demande, le Nucleaire (1946-1987).
January 1, 1998... This is the third and final volume of the history of the electricity industry in France. Under the direction of Henri Morsel, 20 authors drawn from universities, research institutes, the government and Electricite de France (EDF) itself have...

Language of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in Germany, 1850-1914.
January 1, 1998... The title is an overstatement, for this book does not describe all female factory work in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany. The number of professional women in the German Reich increased between 1882 and 1907 from 4.3 per cent...

Competition and Growth: The Continental AG Story.
January 1, 1998... In many ways, Paul Erker's history of the tyre producer Continental AG is remarkable. It provides a useful and readable overview of the firm from its beginnings in 1871 through to the mid-1990s. It combines a history of the company's...

Sozialpolitik und Organisation: Formen Betrieblicher Sozialpolitik in der rheinisch-westfalischen Eisen- und Stahlindustrie seit der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis 1933.
January 1, 1998... This book rests upon the thoroughly plausible premise that the organisational form of an enterprise is closely related to its welfare policy. As economies industrialise, some firms grow larger and reorganise their modes of production, and the...

Valtakunnan sahkoistyskysymys: Strategiat siirtojajestelmat seka alueellinen sahkoistys vuoteen 1940.
January 1, 1998... In the 1920s and 1930s, there were two competing systems for transmitting electricity in the southern part of Finland. One was government-owned and transmitted hydroelectric power of the state-owned Imatra Powerplant (later Imatra Power Ltd). It...

Strom och styring: Norsk Kraftiberalisme I historisk perspectiv.
January 1, 1998... This book presents the history of Norwegian hydroelectric power from the late nineteenth century until the present day. Almost half the book, however, is dedicated to the 1990s, the aim being to discuss the market reforms introduced by parliament...

Russian Corporate Capitalism from Peter the Great to Perestroika.
January 1, 1998... Owen's aim in this volume is to review the political and cultural factors which have shaped the development of the corporate institutions of capitalism in Russia. By looking at the period before 1914 and the beginnings of the process of change...

The Russian Enterprise in Transition.
January 1, 1998... The volume under review is the fourth publication in the series 'Management and Industry in Russia' and is edited by the Professor of Sociology in the Centre for Comparative Labour Studies at the University of Warwick. It is a collaborative...

Quantitative Aspects of Post-War European Economic Growth.
January 1, 1998... This volume of essays is the product of a concerted investigation into European growth by a group of economists sponsored by the SPES programme of the European Commission and administered under the auspices of the Centre for Economic Policy...

The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 1, The Colonial Era.
January 1, 1998... The study of the economic and social history of colonial North America has been one of the most exciting areas of historical research during the last 30 years and has attracted the attention of the some of the leading historians of the...

Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America.
January 1, 1998... Sound the alarm! Business history is being invaded by aliens, not aliens from outer space, but by stealthful invaders residing in sociology departments just across campus. Indeed, one of the most enlightening aspects of this volume for a majority...

The Great Road: The Building of the Baltimore and Ohio, the Nation's First Railroad, 1828-1853.
January 1, 1998... Another history of the Baltimore & Ohio? Didn't we know enough about this admittedly important - railroad company after the books by Hungerford, Stover and others? Apparently James Dilts, an independent scholar, thought that a new approach could...

Slow Train to Paradise: How Dutch Investment Helped Build American Railroads.
January 1, 1998... 'Mon royaume pour une locomotive', resounded everywhere around 1860, but 'convulsively, Dutch capitalists kept their money-bags closed, when called upon to make sacrifices for the public good.... Nothing remained for their own country'. So a...

In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918-1938.
January 1, 1998... In this slender volume, Butler Shaffer surveys efforts by some American business leaders to insulate their firms from competition during the inter-war years. In the first four chapters, he examines the impact of World War I on the thoughts and...

Beyond Left and Right: Insurgency and the Establishment.
January 1, 1998... This is a study of what might be described as a third force in American politics which derives support from people who have been alienated by the main political parties. These people have mostly been involved in the declining parts of the...

The Rational Factory: Architecture, Technology and Work in America's Age of Mass Production.
January 1, 1998... The factory is as much a modernist abstraction as it is a pragmatic engineering achievement and the techniques of mass production are not solely technological or managerial accomplishments. Instead, according to Lindy Biggs, mass production is a...

Technology as Freedom: The New Deal and the Electrical Modernization of the American Home.
January 1, 1998... In 1925 Samuel Dodsworth, a captain of American industry, dreamed of Americans owning appliances that had once been the luxuries of the rich. A generation later, Americans lived that dream. Scholars agree that electrical modernisation occurred...

Capital and Labour and the Rhodesian System: 1888-1947.
January 1, 1998... In the nineteenth century there were many romantic, highly unrealistic ideas about building railways in Africa and their importance in opening up the continent to European trade. The best known was probably the Cape-to-Cairo associated with Cecil...

Asian Business Networks.
January 1, 1998... Networks are of vital importance to the understanding of twentieth-century business strategy in Asia. The contributions to this comparative volume are divided between Chinese East Asia, Japan and South Korea and broadly confirm Hamilton's view of...

Business Relationships with East Asia: The European Experience.
January 1, 1998... This book contains 16 essays focused on trade and foreign direct investment in East Asia (excluding Japan) and on that region's relationship with Europe. The latter topic is certainly a good idea, as many European academics and managers still...

Technology and Industrial Development in Japan: Building Capabilities by Learning, Innovation, and Public Policy.
January 1, 1998... The authors of this book are considered to be economists, rather than historians, and they have written a comprehensive history of technology and industrial development of Japan. It is true that they 'learned much' in the process of writing this...

Historical Evolution of Strategic Management.
January 1, 1998... As a general rule the discipline of management studies, of which strategic management forms a part, does not accord much importance to history; a fact which undoubtedly contributes to the impoverishment of the discipline which is so often...

Institutions in Economics: The Old and the New Institutionalism.
January 1, 1998... Business historians seeking to discover what institutional economics might contribute to their studies can do no better than consult Warren J. Samuels' balanced and concise article in The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics (1987), Volume 2,...

The Selected Scientific Papers of Alan M. Rugman, vol. 1, The Theory of Multinational Enterprises.
January 1, 1998... These two volumes contain 50 papers by Alan M. Rugman, Professor of International Business at the University of Toronto, which have been published over the last 20 years (1975-95) in a remarkably wide variety of journals, including the Columbia...

International Bibliography of Business History.
January 1, 1998... The editors of this bibliography are to be congratulated on providing a much needed aid to students, teachers and researchers working in the field of business history. Whilst the chronological balance reflects the vitality of the subject since...

Generation to Generation: Life Cycles of the Family Business.
January 1, 1998... Business historians frequently encounter present-day advice literatures for entrepreneurs and managers, regarding them with a mixture of horror and amusement. The reductionist generalisations and inattention to historical diversities that infest...

Information Technology as Business History: Issues in the History of Management of Computers.
January 1, 1998... This book is described by the author as 'a guided tour of the critical issues in the history of computing'. The book consists mainly of a series of essays which the author has previously published as journal articles or in his several previous...

The International Computer Software Industry: A Comparative Study of Evolution and Structure.
January 1, 1998... This is a very timely collection of essays which examines the structure of the software industry from a number of perspectives, and includes some useful historical analysis. This sector of the computer industry has grown progressively to outstrip...

The Sources of Economic Growth.
January 1, 1998... The Sources of Economic Growth is a collection of ten essays written by Richard Nelson (sometimes in collaboration with others) over a period of more than three decades. The essays are presented in four categories - 'A Perspective on Economic...

Business History and Business Culture.
January 1, 1998... Although there remain many sceptics who fail to understand why so much attention is paid to this field, over the last 20 years social scientists have shown a much greater interest in the qualitative aspects of business development, and especially...

Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System.
January 1, 1998... The broad thesis of Eichengreen's latest book will be familiar to followers of his earlier work, especially Golden Fetters, his superb account of the rise and fall of the inter-war restored gold standard. In that work the durability...

Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation.
January 1, 1998... In this engaging study, James Utterback, a professor of management and engineering at MIT. takes the reader on a revealing jaunt across the contours of more than a hundred years of technological and business history, seeking insight into the...

Organisations and Institutions: Perspectives in Economics and Sociology.
January 1, 1998... The aim of this book is twofold. Besides introducing organisational economics to noneconomists (mainly organisation theorists and sociologists), the book tries to give economists a better understanding of objections to organisational economics...

Technological Evolution, Variety and the Economy.
January 1, 1998... Orthodox economists have always found changes in technology difficult to incorporate into their models, frequently treating it as a residual that might be captured ex post in quantitative terms. Changes in quality and variety are often ignored or...