Business History articles from January 2004

Business History archives from January 2004

Corporate venturing: the origins of Unilever's pregnancy test.(Company Profile)
January 1, 2004... The relative ability of different sizes of firm and organisational designs to develop and sustain dynamic capabilities in innovation and create new businesses remains a matter of contention. While Chandler among many others has emphasised the...

Tribute to Geoffrey Jones.(Biography)
January 1, 2004... Geoffrey Jones and I served as joint editors of Business History from April 1988 to the end of 2003, sharing responsibility for 63 editions of the journal over 16 years. Geoffrey, who was appointed Professor of Business Administration at...

J. Cattell, S. Ely and B. Jones, The Birmingham Jewellery Quarter: an Architectural Survey of the Manufactories.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... (Swindon: English Heritage, 2002. Pp.xiv + 294; illus.; maps. ISBN 1 873592 48 5, 45 [pounds sterling]). This beautifully presented book delivers much more than is promised by the title. John Cattell, together with Sheila Ely and Barry...

J. Cantrell and G. Cookson (eds.), Henry Maudslay and the Pioneers of the Machine Age.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... (Tempus: Stroud, 2002. Pp.192; illus.; maps. P/back ISBN 0 7524 2766 0, 16.99 [pounds sterling]). Gillian Cookson, in her introductory chapter, admits that, at the outset, this book was never intended as an account of Henry Maudslay and...

Stanley Chapman, Hosiery and Knitwear: Four Centuries of Small-Scale Industry in Britain, c. 1589-2000.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... Pasold Studies in Textile History, Vol. 12 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp.xxiv + 328, 37 illus., 7 figs., 54 tables. H/back ISBN 0 19 925567 9, 55 [pounds sterling]). As Chapman notes in his preface, writing the history of small...

Alan Fowler, Lancashire Cotton Operatives and Work, 1900-1950: a Social History of Lancashire Cotton Operatives in the Twentieth Century.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Pp.xvi + 236. ISBN 0 7546 0116 1, 47.50 [pounds sterling]). This is a well-written and insightful story of an important group of workers and their place in history. The author's explicit objective is to present a...

Georgina Ferry, A Computer Called LEO: Lyons Teashops and the World's First Office Computer.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... (London: Fourth Estate, 2003. Pp.vii + 221; illus.; H/back ISBN 1 84115 185 8, 15.99 [pounds sterling]). This book tells the story of the leading British teashop and catering firm J. Lyons & Company's unlikely entrance into digital...

John Benson and Laura Ugolini, A Nation of Shopkeepers: Five Centuries of British Retailing.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... (London and New York: I.B. Taurus, 2003. Pp.x + 269. H/back ISBN 1 86064 709 X, 45 [pounds sterling]; P/back ISBN 1 86064 708 1, 16.95 [pounds sterling]). John Benson of Wolverhampton University has long been in the vanguard of the study...

David Farber, Sloan Rules: Alfred P. Sloan and the Triumph of General Motors.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Pp.xii + 292. ISBN 0 226 23804, $27.50). This book can be recommended as an outstanding 'life and times' biography of the foremost business executive in the history of the American...

Susan J. Matt, Keeping up with the Joneses: Envy in American Consumer Society, 1890-1930.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... (Philadelphia: University of Pennyslvania Press, 2003. Pp.223. H/back ISBN 0 8122 3686 6, $35; 24.50 [pounds sterling]). Susan J. Matt's monograph is an interesting study of a powerful human emotion-envy--and its role within developing...

Rosalind H. Williams, Retooling: a Historian Confronts Technological Change.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Pp.xv + 252; H/back ISBN 0 262 23223 5, 18.50 [pounds sterling]). A century or so ago, the word technology was hardly used, but nowadays it is everywhere, and it seems that every problem can be expressed...

Parks M. Coble, Chinese Capitalists in Japan's New Order: the Occupied Lower Yangzi, 1937-1945.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003. Pp.xvii + 296; maps. H/back ISBN 0 520 23268 2, 40 [pounds sterling]). For a specialised book like this to reveal such fascinating general themes must be unusual. Coble's modestly but...

Wu Xiao An, Chinese Business in the Making of the Malay State, 1882-1941 Kedah and Penang.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... (London: Routledge Curzon, 2003. Pp.xvi + 239; illus. H/back ISBN 0 415 30176 9, 60 [pounds sterling]). It is interesting to see ever more literature being produced by business historians that demonstrates the effectiveness of networks, not...

Angus Maddison, D.S. Prasada Rao and William Shepherd (eds.), The Asian Economies in the Twentieth Century.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2002. Pp.xi + 250; ISBN 1 84064 045 6, 55 [pounds sterling]; $85). Did Asian economies catch up with the West in the twentieth century by growing intensely, by generating productivity gains as well as by...

Ceri Sullivan, The Rhetoric of Credit: Merchants in Early Modern Writing.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... (Madison, Teaneck: Farley Dickinson University Press and London: Associated University Presses, 2002. Pp.217. H/back ISBN 0 838 63926 7, 38 [pounds sterling]). The early modern European era witnessed a period of spectacularly rising...

John H. Dunning and Gavin Boyd (eds.), Alliance Capitalism and Corporate Management.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2003, Pp.xv + 311. H/back ISBN 1 8406 4839 2, 65 [pound sterling]; $95). As the doyen of international business, John Dunning has probably had more conferences, monographs and edited books organised and written...

Peter J. Buckley (ed.), International Business.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Pp.xx + 472. H/back ISBN 1 85521 974 3, 95 [pound sterling]). This volume in the Ashgate History of Management Thought series contains 28 selected readings concerned with the management of international business....

Dominique Barjot (ed.), Catching Up with America: Productivity Missions and the Diffusion of American Economic and Technological Influence after the Second World War.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... (Paris: Presses de l'Universite de Paris-Sorbonne, 2002. Pp.477. P/back ISBN 2 84050 240 2, 29 [euro]). This book investigates the productivity missions to the USA from Europe and Japan under the Marshall Aid scheme. It contains papers...

Harrison C. White, Markets from Networks: Socioeconomic Models of Production.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. Pp.xvii + 389, illus. H/back ISBN 0 691 08871 3, 26.95 [pound sterling]; $40). White contends that industrial economies are comprised largely of production markets that are formed by streams...

Martin Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: a History of the Software Industry.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2003. Pp.xiv + 372; illus. H/back ISBN 0 262 03303 8, 19.95 [pound sterling]; $29.95). Until the late 1960s, software was seen as having no intrinsic value whatsoever and was simply bundled and sold...

Andrea Colli, The History of Family Business, 1850-2000.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp.v + 108. H/back ISBN 0 521 80028 5, 25 [pounds sterling]; p/back ISBN 0 521 80472 8, 9.95 [pounds sterling]). Over three decades or more, the Macmillan 'Studies in Economic and Social...

Alan L. Heberman (ed.), Twenty Five Years Behind Bars.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... (London: Harvard University Press, 2002. Pp.xi + 159; illus. H/Back ISBN 0 674 00657 7, 16.95 [pounds sterling]). Troy, Ohio, would seem as unlikely a place to herald in a new era of competition as a Wrigley's packet of chewing gum could be...

Matthias Kipping and Lars Engwall (eds.), Management Consulting: Emergence and Dynamics of a Knowledge Industry.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp.282. H/back ISBN 0 19 924285 2, 50 [pounds sterling]). During the late 1990s, the number of academics studying management consulting increased dramatically as the sheer number of consultants...

Nelly Hanna, Money, Land and Trade: an Economic History of the Muslim Mediterranean.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002. Pp.viii + 295; map. H/back ISBN 1 86064 699 9, 39.50 [pounds sterling]). This book turns out to provide a great deal less than its rather grand title seems to promise. Far from being an economic history of the...

A. Jalloh and T. Falola (eds.), Black Business and Economic Power.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2002. Pp.xii + 628. H/back ISBN 1 58046 114 X, 50 [pounds sterling]; $75). This collection of essays results from a conference on black business in Africa and the United States held at the...

David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp.xii + 576. H/back ISBN 0 521 826667, 50 [pounds sterling]; p/back ISBN 0 521 53402 X, 19.95 [pounds sterling]). Second Edition. First edition published 1969. Anyone buying this book on the...

Aida Hozic, Hollyworld: Space, Power and Fantasy in the American Economy.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001. Pp.xviii + 233, illus. H/back ISBN 0 8014 3926 4, $29.95). Aida Hozic's book, ostensibly at least, provides a history of the US film industry in the twentieth century with a particular...

Books received.
January 1, 2004... DOMINIQUE VINCK (ed.), Everyday Engineering: An Ethnography of Design and Innovation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Pp.vi + 247. H/back ISBN 0 262 22065 2, 19.95 [pounds sterling]). MITCHEL Y. ABOLAFIA, Making Markets: Opportunism and...

Defence and the decline of UK mechanical engineering: the case of Vickers at Barrow.
January 1, 2004... In the industrial pronouncements of the Blair government we see repeated much of the rhetoric first used over 30 years ago by an earlier Labour administration. In particular, there are strong echoes of Harold Wilson's 'white heat' of technology...

Strategic alliances and competitive edge: insights from Spanish and UK banking histories.
January 1, 2004... In the literature, regulation has been viewed as mitigating competition as well as hindering the adoption of technological innovation. (1) Regulatory innovations developing into barriers to enter the markets for financial services in general...

Government intervention in the British gas industry.
January 1, 2004... In discussions of the performance of the British nationalised industries, government intervention has often been identified as a significant problem. (1) Enquiries by the Select Committee on Nationalised Industries (SCNI) in the 1960s and the...

Knowledge and training in family firms of the European periphery: Spain in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries.
January 1, 2004... This article is a first attempt to explore the relationship between training and entrepreneurship in Spanish family firms. It examines changes and continuities over time, and relates the evolution of the training practices of Spanish family...