Business History articles from October 1997

Business History archives from October 1997

Transaction costs and the theory of the firm: the scope and limitations of the new institutional approach.
October 1, 1997... I For much of the twentieth century there have been complaints about the failure of economic theory to provide tools with which to analyse the development of business enterprise. While the neoclassical theory of the firm has enabled scholars...

Complexity, community structure and competitive advantage within the Yorkshire woollen industry, c.1700-1850.
October 1, 1997... Although the British industrial revolution has been the subject of immense debate, there is much that we do not understand about the actual experience of key regions like the textile district of the West Riding of Yorkshire.(1) While economic...

Invisible, visible and 'direct' hands: an institutional interpretation of organisational structure and change in British general insurance.
October 1, 1997... The history of British general insurance provides a fascinating laboratory in which to explore ideas drawn from 'new institutional' and evolutionary economics. The proposition of this essay is that such investigations yield a high return in terms...

Consultancies, institutions and the diffusion of Taylorism in Britain, Germany and France, 1920s to 1950s.
October 1, 1997... Neoclassical economic theory assumes that all transactions between buyers and sellers of goods and services take place in a 'market' and that purchasing decisions are determined by price, given that the goods and services have identical features...

Financial reconstruction and industrial reorganisation in different financial systems: a comparative view of British and Swedish institutions during the inter-war period.
October 1, 1997... Studies of financial distress have recently enlivened the institutional economics literature. While the main focus has been on the role of banks in the transformation of industry, other economic historians and economists have concentrated on the...

Post-war strategic capitalism in Norway: a theoretical and analytical framework.
October 1, 1997... This essay explores the efforts of the Norwegian state to influence industrial development during the period 1950 to 1980. To do this it is necessary to clarify the meaning of 'industrial policy': it is defined as a purposeful set of measures...

The politics of protection: an institutional approach to government-industry relations in the British and United States cotton industries, 1945-73.
October 1, 1997... Against a background of progressing, if often hesitant, world trade liberalisation since 1945, the cotton textile industries of the developed world have generally been cushioned against foreign imports, as Table 1 demonstrates. Between 1945 and...

Institutional economics and business history: a way forward?
October 1, 1997... The institutional theory of the firm, derived from Coase and developed by Williamson and others, has only partially fulfilled its early promise.(1) It has succeeded in explaining where the boundaries of the firm are drawn, but has failed to...

Alcohol in the British Isles from Roman Times to 1996: An Annotated Bibliography.
October 1, 1997... Studying alcohol in the past has only become a legitimate task for historians in the last 40 years. In Britain it has followed the agendas of economic and business history as much as those of social history, although the latter have, elsewhere,...

Power and the Professions in Britain: 1700-1850.
October 1, 1997... By the mid-nineteenth century professional men - most particularly lawyers, medical men and the clergy, the main subjects of this book - had achieved a position of status and power in society. Their professions offered them a way not only of...

Glasgow, vol. 2: 1839-1912.
October 1, 1997... This is the second of a three-volume history of Glasgow between 1830, when the city was about to acquire a democratic municipal structure, and 1912, when the incorporation of Partick, Govan, Pollockshaws and Cathcart made it once more the 'second...

Democratic Socialism and Economic Policy: The Attlee Years, 1945-51.
October 1, 1997... The focus of this book is on the interaction between the Labour Party's ideas and the actual circumstances in which the Attlee government found itself formulating policy. Tomlinson covers a lot of ground, including Labour's attitudes to the...

Horse Drawn Cabs and Omnibuses in Paris: The Idea of Circulation and the Business of Public Transit.
October 1, 1997... At first sight this appears to be a book of two halves, the first constituting a social and cultural history of France's capital city from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century through an analysis of the means of physical circulation and...

Naissance et mort des entreprises en Europe, XIXe-XXe siecles.
October 1, 1997... Michael Moss and Philippe Jobert have published a second book about a pioneering research programme exploring the life cycle of firms. Their first one, The Birth and Death of Companies: An Historical Perspective (London and New York, 1990),...

Le Credit Industriel de Normandie.
October 1, 1997... It is now 20 years since Richard Roehl first challenged Gerschenkron's classification of France as a backward economy in the nineteenth century. In doing so he absolved French banks of any failure to stimulate a faster rate of economic growth....

Geschichte der Organisationformen im Absatzbereich von Unternehmen in den alten und neuen Bundeslandern.
October 1, 1997... This volume includes the papers and discussions of the seventeenth scholarly symposium of the Gesellschaft far Unternehrnensgeschichte. The theme was the organisation of company marketing and product management in the old and new Bundeslander...

The Business School in European Perspective.
October 1, 1997... During the 1990s, there has been an increasing interest in comparative research on the history of business schools and management education. This publication is a useful contribution to this new literature, even if it is just an edited occasional...

'A Stranger to the Fur Trade': Joseph Wrigley and the Transformation of the Hudson's Bay Company, 1884-1891.
October 1, 1997... In this book, Eleanor Stardom examines the role played by Joseph Wrigley at a very complex period in the history of the Hudson's Bay Company. In 1869, it transferred a major portion of the lands defined by its royal charter to the Dominion...

Networks of Innovation: Vaccine Development at Merck, Sharp and Dohme, and Mulford, 1895-1996.
October 1, 1997... This is an important account of the process of innovation over the last century in modern, science-based business in the United States. The project on which the book is based began as an internal history of vaccine and serum antitoxin development...

Triumphant Capitalism: Henry Clay Frick and the Industrial Transformation of America.
October 1, 1997... Warren provides a detailed chronological account of the business career of Henry Clay Frick, one of the leading entrepreneurs in American heavy industry during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The study is based on Frick's...

Gas Pipelines and the Emergence of America's Regulatory State: A History of Panhandel Eastern Corporation, 1928-1993.
October 1, 1997... The commanding heights of the American economy, unlike those in Britain, were never nationalised, but the US does have a long history of regulating public utilities. Widespread privatisation here should make this American experience relevant. The...

Beyond the Broker State: Federal Policies Toward the Small Business, 1936-1961.
October 1, 1997... This concise study is based on Bean's doctoral dissertation. He analyses the federal government policies towards small business from the beginning of Roosevelt's Second New Deal until the end of the Eisenhower presidency. The congressional...

Kindred Strangers: The Uneasy Relationship Between Business and Politics in America.
October 1, 1997... David Vogel teaches business and public policy and holds a chair in business ethics at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. One of the few American political scientists who specialise in business-government relations,...

Tricontinental: The Rise and Fall of a Merchant Bank.
October 1, 1997... The history of Tricontinental has a familiar resonance to it. Originally formed in 1969, it responded aggressively to the increased competition in financial markets resulting from the Hawke government's deregulation policies in the early to...

One Big Union: A History of the Australian Workers' Union, 1886-1994.
October 1, 1997... This is a very detailed account of the history of the Australian Workers' Union, which was commissioned to celebrate the union's centennial. The aim of Hearn and Knowles is to present a story of the emergence and development of an organisation...

Cloth and Commerce: Textiles in Colonial India.
October 1, 1997... This volume reprints nine major articles on aspects of the Indian textile industry which were first published in the Indian Economic and Social History. Review, the journal of the Indian Economic and Social History Association. The articles are...

Troubled Industries: Confronting Economic Change in Japan.
October 1, 1997... Dispelling the myth that in the post-war era Japanese industries have achieved an unrelenting record of growth and foreign market penetration, Uriu has provided a fascinating account of how problems in certain ailing sectors have been tackled by...

Building the Nineteenth Century.
October 1, 1997... Drawing largely on examples from Europe and the United States, this book is concerned with how builders' thoughts about the processes of construction changed during the nineteenth century. The author suggests that three stages may be...

The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy.
October 1, 1997... This is the latest in a long line of important works by Susan Strange on international political economy. For her, the basic question of such political economy has always been 'who gets what' in the international arena. In this book, that general...

Professional Elites in the Modern World.
October 1, 1997... Harold Perkin describes this book as the third volume of an unintended trilogy. The first book, The Origins of Modern English Society 1780-1880, was about how the Industrial Revolution, which he considers to be the second great revolution in...

Computer: A History of the Information Machine.
October 1, 1997... Computer, part of the Sloan Technology Series, is intended to inform the general reader about the development of computer technology, a task it fulfils successfully by presenting a fascinating and readable story of the development of the...

National Diversity and Global Capitalism.
October 1, 1997... This thought-provoking book consists of a collection of papers by a group of authors from diverse intellectual backgrounds, brought together for a conference at Bellagio in 1993. The contributors include economists, political scientists,...