Business History Review articles from March 1992

Business History Review archives from March 1992

External economics and economic progress: the case of the microcomputer industry.
March 22, 1992... One candidate is Apple. With its effective compromise between technology and marketing--a combination typical of prime movers--Apple helped define the personal computer and staked an early dominant position. That position was soon eroded, of...

Strategic maneuvering and mass-market dynamics: the triumph of VHS over Beta. (includes appendices on VCR industry chronology, Sony product schedule from 1975-85, JVC product schedule from 1976-85).
March 22, 1992... set rental was a common practice in Britain, extended readily to VCRs, the practice of renting programs on tape was a natural adjunct. The linkages formed by JVC and Hitachi with Thorn and Granada, the leading British TV-rental operations, led...

Theodore N. Vail and the role of innovation in the modern Bell system.
March 22, 1992... arose in regard to certain private branch exchanges; see H. B. Thayer to P. L. Spalding, 21 April 1913, and H. B. Thayer to W. T. Gentry, 21 Oct. 1914. 56 See also Reich, Making of American Industrial Research, 246-47. These aspects of...

Intellectual property protection in the American chicken-breeding industry.
March 22, 1992... breeders explored the new biotechnologies and changes in the procedures for patenting life and attempted to shape them to fit their existing industries. That chickens bred through traditional crossing and selection could not be patented was...

Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760-1808.
March 22, 1992... How do elites establish hegemony over a society beset with strong class and regional tensions? In a fascinating study, Rachel Klein analyzes the formation of a powerful, cohesive planter class in South Carolina during the half century that...

The New York City Artisan, 1789-1825: A Documentary History.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1992... Given the outpouring of monographs on nineteenth-century artisans in the past decade by William Rorabaugh, Sean Wilentz, Steven Ross, Francis Couvares, and others, a book of related documents seems in order. Howard B. Rock, author of Artisans of...

Tournament of Lawyers: The Transformation of the Big Law Firm.
March 22, 1992... The place that lawyers occupy in the American business order has been, and remains, both conspicuous and obscure. The giant corporations dominating the nation's economy possess their own law departments. At the same time, these corporations...

A Tale of Three Cities: Labor Organization and Protest in Paterson, Passaic and Lawrence, 1916-1921.
March 22, 1992... David Goldberg closely examines the activities of textile workers in three cities around the time of the 1919 strikes in order to assess local variables affecting organizing efforts, to evaluate the legacy of the Industrial Workers of the World...

The City Builders: One Hundred Years of Union Carpentry in Portland, Oregon, 1883-1983.
March 22, 1992... The United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America (UBCJA) marked their centennial in 1981. A flurry of writings greeted this anniversary of one of the most pivotal unions within the building trades and a central force throughout the...

Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor.
March 22, 1992... Steven Fraser has written an erudite, deeply researched account of the public career and times of Sidney Hillman, one of the most important labor leaders in the United States in the twentieth century. Born in Lithuania (1887), Hillman studied in...

Southern Timberman: The Legacy of William Buchanan.
March 22, 1992... The story of William Buchanan and his companies provides an excellent case study reflecting the birth, development, decline, and regeneration of the southern forest products industry from the late nineteenth century to the 1980s. Born in...

Fig Leaves and Fortunes: A Fashion Company Named Warnaco.
March 22, 1992... Fig Leaves and Fortunes is an account of the establishment, growth, and development of the Warner Brothers Corset Company. Author John W. Field, a great-grandson of one of its founders and a former chief executive officer, offers a history of its...

Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880-1940.
March 22, 1992... Historians of technology have moved beyond Jacques Ellul's simplifying notion of a monolithic force inexorably rolling over passive populations. David E. Nye argues persuasively for the social construction of new technologies in this perceptive...

Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age.
March 22, 1992... In 1892 Charles and Frank Duryea's gas-powered motor carriage traveled 200 feet and thereby became the first successful automobile in the United States. By 1929, thirty-seven years later, one car existed for every five people in the United...

The Struggle for Auto Safety.
March 22, 1992... The Struggle for Auto Safety offers a nuanced lawyers' perspective (Jerry Mashaw is a professor of law at Yale; David Harfst is a practicing attorney) on the history of national automobile safety regulation from its inception in 1966 through the...

Taxpayers in Revolt: Tax Resistance During the Great Depression.
March 22, 1992... Long before the passage of California's Proposition 13 and the spread of "tax-cut fever" in the late 1970s, there had been another tax revolt in the United States. The other, less well known, eruption of taxpayer protest occurred within the...

The Governmental Habit Redux: Economic Controls from Colonial Times to the Present.
March 22, 1992... Jonathan Hughes's The Governmental Habit appeared in 1977 and soon thereafter went out of print. As government-business relations increasingly came to occupy the research and teaching interests of business and economic historians, The...

After the Breakup: Assessing the New Post-AT&T Divestiture Era.
March 22, 1992... Assessing the impact on telecommunications in the ten years since the decision to break up the Bell System, the essays in this volume address several questions of interest to historians of business, public policy, and technology. Perhaps the most...

Antitrust and the Triumph of Economics: Institutions, Expertise and Policy Change.
March 22, 1992... Since the passage of the Sherman Act little more than one hundred years ago, the tides of antitrust enforcement ardor have ebbed and flowed many times. The reasons for these variations have been the subject of many scholarly works and law review...

Visionary Capitalism: Financial Markets and the American Dream in the Twentieth Century.
March 22, 1992... Providing a summary history of commercial and investment banking since 1920 and of related federal legislation, this is a textbook based on secondary sources rather than a research monograph. After three overview chapters on banking and capital...

What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History.
March 22, 1992... A quiet revolution has occurred in how we think about the relationship between science and engineering. Engineers were once taken to be the handmaidens of science: science discovered and engineers applied. Engineering was worthy but dull stuff....

Space Commerce.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1992... Space Commerce will be of interest to business historians as raw material for their work rather than as an authoritative history. The author, John L. McLucas, defines space commerce to be "... those activities in which private companies put their...

The Breakthrough Illusion: Corporate America's Failure to Move from Innovation to Mass Production.
March 22, 1992... Americans must surely be tired of reading that Japan has won the race for manufacturing supremacy. Richard Florida and Martin Kenney, professors of management and public policy and of applied social science, respectively, nevertheless fearlessly...

The New Competition: Institutions of Industrial Restructuring.
March 22, 1992... This is another book on the roots of American (and to a lesser extent, British) economic decline. For Michael Best the basis of this decline is the organizational inertia of American business, above all its inability to respond to the challenge...

Maritime Capital: The Shipping Industry in Atlantic Canada, 1820-1914.
March 22, 1992... These two books develop complementary facets of a new explanation for the rise and collapse of Atlantic Canada's shipping industry between 1820 and 1914. Canada possessed the world's fourth largest merchant navy in 1880, but over the next twenty...

Agrarian Capitalism and the World Market: Buenos Aires in the Pastoral Age, 1840-1890.
March 22, 1992... Long before meatpacking plants and refrigerated ships enabled Argentina to become one of the world's major exporters of chilled and frozen beef, wool, tallow, and mutton were far more significant sources of foreign sales for the South American...

Wage Labor and Guilds in Medieval Europe.
March 22, 1992... This book, Steven Epstein states in his introduction, "is my answer to two simple questions--why did wage labor appear in medieval Europe, and what sort of rules and traditions governed the casual and dynamic relationship between employer and...

Ricardo and the Gold Standard: The Foundations of the International Monetary Order.
March 22, 1992... This book offers a refreshing new perspective on the workings of the adjustment mechanism in the early history of the gold standard. The analysis focuses on the microeconomics of gold movements and emphasizes the role of market mechanisms (that...

Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History.
March 22, 1992... For most of human history, the world was a very large place, consisting of separate civilizations and subcivilizations that developed quite different solutions to the mundane but nagging problems of how to put food on the table and keep warm in...

The Invisible Weapon: Telecommunications and International Politics, 1851-1945.
March 22, 1992... With The Invisible Weapon Daniel Headrick puts the capstone on a decade of solid research centered on technology and global politics during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Like its predecessors, The Tools of Empire (1981) and The...

Reversing Industrial Decline? Industrial Structure and Policy in Britain and Her Competitors.
March 22, 1992... Despite the implication in the title of a wider coverage, this book is principally addressed to the British industrial disease: its symptoms, causes, and possible cures. Comparative reference is made, at various points, to the experience of other...

Railway Imperialism.
March 22, 1992... Railways were in many ways the chief instrument of European imperial expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The bulk of the capital flowing from Europe into America, Africa, and Asia went to finance the railways that gave...

Banks as Multinationals.
March 22, 1992... Covering much of the world for the past two centuries, the essays in this conference volume deal with the forms in which multinational banking first appeared, how it developed, and the advantages it had over alternative arrangements such as...

The Politics of Social Solidarity: Class Bases of the European Welfare State, 1875-1975.
March 22, 1992... This is an important contribution to the study of comparative social welfare and to current debate among historians and political and social scientists. A highly influential paradigm since the late 1960s has been what is now known as the "social"...

The Agony of Modernization: Labor and Industrialization in Spain.
March 22, 1992... In the preface to this book, Benjamin Martin explains his purpose: to provide a "general account and analysis |of Spanish labor history~ incorporating the substantial monographic research of recent date". Though this may seem a modest goal, in...

Big Business and Industrial Conflict In Nineteenth-Century France: A Social History of the Parisian Gas Company.
March 22, 1992... Though all too often business and social historians speak different languages, Lenard Berlanstein has succeed in combining the approaches of both fields in this fascinating study of the Parisian Gas Company. He does so in a careful analysis not...

State Capitalism and Working-Class Radicalism in the French Aircraft Industry.
March 22, 1992... Herrick Chapman has written an excellent book on industrial policy and industrial relations in the French aircraft industry during the 1930s and 1940s. His detailed account of the way employers and workers in this industry defended and redefined...

La questione meridionale prima dell'intervento straordinario.
March 22, 1992... From the very inception of Italian unification in 1860, the Italian South (roughly defined as the peninsula south of Rome and the islands of Sicily and Sardinia) has proved a source of controversy and frustration. In area and population, the...

Politics and the African Development Bank.
March 22, 1992... Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, is of special economic concern to the international community. Many countries deteriorated, in material terms, during the 1980s. Even once bright lights, like the Ivory Coast and Cameroon, have encountered...

Oil, State and Industrialization in Iran.
March 22, 1992... Oil was discovered in Iran in 1908, earlier than in many other oil-exporting countries. Its exploitation rapidly became of central strategic concern to the British Navy, and in 1914 the British government bought a majority of shares in the...

Industrial Harmony in Modern Japan: The Invention of a Tradition.
March 22, 1992... W. Dean Kinzley argues that the Japanese tradition of harmonious industrial relations was a deliberate creation of political and social elites between the two world wars. In particular, he claims that the Kyochokai (Cooperation and Harmony...

Japanese Takeovers: The Global Contest for Corporate Control.
March 22, 1992... In his recent book, W. Carl Kester analyzes a rare phenomenon, the Japanese takeover, and suggests that the activity is likely to become less rare in coming years, though by no means as common as its American counterpart. Japanese Takeovers...