Business History Review articles from March 1994

Business History Review archives from March 1994

Competitiveness and capital investment: the restructuring of the US industry, 1960-1990.
March 22, 1994... The three articles that make up this special issue of the Business History Review were originally written in 1990-91 for a conference organized by Michael Porter of the Harvard Business School and sponsored by the Council on Competitiveness....

The competitive performance of U.S. industrial enterprises since the Second World War. (Competitiveness and Capital Investment: The Restructuring of the U.S. Industry, 1960-1990)
March 22, 1994... and pharmaceuticals. However, since any balanced evaluation of the competitive strengths and weaknesses of each of these other industries would require at least as much space as that given to chemicals and pharmaceuticals, a few brief remarks...

Capital-budgeting systems and capabilities investments in U.S. companies after the Second World War. (Competitiveness and Capital Investment: The Restructuring of U.S. Industry, 1960-1990)
March 22, 1994... is less structured and rigid; 2) a different concept of valuation is prevalent; and 3) there are dramatically different mechanisms contributing to interfunctional communication and coordination. On Japan, see, for example, James E. Hodder,...

Corporate restructuring and investment horizons in the United States, 1976-1987. (Competitiveness and Capital Investment: The Restructuring of U.S. Industry, 1960-1990)
March 22, 1994... 46 Edwards and Fischer, "Banks, Finance, and Investment in West Germany." 47 Bronwyn H. Hall, "Research and Development Investment at the Firm Level: Does the Source of Financing Matter?" unpub. MS, University of California, Berkeley, and...

Eighteenth-Century Capitalism: The Formation of American Marine Insurance Companies.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... This thin volume is a copy of Mary Ruwell's basically unrevised dissertation on the American marine insurance sector, from its beginning in the early eighteenth century through the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Stuart Bruchey and...

An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815.
March 22, 1994... Joyce Chaplin has combined intellectual, social, and economic history to show how the ideas of the Enlightenment interacted with economic behavior in the Lower South--South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida--before 1815. Perhaps her chief point is...

To Sow One Acre More: Childbearing and Farm Productivity in the Antebellum North.
March 22, 1994... Since the time of Malthus, scholars have been fascinated by the demographic history of the United States. The abundance of resources and opportunities for westward migration led Malthus and others to expect unparalleled population growth in North...

Railroad Signatures Across the Pacific Northwest.
March 22, 1994... It is almost axiomatic among historians that the railroad exerted a fundamental influence on the course of economic development in industrializing America. Tying together a vast, disparate territory, the railroads played a pivotal role in welding...

The American Railroad Freight Car: From the Wood-Car Era to the Coming of Steel.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... The mundane subject of the wooden freight car is delineated in detail in this massive work written by the former Curator of Transportation at the Smithsonian Institution, John W. "Jack" White, Jr. White focuses on the nation's freight rolling...

The Passenger Train in the Motor Age: California's Rail and Bus Industries, 1910-1941.
March 22, 1994... The title of this book inaccurately conveys the contents. This is unfortunate, because potential readers might conclude that the volume is of interest only to students of railroad and transportation history. The title also suggests a very narrow...

From Machine Shop to Industrial Laboratory: Telegraphy and the Changing Context of American Invention, 1830-1920.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... The history of industrial research in the United States has long been told from the standpoint of the large-scale, science-based research and development laboratories of General Electric and Du Pont, which were heavily dependent from the outset...

Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830-1930.
March 22, 1994... In Made to Play House, Miriam Formanek-Brunell engagingly documents and analyzes the forces that shaped an important segment of American girlhood--what she calls "dollhood"--between 1830 and 1930. She asks her readers to consider dolls not as...

Bank Behavior, Regulation, and Economic Development: California, 1860-1910.
March 22, 1994... As the emerging free economies of the world establish banking systems, they will look to banks' historical roles in the development of strong economies. The development of a national capital market in the United States has been well researched by...

Platt Brothers and Company: Small Business in American Manufacturing.
March 22, 1994... Historians have recently begun to devote increased attention to the roles played by small businesses in the development of American manufacturing. The works of James Soltow, Philip Scranton, John Ingham, and Mansel Blackford, among others, have...

From Texas to the East: A Strategic History of Texas Eastern Corporation.
March 22, 1994... Quite apart from the desire of company directors to see it done, telling the story of Texas Eastern was a good idea for a number of reasons. As Christopher Castaneda and Joseph Pratt rightly observe, there are few historians of gas transmission...

Ringling: The Florida Years, 1911-1936.
March 22, 1994... John N. Ringling was the youngest of the five brothers who founded their famous circus in the 1880s. John started his career at the age of four by playing the role of a Dutch clown, and as a young man he controlled the circus's train scheduling...

Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture.
March 22, 1994... In Land of Desire, William Leach probes how a variety of social and economic institutions transformed American society between 1880 and 1930 "into a society preoccupied with consumption, with comfort and bodily well-being, with luxury, spending,...

The Story of NationsBank: Changing the Face of American Banking.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1994... NationsBank, formerly North Carolina National Bank, has grown from an important Charlotte bank to a powerful statewide bank to, in the early 1990s, a national player and a potentially dominant regional bank. It may not be as important as the...

The Structure of a Modern Economy: The United States, 1929-1989.
March 22, 1994... I confess prejudice in writing this review. Shortly after sending the manuscript for this book to his publisher, Kenneth Boulding died at age eighty-three. Four decades earlier, I was taking an undergraduate course in microeconomic theory at the...

Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, and Remington Rand and the Industry They Created, 1865-1956.
March 22, 1994... When business historians of the twenty-first century explore the industries that shaped the early decades of what we now call the "Information Age," they should find James W. Cortada's Before the Computer a valuable resource. A businessman whose...

Alberta's Petroleum Industry and the Conservation Board.
March 22, 1994... The fiftieth anniversary of the Energy Resources Conservation Board of Alberta in 1988 inspired its members to organize their historical records and to sponsor the writing of an official history. The result: historian David Breen's meticulously...

Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838-1918.
March 22, 1994... The title of this important publication understates the broad scope of the study. At first glance, the reader might expect a work on labor and economic history. This book is also, however, a study of Asian immigration to the Caribbean, as well as...

Brazilian Industrialists and Democratic Change.
March 22, 1994... Examining the Brazilian experience from the 1964 military coup to the present, Leigh Payne has made an important contribution to the debate over the relationship between Latin American business elites and democracy. She challenges the currently...

Business History of the World: A Chronology.
March 22, 1994... The tradition of making strictly chronological compilations of world history is as old as Thucydides. To the present day, chronological sequences must be established as the historian's preliminary exercise when tackling a piece of research. In...

The State and Social Investigation in Britain and the United States.
March 22, 1994... This volume consists of ten essays dealing with the relationship between state-building or governance and the pursuit of knowledge in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The essays include the editors' lengthy introduction, "Social...

High-Tech Europe: The Politics of International Cooperation.
March 22, 1994... This book analyzes the political processes that led to three programs for cross-border collaborative research launched in the 1980s by European governments: the European Strategic Programme for Research and Development in Information Technology...

Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright.
March 22, 1994... One way of reading this book is as science fiction. As a look into the world of British book publishing before the advent of copyright law as we know it today, Mark Rose's study forces us to imagine the book market without authors in a time when...

Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain, 1914-1950.
March 22, 1994... This substantive and interesting work contributes to a better understanding of the commodification of books and magazines in the early twentieth century. Joseph McAleer examines popular reading habits and publishing in Great Britain between 1870...

Capitalists and Christians: Business Leaders and the Churches in Britain, 1900-1960.
March 22, 1994... Religion is an aspect of business history that receives all too little scholarly attention. Many business historians would probably take an agnostic stance, adopting the Marxist line of religion as a weapon of social control or, alternatively,...

Cheminots en usine: Les ouvriers des Ateliers d'Oullins au temps de la vapeur.
March 22, 1994... Cheminots en usine is a unique social history of a company. It belongs to an enduring trend in French social history, a history that has evolved markedly since the early 1970s from a narrow focus on trade unions to a broader history of labor,...

Parcours de femmes: Realites et representations - Saint-Etienne, 1880-1950.
March 22, 1994... One day there may be a feminist business history. If so, a book like Parcours de femmes, a set of studies of women in Saint-Etienne during the Third Republic--schoolgirls, ribbon weavers, midwives, and employees of the foodstuffs manufacturer...

France at the Crystal Palace: Bourgeois Taste and Artisan Manufacture in the Nineteenth Century.
March 22, 1994... Like the Crystal Palace that serves as its centerpiece, Whitney Walton's provocative book brings together a rich and varied array of goods under a single roof. One major theme concerns the international pre-eminence and domestic dynamism of...

Louis Loucheur and the Shaping of Modern France, 1916-1931.
March 22, 1994... Prior to 1914 the orthodoxy of liberal economics held sway in France. The Great War nullified the paradigm, because total war demanded total mobilization of national resources. No models of macroeconomic management existed; yet, the emergency of...

Japan's New Global Role.
March 22, 1994... A major debate in academic and policy circles concerns whether Japan's political economy is fundamentally similar to or different from that of the United States. Some scholars argue that Japan's systems of democracy and capitalism are similar,...