Business History Review articles from September 1992

Business History Review archives from September 1992

The origins and evolution of Japanese direct investment in Europe.
September 22, 1992... Common misperceptions notwithstanding, Japanese foreign direct investment (FDI) in Europe has a long history. Such investment first penetrated European markets in the 1870s, and it has since evolved through a number of important historical...

Kellogg's six-hour day: a capitalist vision of liberation through managed work reduction.
September 22, 1992... Historians have recently tried to explain why the century-long work-reduction movement ended in the 1940s. A history of Kellogg's six-hour day program reveals that the loss of business and management support contributed to this demise....

From trust to contract: the legal language of managerial ideology, 1920-1980.
September 22, 1992... Although the managerial function arises out of organizational needs imposed by market competition and technological development, managers' professional status has come in large part from legal conceptions that perceive the managerially run firm...

John Jacob Astor: Business and Finance in the Early Republic.
September 22, 1992... Throughout his ninth decade, John Jacob Astor's fortune burgeoned, even as the multimillionaire's body deteriorated. He drooled at dinner parties and required a servant to guide the food to his mouth; his palsy-racked body had to be tossed in...

Revenuers and Moonshiners: Enforcing Federal Liquor Law in the Mountain South: 1865-1900.
September 22, 1992... This thoroughly researched and well-written book focuses on efforts of national authorities to collect the federal excise tax on the production of distilled liquor. The tax was inaugurated during the Civil War, and its collection on a national...

Frederick Billings: A Life.
September 22, 1992... Robin W. Winks is a historian of electic interests who is difficult to categorize. He has written several several fine books on a wide variety of subjects; each work is so well crafted that readers are sure to believe he is a specialist in that...

Enterprise and American Law: 1836-1837.
September 22, 1992... The contemporary "law and economics" movement did not pioneer the application of economic principles to the law. Nineteenth-century jurists on both sides of the Atlantic informed their decisions with classical economic theory. In this...

The Political Economy of the Sherman Act: The First One Hundred Years.
September 22, 1992... In celebration of the centennial of the Sherman Act, E. Thomas Sullivan has produced a most useful book. It consists of a collection of previously published articles, which Sullivan has ably edited to retain their central insights while...

The Quest for Authority and Honor in the American Professions: 1750-1900.
September 22, 1992... In their studies of the professions, the heirs of Max Weber and Karl Marx have generally emphasized the attainment of economic monopoly or social modernization. In either case, the professions are presented as having slipped the bonds of the...

Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics: 1863-1923.
September 22, 1992... In Waterfront Workers of New Orleans, Eric Arnesen asserts that during two periods--the 1880s and from 1901 to 1923--black and white long-shoremen in New Orleans joined together in a series of biracial, multi-trade alliances that enabled them...

Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments.
September 22, 1992... Because the central questions raised by the Hawthrone experiments remain unanswered, many people with diverse interests are likely to want to read this account. What are the main influences on worker performance? And how can managers and...

Taylorism Transformed: Scientific Management Theory since 1945.
September 22, 1992... Stephen Waring begins his study by contending that Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.'s explanation of the rise of the manageriall class in The Visible Hand (1977) validated its undemocratic structure with historical inevitability. He then uses Taylorism...

Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor.
September 22, 1992... This new collection on gender and labor sets out to chart a new course for the study of the working-class and labor movements. Together, the fourteen articles in this collection vividly demonstrate that a "gendered labor history" can...

Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company.
September 22, 1992... Until recently, film historians viewed the rise of a Hollywood style as inevitable. They argued for a classical Hollywood form beginning with D. W. Griffith in 1909, unaffected by competing entertainment fields or structural changes in the...

Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America.
September 22, 1992... For over a quarter century, Neil Harris has been among most influential historians of American culture. Some of his work has been directed at his fellow academics, but much has been prepared for various professional audiences outside the...

Saving the Savings and Loan: The U.S. Thrift Industry and the Texas Experience: 1950-1988.
September 22, 1992... For about two decades following the end of the Second World War, the savings and loan (S&L) business was secure, profitable, and dull. The scope of permitted thrift activities was narrow and consisted primarily of taking savings deposits and...

High Rollers: Inside the Savings and Loan Debacle.
September 22, 1992... The public is angry and confused by the savings and loan (S&L) debacle and wants to know who and what were responsible. Martin Lowy's book provides a readable analysis of the crisis, but readers will find no easy answers and will be dismayed...

The Costing Heritage: Studies in Honor of S. Paul Garner.
September 22, 1992... This festschrift was prepared to honor Dean S. Paul Garner of the Manderson Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Alabama. As H. Thomas Johnson and Guo Duoyang remind us in their thoughtful introductions, Paul Garner...

Power and Economic Institutions: Reinterpretations in Economic History.
September 22, 1992... This is a collection of papers from a 1986 conference devoted to the role of property rights and organizational forms in economic behavior. The topics covered encompass open-field agriculture, medieval craft guilds, the factory system,...

Close Ties: Railways, Government, and the Board of Railway Commissioners: 1851-1933.
September 22, 1992... For his first book, Ken Cruikshank, an assistant professor of history at Trent University, has crafted a concise yet informative analytical and narrative history of Canadian railway rate policy and of Canada's first national regulatory agency,...

Latin America's Economy: Diversity, Trends and Conflicts.
September 22, 1992... Eliana Cardoso and Ann Helwege's book presents an overview of the Latin American economy, its historical roots, and selected macroeconomic problems that emphasize the last decade. It is strongest in its presentation of definitions and analyses...

Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-System.
September 22, 1992... Immanuel Wallerstein, a sociologist by training, is best known in the academic world as the inventor of an imaginary model of the world that he calls "the modern world-system" or, alternatively, "the capitalist world-economy." He has elaborated...

Europe, America, and the Wider World: Essays on the Economic History of Western Capitalism.
September 22, 1992... This volume represents the second set of essays by William Parker on the history of Western capitalism. Whereas the first volume focused on the development of capitalism in Europe, this one describes the American experience. Few living...

Commitment: The Dynamic of Strategy.
September 22, 1992... This well-written volume continues the age-old quest for the business scholar's Holy Grail: a general theory of business strategy. Rejecting conventional explanations of business firms' success as insufficiently concrete and general, Pankaj...

Technology Transfer in International Business.
September 22, 1992... This collection of fourteen essays by eighteen authors is the product of an international business research program at the University of Southern California's School of Business. Only one essay is concerned with a longitudinal historical...

The Struggle for Market Power: Industrial Relations in the British Coal Industry: 1800-1840.
September 22, 1992... In The Struggle for Market Power, James A. Jaffe aims to revise our views of how industrialists and, especially,. workers understood the British economy during the first half of the nineteenth century and how they functioned within it. The...

England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation.
September 22, 1992... Presented as an "interpretative essay" rather than as an extended historical monograph, this book purports to challenge the traditional historiography of the modern England with its focus on the "politics of welfare and on the failings of...

Coal, Steel, and the Rebirth of Europe, 1945-1955: The Germans and French from Ruhr Conflict to Economic Community.
September 22, 1992... The Ruhr was, and is, the economic engine of Europe, and the hegemony it conferred on Germany has been cited as the cause of the two world wars and the reason for interwar instability in Europe. In this admirable book, John Gillingham attempts...

Bureaucratisation in Northwestern Europe, 1880-1985: Domination and Governance.
September 22, 1992... Bureaucracies serve purposes of power. However, such a general statement neither tells us whose power they strengthen nor implies that all struggles about power in society are geared through bureaucracies. Rolf Torstendahl sets out to...

Protectionism and International Banking.
September 22, 1992... This volume is a collection of papers, with dissenting and elaborative commentaries, by twenty participants in a 1987 conference organized by the Permanent Advisory Committee on Eurodollars in cooperation with the Institut der deutschen...

The Role of Banks in the Interwar Economy.
September 22, 1992... This highly informative collection of papers, originally prepared for the Tenth International Economic History Congres in 1990, deals, mainly with the banking experiences of the smaller European countries, plus Canada and Japan, primarily in...

An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia: The Memoirs of Zara Witkin: 1932-1934.
September 22, 1992... A strange experience, my Russian one. I have met the greatest social disappointment, the loveliest beauty, the warmest friend, the heaviest and most responsible task, the deepest sensory sufferings, and the greatest joy possible (p. 105). ...

The Hongkong Bank in the Period of Development and Nationalism, 1941-1984: From the Regional bank to Multinational Group.
September 22, 1992... This is the fourth and final volume of the history of the Hongkong Bank, commissioned by the bank itself, and written by Frank H. H. King, professor emeritus of economic history at the University of Hong Kong. King was given a free hand by the...