2010 Annual Meeting
University of Georgia
Athens, Georgia
March 25-27, 2010

"The Business History of Everything"

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Abstracts

Neveen Abdelrehim, Josephine Maltby, and Steven Toms
Imperialism, Employment, and Racial Discrimination: The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, 1933-1951
  [Paper]

By the mid-twentieth century, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) had become a large British multinational that was held to consider Iran as its "own town." It was a very common complaint that members of the British staff of the company treated their Iranian colleagues and subordinates as racial inferiors, and Iranians of all grades, from workmen up to senior staff, including UK graduates, claimed to have experienced insults on the grounds of nationality from British staff. This paper addresses the claims by the Iranians against the AIOC and the company's counter-claims, and the tactical methods adopted by the AIOC management, including the management of information. The paper draws on a wide range of archival evidence from various historical sources such as the Iranian Press "ITTILA'AT," UK Press, archival records of correspondence between the chairman and various diplomats, and the AIOC annual reports. Specifically, it contrasts the pronouncements of the AIOC in public documents such as the Annual Reports with private views reflected in correspondence and third party evidence, allowing an objective assessment of the extent of Iranianization ahead of the political crisis of 1951. The analysis shows that the AIOC was discriminatory toward Iranians, reflecting a negative attitude to their technical potential as well as traditional colonial stereotyping. More important, the AIOC resisted Iranianization because the redistribution of employment in favor of Iranians, including at the senior level, threatened to compromise the control of the business. It was this point that was most strenuously resisted by the AIOC negotiators. The company was more willing to compromise on other aspects that were less threatening to overall control, for example on housing and health care. These concessions were insufficient to forestall the ensuing nationalization crisis, which after all, was all about the crucial question of control of the oil fields.

Michele Alacevich
The World Bank and the Reconstruction of Italy, 1947-1955

The early loans of the World Bank were aimed at helping European countries in their reconstruction efforts after the war. Italy, a defeated country whose southern regions were the largest underdeveloped area in Europe, began negotiations with the Bank as early as 1947. When the United States launched a massive bilateral aid program—the so-called Marshall Plan—the Bank shifted to its second mission: development. Yet, it continued the work in Italy, and in 1951 it granted the first of a series of eight loans that would make Italy the largest European borrower from the Bank. Early Bank-Italy relations are particularly interesting because they show that the Bank was testing development policies that were new for the organization. Initially, the Bank focused on the macroeconomic aspects of development assistance, including supporting Italy's balance of payments. The Bank treated reconstruction and development as two interconnected phases. Southern Italy thus become a laboratory for Bank policies to be applied elsewhere in the developing world. However, this phase came to an end when the Bank abandoned its initial macroeconomic approach and narrowed its focus to specific infrastructural projects.

Dimitry Anastakis
Hubris, Nepotism, and Failure: The Bricklin Car Company and the Question of Inevitability

In 1974, Malcolm Bricklin, a charismatic self-promoting automotive entrepreneur, announced that he would build a dazzling new car, the Bricklin SV1. Bricklin immediately launched a massive public relations campaign, appearing on numerous American television shows and magazines. He was heralded as a throwback to a bygone era: the last great automotive entrepreneur, akin to a Henry Ford, or Walter Chrysler. The vehicle would be built in, of all places, New Brunswick, Canada. Bricklin would mean jobs for New Brunswickers, investment, industrial development, and perhaps a new respect for the province. Instead, Bricklin's dreams quickly turned into a nightmare. External challenges such as the 1973 oil embargo and new safety and emissions regulations hampered design and production. The firm's own shortcomings—poor engineering, inexperience, and corporate disorganization and nepotism—crippled the company. By 1976, after building nearly 3,000 vehicles, Bricklin was unceremoniously put into receivership. This paper examines the Bricklin case as a question of failed entrepreneurship within a mature sector of the economy. It focuses on two particular aspects of the Bricklin story: the company's management style, organization, and structure, and its relationship with the New Brunswick government. The primary sources for this project include government records, company archives, and other records in Fredericton, Ottawa, Detroit, Michigan, and Washington, DC.

Ryan K. Anderson
Dick Merriwell, the Problem of Generational Readers, and the Business of Making Boys

Street and Smith publishing had a problem in 1901: their flagship dime novel, Tip Top Weekly (1896-1912) did so well that they now found themselves negotiating the demands made by the original readers of the serial and new readers regarding the direction of the story. The house's introduction of Dick Merriwell in "Frank Merriwell's Brother; or, Training a Wild Spirit" represented its attempt to satisfy both groups of readers, who wanted a story that told them how they might live as a manly boy. This was important because Street and Smith made cloth-bound novels by using their dime novels as a form of audience research. Deciding which storylines merited reprinting depended on reader validation, so maintaining a holistic audience remained important to making money. But, as long as the house included readers as direct participants in creating the Merriwell saga they gave them power to handicap their production methods. This had less to do with any shortcoming in their particular creative process than with reflecting Progressive Era changes in the publishing business in general and the continuing bifurcation of adolescence.

James L. Baughman
The First Pitch: American TV Commercials in the 1950s

The first decade of television commercials offers a window on prevailing theories about broadcast salesmanship—and advertising generally—in mid-twentieth-century America. Television's swift diffusion in the 1950s created enormous opportunities for ad agencies. And most followed rules conveying agency culture in the decade before "the creative revolution" began to transform the industry. TV advertising should appeal to a mass audience. The restrictive nature of TV service—most Americans could choose from among only three channels—discouraged pitches that played to demographic sub-groups. At the same time, most agencies assumed that an excessively clever or humorous commercial distracted from the spot's core message. The best pitch was serious. "The purpose of a commercial," Rosser Reeves of Ted Bates wrote, "is not to entertain the viewer but to sell him." In that regard, many television ads, mimicking a radio practice, affected intimacy, or what the sociologist Robert Merton termed "pseudo-intimacy." The seller on the small screen was your friend. Finally, advertisers sought to identify their products with TV's stars. The tendency of programs to have single underwriters eased this goal. Commercials and product plugs were routinely integrated into programs, including those for children.

Thomas M. Bayer
Arthur Tooth: A London Art Dealer in the Spotlight, 1870-1871

This paper contributes to the current research into the history of the art business by examining the behavior of an art dealer in Mid-Victorian London to determine the extent and manner his business dealings shaped the arts environment of nineteenth-century Britain. To explore this topic from a new direction, the study employs quantitative methods borrowed from the fields of economics and accounting to expand beyond the socio-historical analyses of other investigations into this topic. Detailed analyses of the 1870-1871 inventory records of the London art dealing firm of Arthur Tooth reveal widespread trade cooperation. This collaboration maximized the influx of new artists and optimized the opportunities for sale to the public of their works as well as other paintings by well-established artists. The data show that in addition to functioning as arbitrageurs, art dealers also performed the role of market-makers to ends similar to those of stock specialists in modern stock markets. The paper argues that these functions are the necessary tools of a fixed-location retail trade to facilitate growth and maintain stability of a mature market in luxury goods with an added speculative commodity character. The modus operandi of this dealer network signaled artists to produce more and increasingly diversified works. As a result, the very system of art dealing that came into being during this period contributed to a far greater extent to the subsequent, and still ongoing, explosion of styles than hitherto recognized.

Matthew Bellamy
"Rich By Nature, Poor By Policy": State Intervention and the Stillborn Birth of the Canadian Brewing Industry, 1668-1675

The paper examines the factors that led to the birth and quick death of the first child of commercial brewing in Canada. During the period 1668-1675, Jean Talon, the energetic Intendant of New France and the man in control of the colony's entire civil administration, induced the birth of commercial brewing. His reasons for doing so will be examined, as will the scale and scope of his state-owned and -controlled brewery. The paper takes as its theoretical starting point the position of Alfred Chandler that firms and markets evolve together to shape industrial outcomes. As a result, supply-side and demand-side influences will be analyzed. Ultimately the paper argues that when it came to the birth of commercial brewing in Canada, the state forced the development of the industry ahead of market dictates. Despite the fact that the colony possessed all the natural ingredients to manufacture beer, Jean Talon's rigid adherence to the monopolistic dictates of mercantilism produced a stillborn child, one insensitive to local tastes and lacking any intuition of the working of a diversified, sui generis economy.

Gavin Benke
Shifting Focus: Enron's Change in Corporate Rhetoric and Practice

Before its name became synonymous with corporate fraud and deception, Enron Corporation was a darling of the business press, praised for its "innovative" practices. However, the company was not always so closely tied to that term. Rather, Enron emphasized several different values over its relatively brief existence. For instance, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, amid concerns in the United States over acid rain and global warming, the company's marketing literature presented Enron as an environmentally sound company. However, over the course of the 1990s Enron began to de-emphasize these issues and mimicked the rhetorical and visual style of the "new economy" instead. These shifts in Enron's focus throughout the course of the decade reveal both the company's sensitivity to wider cultural trends and their attempt to influence those trends. Through examining Enron's marketing literature, I argue that the company's shift in rhetoric demonstrates the influence of culture on a firm, as well as how a firm tries to both capitalize on and shape the culture around it.

Hartmut Berghoff
Are Immigrant Entrepreneurs Different? Questions and Concepts of a New Research Initiative

This paper will first take a look at theoretical models of immigrant entrepreneurship and the results of some of the most important empirical research so far. It will ask for sources of comparative advantages and disadvantages, skill and knowledge transfer, and socio-cultural networks and for processes of assimilation. In its second part, the paper will introduce a new research initiative of the German Historical Institute in Washington D.C., which will focus on the history of German immigrant entrepreneurs in the United States from 1720 to the present time. This major research initiative addresses two central themes in the history of the United States, immigration and entrepreneurship. The topics are closely interrelated, since the U.S. developed a strong culture of entrepreneurship as it became the quintessential receiving country in the nineteenth century. One aim of the project is to reappraise the Economist's statement that "no other country refreshes itself in quite the same way by continuous waves of immigration." The project will also challenge sociological studies on the composition of the American business elite, which claim that it was "disproportionally derived from Protestant, Anglo-Saxon, native-born, well-to-do families." This thesis of a relatively homogeneous, socially exclusive group must certainly be reviewed. The project aims at new empirical data as well as at a contribution to the discussion on the nature of entrepreneurship.

Mark Billings
Abolishing Retirement? The "Employer Covenant" and the Privatization of Pensions Liabilities in Major British Companies, c. 1980-2010

In recent years pension provision has come under great stress in many countries, although detailed institutional arrangements vary greatly. An important aspect of Britain's "pension crisis" has been the deterioration in the funding positions of many occupational pension schemes (OPS) sponsored by major listed companies. The wider difficulties of private sector OPS have brought onto the political agenda the relative generosity and underfunding of public sector pensions, a debate that has largely ignored the impact of Britain's 1980s and 1990s privatization program in shifting considerable pension liabilities from the public to the private sector. The provision of OPS in private and public sectors grew dramatically in the decades after World War Two, but the "employer covenant"—the ability and willingness of employers to provide and support OPS—has weakened in the last twenty years. The benefits to employers of providing such schemes have diminished, reflecting changes in employment patterns and the bargaining power of labor. The costs of providing OPS have increased, with changes in regulation, investment returns and demographic factors. But I also argue that the apparent affordablity of OPS in earlier decades was to some extent illusory, and that privatization has played a part in exposing this.

Eugene K. Choi
Reconsidering the Innovations in the Meiji Cotton Spinners' Growth Strategy

From the beginning of the 1890s, the cotton-spinning sector stood out in the Meiji economy as the most competitive sector. It was the first industry to undertake full-scale mechanization in Japanese business history and, more important, it also formed the forefront of international corporate formation. For the strategic significance in the national policy, the top echelon of the industrial elites were involved with early industrial development, and the success was due to their outstanding entrepreneurial leadership. The most important success factor concerned their early conceptualization of pan-industrial growth strategy. Their concept of growth was based on the industrialists' determination to face and win over the upcoming global competition, and this resulted in continuous innovations in accordance with the incessantly changing market conditions. Innovation did not have to be always technological; this paper focuses on the Meiji Japanese conceptual breakthrough as the essential innovation, derived from their clear business vision and firm commitment to the evolving cognitive commonality in growth strategy. To debate the historical context of their innovations, this paper investigates the leading opinions, debates, and voices of the cotton spinners, through the industrial journal Boseki Geppo (1889-1912). This journal, as a primary reference, provides the Meiji cotton spinners' dynamic perception of strategic market segments in the global perspective, of necessary technical improvement, and of the international competitors in India, China, and Britain. Another key attempt of this study is to contribute to the ongoing debates on innovation and entrepreneurship, and this requires a reconsideration of the Meiji cotton spinners' competitive strategy throughout the rapidly developing period.

David J. Clampin and Ron Noon
The End of Social Responsibility: Mr. Cube and of the Place of Business and Marketing in British Postwar Society

This paper offers a case study in both the history of British commercial marketing and the inter-relationship between business and politics via an examination of the postwar Labour government's stated intention to nationalize sugar refining in 1949. In response to this decision, taken by a freely elected government, the British sugar refining giant, Tate & Lyle, adopted an intense marketing campaign with a view to "informing" the public in the hope that they might choose to stand up to the state. In so doing, the marketing industry was inextricably drawn into politics and, it is argued, for the first time adopted an ostensibly party political stance that stands in contrast to their earlier more circumspect approach and their adherence to the basic ideal of "social responsibility." By focusing on this cause in the brief period 1949-1952, I explore a key moment in British marketing history and the contested role of marketing in modern society.

Will Cooley
Robin Hoods to "just robbin'": Race, Violence, and Organized Crime in Chicago, 1945-1975

In the 1940s and 1950s, Chicago's white organized crime syndicate forcibly removed black organized crime leaders and took over the illicit economy. Though blacks were employed in the informal sector, it was only as lower-echelon underlings. Many of Chicago's black residents deeply resented this situation, viewing it as another form of exploitation, and in the 1960s and 1970s, youth gangs emerged to re-take control of vice activities in Chicago's black communities. Yet when youth gangs such as the Rangers asserted themselves in the 1960s, the gangs' brazen methods alienated their communities and exacerbated tensions with law enforcement. This paper historicizes the rise of black street gangs by showing that when the lucrative informal economy was removed from black management in the 1950s, it also eliminated the experienced black organized crime figures who had cultivated a general community tolerance of their activities and developed indispensable political ties. When the next generation tried to reclaim the control of vice, they were bereft of crime mentors. The lack of mentorship impaired the development and maintenance of formal and informal businesses in black communities.

Jonathan Coopersmith
The Elephant in the Room: The Normality of Failure in the History of Technology

Failure is an integral and normal part of the evolution of technologies and organizations. Widely viewed, failure extends from the commercial collapse of a firm promoting a new technology and the inability of a technology to work to less obvious shortcomings like suboptimal performance, poor economics, and late delivery. Academic disciplines (especially history) have not paid sufficient attention to this important subject, focusing on success. The understandable tendency to focus on what worked instead of on what did not has resulted in a simplified appreciation of the reality of technological evolution. This research explores the importance of failure in the history of technology and offers a theoretical framework to understand and position failure. Failure is an integral part of history, a part that should not be forgotten or excluded. Just as honest biography is more interesting and valuable than an admiring hagiography, so too does historical inquiry benefit from a fuller understanding of its subject. A complete history demands study and analysis not only of the roads taken, but also of the roads not taken and the roads unsuccessfully taken as part of the tortuous, demanding, and uncertain path that technologies follow to move from an idea to a commercial reality.

Harald Degner
Large Sample Analysis and Firm-Level Business History: Understanding the Long-Term Relationship between Firm Size and Innovativeness

In my paper I investigate the relationship between size and innovativeness of firms in the long-term perspective. To this day, the so-called Schumpeterian hypothesis about an above-average innovativeness of large firms has been neither confirmed nor rejected, often because of insufficient data or a too-short observation period. Many studies concentrate only on a specific region or a specific sector, or they analyze a very short period of time. In contrast, this analysis is based on a completely new dataset containing every long-lived patent in the German Empire and the Weimar Republic (1877-1932). The dataset contains 66,500 entries concerning economically relevant innovations. Firm size is measured by employment and capital stock. Technological booms, providing a window of technological opportunities for both firms and sectors, have not yet been investigated. An analysis of Germany's chemical and metal sector between 1877 and 1932 revealed that the sector-specific long-term relationship between firm size and innovativeness is negative, except for the time of a specific technological boom. Identifying and understanding firm-specific characteristics, analyzed as well in the present paper, is the key to understanding why inside a specific technological boom no general relationship between firm size and innovativeness can be found. Combining large-panel regressions with detailed business history research at the firm-level can contribute to a much better understanding of the long-term relationship between firm size and innovativeness.

Jennifer Delton
Corporate Social Responsibility: The NAM and Equal Employment Opportunity, 1945-1985

This paper will examine the National Association of Manufacturers' support for equal employment opportunity (EEO) practices beginning during World War II, as well as its efforts to help employers comply with 1960s-era Civil Rights legislation. Most studies of corporate racial policies have focused on Civil Rights organizations as instigators of change. This paper argues that conservative organizations were also interested in racial integration, thus broadening our understanding of the types of organizations that contributed to socially responsible corporate practices.

Pierre Desrochers
Industrial Symbiosis: Old Wine in Recycled Bottles? Some Perspective from the History of Economic and Geographical Thought

"Industrial symbiosis" (IS) is a central concept in the industrial ecology literature; it describes geographically proximate inter-firm relationships involving the exchange of residual materials, water, and energy. Despite its obvious relevance to regional science, economic geography, and urban economics, the issue is only beginning to be addressed in these sub-disciplines. This situation is paradoxical, as both recovery linkages and the very concept of IS were discussed in some depth by numerous economists and geographers several decades ago. This paper summarizes this intellectual history, in the process providing a better understanding of the phenomenon while shedding additional light on current controversies.

Hasia Diner
Peddlers: A New World Jewish History

This paper explores the way in which peddling functioned as a migration strategy for central and east European Jews in the century from the 1820s to the 1920s, as they moved out to a series of "new worlds," including the British Isles, North and South America, South Africa and Australia. Peddling not only facilitated Jewish migrations but also served as an engine of Jewish integration. Of all the occupations in which Jews clustered, peddling not only lasted longer than nearly any other, but it also forced them into an intense and almost instantaneous encounter with the local cultures of the places to which they went. This paper focuses on peddling in these two contexts, at the same time that it contextualizes it around the conflicts and controversies that surrounded this peripatetic occupation. To what degree did peddling in any one part of the "new world" resemble peddling in any other? How did peddling differ from place to place?

Dan Du
Illinois Free Banks

Free banking had been consigned to oblivion until Friedrich Hayek proposed the concept "denationalized currency." Study of banks, therefore, helps to render a full understanding of American financial history. However, mainly based on economic and financial theories, current researches on this subject focus on whether banking is born a monopoly, and try to conceive a financial market without the regulation of central banks. Their historical background and influence on the society are seldom drawn to attention. This paper, by melding economic issues with the overall trends of history, seeks to solve this problem. Employing tools from economics and history, this paper analyzes the accounting statements of Illinois free banks and examines related indices such as discounts on banks notes, prices of exchanges, and the life span to assess their performance. The development of free banking, furthermore, was intertwined with the confrontation between Whig-Republican and Democratic parties, economic changes in the nineteenth century, the rise of corporations as well as the transportation revolution. On the whole, investigating the Illinois experience helps to assess the performance of the free banking system, which allows us to grasp the main line of nineteenth-century Illinois history from the perspective of financial history.

Anton Ehlers
Black Economic Empowerment, Apartheid Style: The Case of Pep Stores Peninsula, Limited, 1973-1974

In a certain sense black economic empowerment (BEE) is not a new concept in South Africa's more recent past. The apartheid policies of the National Party also made provision for the economic development of black people. In the process state-controlled corporations such as the Coloured Development Corporation (CDC) were founded to finance and drive the process. Some white businessmen seized this opportunity to access Coloured group areas as markets. Pep Stores Peninsula, Limited, a clothing retail company founded in 1974, was probably one of the earliest examples in this regard. The aim of this paper is to use the Pep Peninsula case study to argue that the roots of BEE in South Africa stretch back much further than the early 1990s; to posit it as one of the earliest examples of corporate involvement in BEE in South Africa; to highlight the dynamics generated by the combination of state-controlled, ideologically driven, race-based empowerment in tandem with corporate market-driven initiatives; to indicate incidences (tangencies) between the apartheid economic empowerment initiative and the current BEE initiatives of the post-apartheid era.

Bartow Elmore
The Coca-Cola Company, Convenience Packaging, and the Limits of Corporate Environmental Stewardship in the 1970s

My study explores the Coca-Cola Company's involvement in the pioneering of resource and environmental profile (or REPA) studies on soft drink containers in the 1960s and 1970s, studies that laid the foundation for contemporary life-cycle analysis (LCA) research. It begins with an examination of Coke's anti-litter campaign in the 1960s, the company's first real foray into the realm of environmental stewardship. I examine soft drink anti-litter advertising in the 1960s and 1970s, emphasizing its appeals to popular free market principles, and I then consider the contradictions between Coke's promotional rhetoric and its clandestine approach to life-cycle research. As I examine the details of beverage container REPA studies in the 1970s, I focus on Coke's limited translation of life-cycle findings to its customers. I conclude that, despite professing an allegiance to a classical liberal vision of a free market system driven by rational consumers, Coca-Cola actively withheld (and continues to withhold) critical information about its nonreturnable packaging from its customers, thus preventing consumers from making eco-conscious decisions about packaging alternatives.

Mehmet Erçek and Öner Günçavdi
Evolution of National and International Resource Constraints and Business Groups: The Historical Case of a Turkish Family Holding, 1950-1999
  [Paper]

In this study, we attempt to contribute to the literature on evolution of business groups by providing a rich historical case of a Turkish business group's evolution during the second half of the twentieth century. We emphasize the role of macroeconomic expenditure flows as well as certain environmental and firm-level constraints in shaping the evolutionary pattern of the Turkish business group. When the level and direction of macroeconomic expenditure flows vary during the second half of twentieth century in Turkey, the business group's investment strategy and structure also varied. Fit with the macroeconomic expenditure flows and environmental constraints resulted in better performance and growth, whereas misfit with environmental constraints and certain firm-level characteristics brought about below average performance and consolidation. Our case study also corroborates the earlier explanations of business group evolution based on asymmetric trade and investment flows and institutional voids.

Paul Erickson
Honest Weights and Full Measures? or, Learning How to Cheat Customers in Antebellum America

This paper will examine practices of and discourses around urban retail shopkeeping in the antebellum United States, focusing on a set of texts that depicted shopkeepers and their clerks as fundamentally dishonest. In an era before fixed-price stores, established consumer brands, and product certification, shoppers were often at the mercy of retailers regarding the quality and pricing of the goods they bought. The proliferation of narratives that taught retailers how to disguise their dishonest business practices fed an attitude of suspicion on the part of consumers, who began to view increasingly anonymous retail transactions as unavoidably adversarial interactions. In these narratives, the customer was the enemy, not the reason a retail business existed, and to the customer, a salesperson was only a small step up from a pickpocket. But if these writings detailed the business practices that shopkeepers might use to deceive their unwitting clientele, they also offered consumers the tools to assert their own agency in commercial exchanges. This paper will shed light on the emergence of business practices that—whether actually employed or not—shaped an emerging assumed stance of caveat emptor in a world of economic activity where traditional connections of acquaintance and obligation between retailer and customer were being eroded.

Bernardita de los Angeles Escobar
International Commitments on Intellectual Property Protection: When Countries Decide to Take Them on Board

This essay analyzes the path taken by countries in committing themselves to protecting intellectual property (IP) internationally from the late nineteenth century until December 2008. The aim is to unveil economic rationales behind such decisions and the relative role played by Latin American countries. The analysis is based on an index of country-level decisions of membership to international treaties regarding IP protection. Sixty-eight treaties and 189 countries are studied throughout the 1884-2008 period. Data shows that Latin American countries played a significant role in such processes. Before the Great Depression, countries from the Americas, particularly Latin American ones, and Europe led the process. After a drought period around the Second World War, international commitments on IP gained momentum by the late 1950s, with countries of other regions of the world featuring increasing leadership. Nonetheless, data shows that Latin American countries have shown sustained long-term eagerness to protect IP. Yet, the statistical analysis indicates that countries have pursued international IP protection increasingly, the richer they are. Also, countries perform a path-dependent trajectory in international IP protection; the more engaged a country has been in IP protection internationally, the more likely it is for that country to continue undertaking such international commitments. This path dependence appears directly linked to countries' level of economic development.

Paula A. de la Cruz Fernandez
Patterning the "Other": Sewing Machines in the Age of the American Empire

The United States' position as a major industrial nation went on display during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Beginning with the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial International Exhibition, American international exhibitions displayed domestic technological and industrial advancements; they brought together various nations' exhibitions but gave prominence to American manufacturing corporations within the fair's spatial setting. American technological and promotional/advertising exhibitions stood in contrast to more folklore-based international displays. The Singer Manufacturing Company, for one, exhibited its success domestically and internationally at the World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893, and at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904. Western industrial development in the nineteenth century became the symbol of civilization and progress. White American men led the organization of international fairs at the turn of the twentieth century, and displays of technological prowess symbolized male Anglo-Saxon racial and gender cultural hegemony within the pluralistic American society. American international fairs also put on display other cultures from around the world. The categorization and distribution of these cultural displays within the exhibition was representative of American classification and hierarchization of the "Other" within the ladder of civilization. One such example of this othering and ordering comes from a collection of Singer Company advertisement cards produced for dissemination at the 1893 and the 1904 expositions. The main source for this paper, these advertisement cards portrayed women from different parts of the world wearing stereotypical local attires and using Singer sewing machines. On the back of the cards a brief text described the culture and country of the women illustrated and noted the improvements made in their life from using a Singer sewing machine. The examination of Singer's advertising explains the instrumentality of the ideal of the domestic women within the civilizing discourse. The success of a single industrial technology for women to use around the world, mainly in their homes, suggests the globalization and strengthening of domestic ideologies in contrast to the "New Woman" ideals emerging at the end of the nineteenth century. The internationalization of sewing machines also reinforced industrialization as the symbol of progress and Western dominance.

Jonathan Stevenson Franklin
Irrelevant Genius: Economists and Federal Economic Policymaking in the United States, 1921-1938
  [Paper]

Although this paper began as an investigation of the business community's influence on federal economic policymaking in the 1920s, it soon evolved into a consideration of professional economists' policymaking power. The press's tendency to describe then Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover as an economist, despite his lack of training in the rapidly growing discipline, suggested an interesting relationship between professional economists and politicians. This paper argues that although the business community continued to enjoy nearly exclusive influence on federal economic policymaking from 1921 to 1932, the professionalization of economists created a permanent bridge between economic departments and Washington by 1938. To support this argument, I focus on Hoover's tenure as Secretary of Commerce, as well as his presidency. In particular, I consider his reaction to the 1921 recession and his run-ins with Secretary of Agriculture Henry C. Wallace. I also consider how Franklin D. Roosevelt developed economic policy through consideration of his gold purchasing plan, which was largely run by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr.

Georgina E. Gajewski
"Painting on the Most Reasonable Terms": The Business of Art in the Early Rural South

Before the age of photographic reproduction began with the introduction of the daguerreotype in 1839, portrait artists provided the only means of recording a likeness. During the period of the early Republic, many painters traveled to the Southern states, attracted by the region's reputed wealth and refinement. This paper compiles data on the more than forty-five artists known to have worked in North Carolina between 1790 and 1830, who primarily hailed from the northeastern United States and Western Europe. These artists made use of sophisticated entrepreneurial devices to navigate the unfamiliar Southern market, including offering money-back guarantees, advance subscription lists, group discounts, and diversifying services offered. These painters advertised prices that made their services accessible for non-elites, and as a result competed for consumer dollars not only with other painters but also with local merchants who provided a variety of inexpensive, fashionable, and decorative goods. This paper suggests that although Southerners had less incentive to abandon agriculture than did their Northern counterparts, those who attempted to make a living as itinerant artists would have been crowded out by the significant number of non-Southern artists who successfully marketed their products to a wide range of consumers.

Susan H. Gensemer
Profile of an Early American Feminist Economist: The Life and Work of Virginia Penny

Virginia Penny (1826-1913) has been identified as one of the two earliest American feminist economists. She wrote a book in 1863, eventually retitled How Women Can Make Money, in which she listed over 500 occupations for women, with their associated wages and qualifications. Penny followed that book with a second in which she addressed many questions of her day, including labor market discrimination against women. This study describes Penny's contributions as a feminist economist. She argued in favor of widening employment opportunities for women, and argued more generally for improved access by women to economic resources. Additionally, this paper outlines, to the extent possible, her life. A few letters, references in books, and numerous newspaper articles are used to piece together the details. Further information about Penny has been derived from genealogical resources such as census and death records. This study is a first attempt to assemble information about Virginia Penny from many sources, constructing a profile of this early feminist economist. The study indicates the difficulties of piecing together profiles, especially of women, or of other people who remain relatively invisible in historical studies.

Philip Glende
"We used Every Effort to be Impartial": The Complicated Response of Newspaper Publishers to Unions, 1933-1955

As large employers of labor and owners of businesses that conveyed information about organized labor to a wide audience, publishers were intimately connected to the labor movement during the 1930s and 1940s. Publishers, such as Colonel Robert McCormick and William Randolph Hearst, were routinely condemned for controlling a press determined to fight unionism. Newspaper owners, however, found themselves in simultaneous roles as business operators, journalists, and community leaders as organized labor gained strength in the 1930s. These diverse interests led to an array of responses in newspapers. For some publishers, such as John S. Knight in Akron, Ohio, civic and professional motivations encouraged an effort to remain neutral or to offer balance in reporting and commentary on labor-management relations. Other publishers, such as William T. Evjue in Madison, Wisconsin, expressed support for unions. Regardless, many publishers also showed an honest respect for the line between opinion and news. With the rise of the American Newspaper Guild beginning in 1933, labor and management relations took on new dimensions that mixed business operations, professional standards, and political ideology. This paper is based on archival research, oral history interviews, memoirs, trade and general interest publications, and studies in journalism, labor history, and sociology.

Rob Goldberg
Black Power in the Dollhouse: Shindana Toys and the Business of Social Change

In early 1968, black community activists Lou Smith and Robert Hall sat down with Mattel president Elliot Handler to discuss how the world's largest toy company might help out Operation Bootstrap—the community development organization that Smith and Hall had founded in South Los Angeles after the 1965 Watts uprising. Six months later, with Mattel's financial and technical assistance, Shindana Toy Division was born as Bootstrap's new subsidiary. Over the next decade, thanks in part to a loan from Chase Capital Corporation, Shindana's line of politicized, racially coded dolls changed the face of the American toy industry by redefining what it meant to manufacture a "black" toy. From 1968, when it brought its pioneering dolls to the national market, through 1974, when it became the first black-owned firm to lease a permanent space in New York's Toy Fair Building, Shindana institutionalized Black Power as a set of community ideals, material practices, and commercial representations. In tracing the origins and development of Shindana Toys, this paper seeks to cast fresh light on the possibilities and limitations of business as a black freedom strategy; the impact of black liberation on the making of "relevant" consumer culture for children; and the interplay between black nationalism and corporate America in an era of socially responsible business idealism.

Debra F. Greene
New Age, People's Finance, and Gateway National: African American Banking in St. Louis, Missouri

At the turn of the twentieth century, St. Louis, Missouri, had a black population of slightly more than 35,000 people. The city ranked second to Baltimore in the percentage of African Americans in the population. A decade later in 1910, St. Louis was the fourth largest U.S. city behind New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. The African American population was 43,960, a 6.4 percent increase from 1900, representing the third largest urban black population increase after Kansas City and Indianapolis at 9.5 and 9.3 percent, respectively. The city was growing and African American businessmen believed that the black business community of St. Louis should be representative of that growth and development. In 1915, the St. Louis Argus newspaper publisher Joseph E. Mitchell editorialized that he was determined "to bend his every effort to lift black St. Louis to the place it should occupy in the nation." A part of that uplift was black business development. Black community leaders such as Mitchell believed that financial backing was an integral part of the uplift process. To that end, three financial institutions were founded and developed in St. Louis by black business leaders—New Age Savings and Loan Association (1915), People's Loan and Finance Company, incorporated as People's Finance Corporation (1922), and Gateway National Bank (1964). This paper attempts to document the challenges encountered by the black community in operating these institutions as banking regulations changed, the economy declined, and retail banking services to the black community expanded.

Darren E. Grem
Of Chicken Sandwiches and the Christian Right: The World of Chick-fil-A

Famed for its signature chicken sandwich, and its "closed on Sunday" policy, Atlanta-based Chick-fil-A purports a singular mission: "to glorify God by being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to us [and] to have a positive influence on all who come in contact with Chick-fil-A." Incorporated in 1964 by S. Truett Cathy, a Southern Baptist, Chick-fil-A's has a history intertwined with the Sunbelt's emergence as the economic, political, and religious center of the nation. In this paper, I focus on the specific arrangements of space, capital, and labor that created Chick-fil-A. In turn, I detail the meritocratic evangelicalism of its employees and managers, its partnerships with suburban megachurches and schools, and its support for the cultural politics of the Christian Right. Altogether, this paper connects the "business of food" to the politics of consumption in contemporary America, showing how consumer actions—such as buying and eating a Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich—forward corporate activities and activism from the Sunbelt's suburbs to the global South.

Stephen Gross
Information, Uncertainty, and Trust in German-Balkan Trade: A Case Study of the Leipzig Trade Fair 1920-1930

Historians and contemporary economists have argued that Nazi Germany established an informal empire in the Balkans during the 1930s by dominating the exports and imports of Yugoslavia, Romania, and Bulgaria. Yet the institutions that supported Germany's trade in the 1930s formed during the previous decade in direct response to the severe commercial problems that arose after World War I. German banks in the region had been nationalized, Germany's consular system was all but dismantled, and the reputation of German merchants was damaged by hyperinflation. German businessmen in the Balkans consequently faced problems of uncertainty and information. This paper shows how one institution, the trade fair in Leipzig, helped overcome the issues of uncertainty and information during the 1920s by building an extensive trading network across southeastern Europe that relayed economic news, found reliable agents for German firms, and advertised for German products and for Germany in general. The fair was Germany's largest and its representatives became the backbone of Germany's trade network in southeastern Europe during a decade when many firms were only slowly returning to the region. Ultimately, the fair helped lay the foundation for Germany's economic imperialism of the 1930s.

Chao He and Kang Zu
The Scientification of the Advertisement Industry in Business History Perspective in China, 1901-1950

From the Opium War in 1840 to the invasion of the Eight Power Allied Force in 1900, social activities of the Chinese people have been provoked to save the nation by the means of "industrial, business and academic wars." A great number of BSBs and MBAs have emerged as a result of the studying in Japan, America, and Europe of Chinese youth for nearly a hundred years. During the First World War, the commerce and industry of China obtained the opportunity to develop, and around the May Fourth Movement in 1919, the appeal of "science and democracy" was proposed and afterward put into practice. This paper is in a business history perspective; first, it takes as examples the information on advertising and window display in three publications, Chinese Business (1914-1916), Science (1915-1951) and Business News (1923-1925), to analyze the cooperation and interaction of Chinese industry and commerce scientists and business circles as well as the theoretical and practical progress they achieved, indicating the leading role of social economy and technology and verifying the scientific achievements of advertising.

Laura Warren Hill
Black Power's Confrontation with Kodak: The New Corporate Responsibility
  [Paper]

In 1966, the FIGHT organization—a newly created Black Power entity—demanded that the Eastman Kodak Company, headquartered in Rochester, NY, hire and then train 600 "hard-core unemployed." Kodak, a Fortune 500 company that had avoided unionization and labor negotiations for more than eighty years, politely declined FIGHT's proposal. The demand and subsequent refusal sparked a year-long struggle, the likes of which the business world had never seen. Enlisting the support of Black Power activists, national church bodies, and the media, FIGHT pioneered and waged a shareholder's proxy strategy that forced Kodak to the bargaining table. In the process, FIGHT rewrote the rules of corporate responsibility.

Keith Hollingsworth and Cheryl Allen
J. B. Blayton: An Overview of His Impact on Atlanta's Black Business Community

Jesse Bee Blayton, Sr., was a prominent part of the Atlanta Black business community from the mid-1920s to the mid-1970s. Blayton, in solo ventures and with his partners L. D. Milton and C. R. Yates, was involved with practically every major business of Atlanta during this time period. Among his solo ventures, he was the first African American CPA in Georgia and the first African American owner of a radio station. The purpose of this presentation is to highlight the contributions of Blayton as a 1) Financier and Entrepreneur, 2) Accounting Mentor, and 3) Community Activist as an introductory study of his influence. The authors discuss how Blayton was symbolic of two major factors of Atlanta's Black business culture: the emphasis on self-reliance and the relationship with higher education institutions. By all accounts, Blayton, following in the footsteps of his mentor Heman Perry, used his business activities in a socially responsible manner by being instrumental in helping African Americans gain access to economic opportunities and wealth.

Tisha Hooks
Fighting the Good Fight: Johnson & Johnson and the Origins of Duct Tape

Duct tape is a technology that emerged out of the unreserved engagement in military research and development demanded by World War II. Although seemingly low-tech and lowbrow in comparison to yet another product of military R & D, the World Wide Web, duct tape too has come to enjoy a kind of heroic, and perhaps even more pervasive presence in American life. This is particularly true after having been touted by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge in 2003 as a key tool for everyday Americans wanting to construct their own defense against potential dirty bombs. Most discussions of the origins of this technology start and stop at the mention of Johnson & Johnson, the company believed to be its original developers. In this paper, I argue that Johnson & Johnson's own history, and indeed, the historical moment in which the company was established, are in themselves key components/manifestations of the mythology of duct tape as a technology that heals and preserves the individual, the machine, and even the state in the midst of the crises of war.

Caley Horan
The Post-World War II Insurance Industry and the Reshaping of the American Landscape

During the years following World War II, the American landscape changed significantly. Widespread suburbanization was accompanied and aided by a number of other spatial transformations, including the "shopping center boom," the birth of the suburban corporate campus, and the construction of new infrastructural networks like interstate highways and natural gas pipelines. Most historical accounts cite either public demand or federal funding as the primary factors driving the postwar reworking of the nation's spatial landscape. This paper contributes to this conversation through a study of insurance industry investment practices during the years following World War II, arguing that insurance companies were instrumental players in reshaping the built environment of the United States during this period. Through massive investments in urban housing projects, suburban subdivisions, shopping centers, and infrastructure projects, postwar insurance companies became key participants in a large-scale restructuring of the American landscape. Insurers exercised a large degree of control over these investments and gained through them unprecedented influence over the living arrangements, consumption patterns, and daily movements of millions of Americans. This new influence substantially expanded the governing reach of insurance as an institution and fundamentally altered the postwar economy and social life.

Robert M. Hutchings
Ordering Nature: Capital's Victory over the Environment and the Creation of Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice

In the summer of 1945, the logic of capital triumphed over the chaos of nature in the orange groves of Florida. A small handful of scientists created frozen concentrated orange juice, finally bringing to fruition what had been a veritable pipe dream for so many involved in the Florida orange industry. For decades, growers, packers, and others fought with nature not merely over the basic agricultural problems of irrigation and fertility, but over the production of marketable fruit. Oranges had to have the right size, color, shape, and flavor to sell at good prices in northeastern markets, but most often growers had to settle for just two or three of those characteristics, and received corresponding prices. Thus, resolving the dissonance between capitalist enterprise, which insisted on factory-like efficiency, and nature, which utterly opposed such order, was increasingly the primary objective of all orange growers. That objective was realized in frozen concentrated orange juice. Concentrate at all stages of its history was a highly capitalized enterprise, and thus, from the perspective of the people who grew the oranges that became juice, capital defeated nature.

Laresh Jayasanker
The Paradox of Sameness in Diversity in the Modern American Supermarket

After the 1960s, American supermarkets came to offer a much wider array of foods. At the same time they consolidated, so that in every major metropolitan area just a few chains dominated most of the market. Supermarkets then paradoxically offered greater diversity and greater homogeneity to consumers. This paper explores the political economy and cultural ramifications of that paradox. In 1960, the average supermarket carried 5,900 items, but by 1998 that number had grown to 40,333. Increased global trade and immigration made many more of these choices available, and supermarkets deliberately employed greater diversity in their product offerings after they decided that ethnic foods could be an avenue for growth. As supermarket chains offered more products, they also consolidated and grabbed larger regional market shares. One-stop shopping took hold, and by the end of the twentieth century, Americans typically bought most of their foods at one massive superstore. Food businesses plying their wares within American supermarkets also consolidated and homogenized. The tortilla industry was but one example. GRUMA, based in Mexico, used the United States as a foothold for massive expansion, meaning consumers in Mexico, the United States, and even China ate the same tortillas over time.

Christopher Jones
The Regulation of Muddling Through: Debating the Holtwood Dam, 1939-1954

Between 1939 and 1954, the Holtwood Dam on the Susquehanna River was at the heart of a series of new regulatory efforts. In response to perceived abuses by electric utilities in the 1920s and the reform agenda of the New Deal in the 1930s, state and federal regulatory bodies attempted to implement several new regulations. This paper tracks these new regulations and the responses of electric utilities to the new world in which they found themselves. Studies of regulation have often treated cases like this as simple expressions of raw power, ideology, and interest group politics. I argue in this paper for an alternate interpretation. Drawing on Charles Lindblom's notion of "the science of muddling through," I suggest that we think of this regulatory history as a contingent and imperfect attempt by various actors to implement their visions of what constituted a good society. "The regulation of muddling through," I argue, offers new perspectives for understanding regulation then and now.

Tobias Jopp
The Welfare State Evolves: German Knappschaften, 1854-1923

This paper reviews the German miners' model of mutual insurance from its introduction in 1854 to its basic reformation in 1923. Its core feature was the provision of cash benefits for compensation of income losses due to temporary sickness and permanent disability or death of the bread-winner. The carriers of the insurance scheme, the Knappschaften, date back to medieval times, and the Knappschaft is still present today as the second pillar of German statutory old-age insurance. This is why the Knappschaft can look back at a continuous history of about 750 years. This paper aims to establish the Knappschaft insurance's main characteristics, many of which soon found their way into Bismarckian social insurance. These include, for example, compulsory membership, shared financing between employed miners and entrepreneurs, self-management and financing based on earnings-related contributions, and the pay-as-you-go mechanism. On the one hand, evidence of increasing generosity adds an organizational analysis. On the other hand, evidence of increasing financial distress substantiates the shadow side of a maturing pay-as-you-go based scheme. Definitely, this has a parallel in the problems of German social insurance today.

Amol Joshi
Mixed Signals: How the Recombination and Rediscovery of Mathematical, Material, and Architectural Innovations Shaped the Signal Processing Industry, 1948-2008

Signal processing is the science of identifying, analyzing, manipulating, and extracting physical signals such as audio, video, images, and sensory data in real-time. Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) are semiconductor chips that are the core engines of a diverse array of products including cell phones, digital cameras, high-definition televisions, network equipment, global-positioning systems, and communications satellites. DSPs account for $27 billion or 10 percent of global semiconductor revenues. Although DSPs are technologically and economically significant, the evolution of innovation in the signal processing industry is relatively unexplored. This paper traces the commercialization of signal processing since its inception in 1948, when the following three breakthrough innovations occurred. Information theory, a mathematical innovation, introduced a conceptual foundation for designing DSPs. Transistors, a material innovation, provided the physical building blocks for creating DSPs. Stored-program computing, an architectural innovation, offered an integrated framework for recombining mathematical and material innovations to produce functional DSPs. An analysis of sixty years of subsequent innovation in DSPs reveals that: (1) some fundamental mathematical innovations are actually rediscoveries of earlier inventions; (2) architectural innovations often lag mathematical innovations by decades due to the technological constraints of material innovations; and (3) architectural innovations frequently reconfigure industry alliances and open new markets.

Michael Keane
From Soldier to Salaryman: How A Change in Military Compensation Revolutionized Warfare

Perhaps the most unheralded yet most significant revolutionary in military affairs is the change in the compensation of military professionals. For hundreds of years soldiers and navies were compensated on a profit participation system. They were effectively entrepreneurs of conflict. With the development of the modern state, this compensation scheme came to an end, and soldiers were provided with steady incomes and pensions. At the same time medals were invented to replace profits in order to incentivize and reward soldiers for bravery. The new compensation scheme would, however, radically alter the behavior of soldiers and the nature of warfare. Whereas in earlier times battles would be limited by the calculation of profits, today medals reward risk-taking and bravery independently of success on the battlefield.

Laura D. Kelley
Erin's Enterprise: An Example of Social Entrepreneurship

While more attention has been paid to the economic advancement of Irish male immigrants in the antebellum era, little has been written in this context about Irish female immigrants. Sparseness of data is in part to be blamed. The 1850 census enumerators were not required to list the occupations of women, and therefore, rarely did. Furthermore, the types of work available to poor women in general were severely circumscribed. By drawing on Catholic Church records, census data, and diaries, this paper will explore how Irish females reconciled limited opportunity, outsider status, epidemics, and other hardships of immigrant life with the need to subsidize household income or survive on their own. I argue that, contrary to the notion that the poor are without agency, Irish women showed remarkable enterprise and relied on a tradition that recognized that the strength of an individual depends on that individual's personal contribution to her community. An illustration of this type of Irish social entrepreneurship is the life of Margaret Haughery, and my case study of her life exemplifies that Irish women were highly skilled and creative in their use of the marketplace both to earn money and to fulfill altruistic and familial goals.

Kelly Kilcrease
Religion and Managerial Decision Making: How the Oldest Company in the United States Survived for over 300 Years through the Implementation of Quaker Principles in Its Mission
  [Paper]

In 1702, Joseph Rhoads established a tanning company in Marple Township, Pennsylvania, that would go through eight generations of family members and is still in operation today. The company, J. E. Rhoads & Sons, eventually transformed into a manufacturer of conveyor belts. How has such a small, relatively unknown company not only survived for over three hundred years but actually thrived? Through the examination of the original corporate records, the corporate mission was found to be the cornerstone of the firm's longevity. Based on Quaker doctrine, this mission greatly influenced J. E. Rhoads & Sons when making decisions regarding organizational structure, employees, competition, and customers.. However, their mission also created challenges for the firm, as they lost income because of their refusal to sell to any business that was a part of the alcohol, tobacco, or defense industries.

Elizabeth Lamoree
Gambling on Grapes: Management, Ideology and Politics in California Agribusiness

From the Great Depression of the 1930s to the Great Recession of the mid-1970s, California growers reduced competition and stabilized prices through a combination of private consolidation and public assistance. Ironically, the process of regularizing production and the farm economy made agriculturalists more vulnerable to organized labor and labor relations legislation. Despite growers' reliance on state support in their battle to tame market instability, agribusiness employers espoused an anti-statist labor ideology to avoid labor relations legislation at both the state and federal levels. However, by 1968 the United Farm Workers Union had turned farm workers' exclusion from the National Labor Relations Act into a liability. The United Farm Workers Union became a potent foe by bringing the farm labor debate out of the fields and into the supermarkets and transportation hubs with an international boycott. To escape the boycott and reinstate orderly marketing, growers temporarily submitted to collective bargaining contracts and aggressively pursued labor relations legislation. But even as agribusiness employers were forced to deal with unionism, they steadfastly refused to disassociate modern farm management from the ideology of agricultural exceptionalism.

Mitchell Larson and John Wilson
Strategic Responses to Economic Integration: The Case of Barclays Bank, 1973-2003

From 1973 to 2003 British banking underwent a series of dramatic changes, providing fascinating insights into the interactions among strategy, structure, ownership and performance (SSOP). Although few SSOP studies have been conducted in banking, a corporate micro-perspective shows how Barclays Bank responded to the global financial integration process from the early 1970s to the middle 2000s. Our study can provide valuable insights into banks' responses to the integration process and the growing impact of international competition on strategic decision making. The point of departure for this paper will be the impact that economic integration had on the formation of new markets; given that this process should be regarded as a (somewhat underestimated) cornerstone of our understanding of the dynamics of capitalism, it will also become apparent that a range of other factors influenced especially strategy and structure, including global tendencies in the financial sector, the liberalization of financial markets, and a series of traumatic crises that severely affected attitudes within and about banks. After tracking the fundamental change from a highly cartelized UK banking sector before the 1980s toward a more fully integrated financial sector in the post-1990 period, we assesses the relative importance of the key drivers of change.

William Lazonick
Marketization, Globalization, Financialization: The Fragility of the U.S. Economy in an Era of Global Change
  [Paper]

In the 1980s and 1990s the rise of the "New Economy business model" (NEBM), characterized by marketization and globalization, enhanced the potential of the U.S. economy to upgrade its innovative capability in response to international competition. (By marketization, I mean that competitive market processes play a heightened role in the allocation of inputs to a company and the sale of outputs by a company. By globalization, I mean the breaking down of national barriers that face a company in the movement of goods, people, and money around the world.) In the presence of marketization and globalization, however, the achievement of equitable and stable economic growth in the United States required more, not less, coordinated investment by business and government in developing the capabilities of the U.S. labor force as a whole and in ensuring the availability of new employment opportunities. In the 2000s the financialization of the U.S. business corporation undermined the innovative potential of marketization and globalization. The manifestation of the financialization of the U.S. economy is the obsession of corporate executives with distributing "value" to shareholders, especially in the form of stock repurchases, even at the expense of investment in innovation and the creation of U.S. employment opportunities. In this paper I analyze how the marketization and the globalization of corporate resource allocation contributed to the success of the NEBM in international competition. Then I show how the financialization of corporate resource allocation under the dominant U.S. business model that arose out of the processes of marketization and globalization is now resulting in a massive misallocation of resources and that, as a result, the U.S. economy has become a very fragile economy. Under the "Old Economy business model" (OEBM), the industrial corporation performed critical collective functions in ensuring economic security in employment and retirement to U.S. households that it no longer performs. Under NEBM there is a much greater need for the government to perform these collective functions. Yet the trend of government involvement in the provision of economic security has moved in just the opposite direction. It will require, I contend, a radical transformation of U.S. economic institutions and government policies to provide equitable and stable growth.

Marc Levinson
Turning Crisis to Advantage: Depression, War, and the Attack on Chain Retailing

The battle between independent retailers and chain stores in the United States goes back as far as 1869. Since the turn of the twentieth century, independent storekeepers and the wholesalers and manufacturers who rely on them have sought to enlist state and federal governments in the fight against the chains. These efforts have been most successful at times of crisis. World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II all led to government policies that had no direct link to retailing, but that could be wielded to the disadvantage of the chains. These policies generally sought to limit price competition in the service of other goals. Incidental to these purposes, they sheltered less efficient independent merchants from larger competitors, protecting the independents' profit margins and retarding the advance of chain retailing.

Susan Ingalls Lewis
"No Business Extant in which Women Are Not Employed": Businesswomen in Cities across the United States, 1840-1885

Using The Employments of Women, Virginia Penny's 1863 study of female occupations in the United States, as a jumping off point, my paper explores the variety of businesses owned or managed by women in cities across the United States between 1840 and 1885. I compare Penny's findings with my own research in the R.G. Dun & Co. credit ledgers, presenting evidence from over twenty mid-nineteenth-century communities. Although most female proprietors evaluated for credit did operate small millinery establishments, fancy and dry goods stores, or groceries, nineteenth-century American women also entered numerous other ventures, as reflected in both sources. However, while Penny discussed such small business and self-employment opportunities as breeding and selling canaries, preparing and marketing botanic medicines, public speaking, and hairdressing, the Dun reports identify female proprietors brewing beer, selling wallpaper, managing hotels, manufacturing coffins, and operating hardware stores. I conclude that because of her focus on employments for native-born, single women without much capital, Penny misses the business opportunities open to immigrant wives and widows. I also argue that these two important sources for women's business history should be seen as additive rather than conflicting, reflecting two distinct populations of nineteenth-century businesswomen.

Jason Lim
The China Trade for the Chinese Merchants in Malaya and Singapore during Decolonization, 1945-1965

This paper looks at how the Chinese merchants in Malaya and Singapore (known collectively as "British Malaya") conducted their trade with China at a time when British Malaya was increasingly decolonized. The Cold War had already started with the end of World War II in 1945 but the communist insurgency (known as the "Malayan Emergency") in British Malaya in 1948 and the proclamation of the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 complicated matters further for the merchants. In this paper I intend to look at the China trade from 1945 to 1965 from the point of view of the Chinese merchants in Malaya and Singapore. What were their reactions to the trade embargo by the British and local leaders in Malaya and Singapore? Did the embargo affect the trade and livelihood of the Chinese merchants in British Malaya and if so, how badly were they affected? Did they try to seek redress from the British colonial authorities and the local leaders? Did the Chinese merchants seize any opportunity to try to trade with China on their own?

Christina Lubinski
Selling the Family Silver: Ownership and Foreign Investment in German Family Firms in the Late Twentieth Century

The German term "Mittelstand" refers to family-influenced, closely held companies with a long-term business strategy. Building on a sample of over 300 German businesses, I analyze the corporate governance of these businesses in the 1960s, which was centered on a highly concentrated ownership structure and built on the assumption that the business is a part of the multi-generational family heritage. "Selling the family silver" was therefore considered a personal defeat. Despite the politically influential concept of the Mittelstand, the changes in the market structure since the 1970s forced many companies eventually to open up to external, mostly American investors. When selling was unavoidable, the first contacts and negotiations with the investors were interlaced by mutual misunderstandings and different conceptions of business ownership. By comparing two qualitative case studies, I examine the process of selling out, which adds to a better understanding of the family business and of ownership as a culturally embedded concept.

Brian P. Luskey
Central Intelligence Agencies: Negotiating Market Transactions and the Commodification of Labor in the Nineteenth-Century City

In this paper, I analyze the cultural significance of the "intelligence office" or labor agency, an ubiquitous urban institution in the nineteenth century, in which agents, workers, and employers negotiated market transactions, the commodification of labor, and the legitimacy of capitalism as an organizing principle of American society. For a fee, intelligence office proprietors would connect prospective employees with employers. The meaning of this transaction was at the core of the cultural problem that the intelligence office posed, and for many urban Americans this economic deal was unjust. While the agent pursued profits like brokers and other intermediaries in the economy, he appeared to prey upon friendless immigrants and helpless women. Newspapermen, elite women looking for servants, and ministers criticized the intelligence agent because he represented for them the worst excesses of capitalism. The presence of these scapegoats made the acceptance of the economic transactions and social relations of capitalism, based as they were on the commodification of waged workers, more palatable to many Americans.

Jason Martinek
The Business of Social Protest: Charles H. Kerr and the Subterranean World of Radical Publishing

Although historians typically view the history of social protest as discrete from business history, small business enterprises, especially in the publishing industry, have served significant roles in social movements since the American Revolution. Many professional activists were, counterintuitive to conventional wisdom, businesspeople. The goods and services that they sold just happened to be meant to overthrow the status quo. In this paper, I explore the business of social protest through the case study of Charles H. Kerr and Company, a Chicago-based publisher that specialized in publishing socialist tracts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Andrew Meade McGee
Confronting Automation: Enlisting Economists to Address Great Society Fears of Technology and Unemployment

In the mid-1960s federal policymakers, elected officials, and labor and corporate leaders confronted an economy marked by the increasing prevalence of computer-directed machines that could operate assembly lines, perform secretarial tasks, and seemingly even supplant the need to rely on the human oversight of white-collar managers. A growing "automation panic" gripped the press and the American public. How to maintain America's remarkable economic prosperity in the face of new machines that threatened to render millions unemployed? Interest groups demanded government action even as they clashed over how best to ensure that the wheels of national employment and consumerism continued to spin. Seeking authoritative guidance on how to balance an economy and labor force increasingly comprised of machines that could take the place of men, the Lyndon Johnson administration turned to economists (both inside and outside the government) for advice. This paper seeks to frame the mid-1960s debate over the effects of automation within its temporal and political context, looking at the role played by those economists engaged in "the business of policy-making." Their heavily contested (and at times contradictory) contributions to the national debate over automation would have significant policy ramifications and help shape the emergence of a post-industrial American service economy.

William W. McMillan
Barriers to Entry, Technical Momentum, and the Creation of the Jicamarca Radio Observatory

The growth of radio astronomy in the mid-twentieth century demonstrates evolution of enterprises competing for limited resources, the quest for "market" niches, competitive advantage, and the lowering of barriers to entry. The rapid and relatively smooth development of the Jicamarca Radio Observatory is offered as a case study in technical momentum overcoming barriers to entry in a field that was a few years earlier the domain of only the most professionally and academically connected individuals and organizations. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the U.S. National Bureau of Standards and the Instituto Geofisico del Peru built at Jicamarca, Peru, a massive radio observatory to study the nature of the ionosphere near the Earth's equator. As an ambitious concern in a competitive environment, the NBS project would likely have had a different fate if undertaken nearer to 1950. Yet in the late 1950s, under the direction of a young NBS engineer named Kenneth L. Bowles, Jicamarca was constructed quickly, without a great deal of contention for resources. The momentum that enabled this relatively quick success derived from multiple sources, both social and technical: the maturity of technology, availability of surplus military equipment and facilities, society's Sputnik-sparked interest in science, a peaceful period during which ground-breaking experiments could be undertaken cooperatively in equatorial regions, growing importance of long-distance radio communication, availability of talented engineers, and the previous success of radio observatories that left open such niches as investigations of the ionosphere. The creation of Jicamarca serves as an exemplar of an enterprise benefiting from social and technical momentum in order to overcome barriers to entry to a developing field.

Stephen Mihm
American Silver in China: Trade Dollars and the Money of Empire

The decades after the Civil War witnessed struggles over the money supply, with rival political factions favoring a currency of gold, silver, greenbacks, or some combination of these three. The problem, of course, was that the growing abundance of domestic silver, combined with events overseas, sent the price of silver ever lower. Congress demonetized silver in 1873, but it did something else that is rarely mentioned: it sanctioned the creation of a silver "trade dollar" meant for commerce with China. The United States was acquiring a taste for empire, one in which unwanted surplus silver could be palmed off on other countries. In the process, these countries might also adopt the dollar as their unit of account, bringing them further into the orbit of the United States. This paper examines the rise and fall of the trade dollar. Though the trade dollar was initially a success, Chinese authorities ultimately frustrated its adoption, rightly fearing that its widespread use would permit the United States a far greater degree of leverage. In the end, the trade dollars flowed back to the United States, where they became a kind of pariah currency, melted down or forced into the hands of low-paid laborers in company towns. Nonetheless, the silver trade dollar anticipated much of the monetary history of the late nineteenth-century United States: the denigration of silver as a domestic currency, the embrace of the gold standard, and a growing aggression toward countries or colonies that relied heavily or exclusively on silver as their principal currency.

Michael Miller
Toward a Business History of Globalization

This is a paper about how the history of the maritime business world in the twentieth century translates into an empirical history of globalization. The paper addresses three questions: How were the webs that made possible the close and constant inter-penetration of global and local— effectively the definition of globalization—constructed? Why did these global systems work? And how did this history proceed, or how should we historicize globalization in the twentieth century? To answer the first question I stress the pervasive, intertwined, and composite character of maritime port, shipping, and trading networks. To answer the second question I look to the hybridity of identities and realms of action that enabled maritime men and maritime companies to mobilize networks and resources at both ends of the local-global spectrum, and thus to effect globalization. To answer the third question, I challenge current paradigms and argue for a history of globalization, albeit sensitive to its mutations, occurring across all of the twentieth century.

Clive Muir
Not Working a Smile: A Sociohistorical Look at Black Men's Underemployment in American Service Businesses

This presentation provides a historical view of the effect of the growing demand for soft skills and interpersonal attributes on African American men's chances for employment in the service sector of the American economy. There is the widely held view that black men lack the ability to interact with others in an amiable manner. As one business owner responded to researchers, "If they don't smile, don't hire them." For decades black men were able to find jobs in steel and auto factories in northern cities and sustain middle-class lifestyles for their families; but those physical, labor-intensive jobs that required few pleasantries have largely disappeared. Now, job training centers in many hard-hit cities train men in acquiring soft-skills and removing the macho, game face they are known for. But moving from factory-face to friendly-face is easier said than learned for many of these men. Furthermore, the business literature and current training practices largely ignore the centuries of scrutiny and ridicule African American men have endured regarding their looks and mannerisms.

Don Nerbas
The Politics of Business in Canada during the 1930s: Charles Avery Dunning and the Limits of the Party System

This paper examines the politics of big business in Canada during the 1930s through the experience of Charles Avery Dunning (1886-1958). A farmers' advocate and a progressive politician in Saskatchewan in the 1910s and 1920s, Dunning emerged as a political figurehead of big business during the 1930s. Developing wide connections with leading Canadian business interests, including the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), Dunning and his business associates sought to marshal progressive rhetoric and non-partisan tactics in pursuit of political aims that included government retrenchment and amalgamation of the country's two railway systems under CPR management. Nonetheless, the effectiveness of their political agenda remained constrained by party politics and popular opinion, and Dunning became re-integrated into the party system, becoming Dominion Minister of Finance following the Liberal electoral victory in 1935. Although this gave big business a representative in the cabinet, Dunning's ability to shape public policy remained limited in the context of the continuing Depression and the social democratic alternatives that superceded the older "progressivism" of his worldview.

Franklin Noll
Money as Industrial Waste: The Business of Recycling Greenbacks at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, 1870s-1970s

From its early days, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing was conscious of the environmental impact and waste resulting from its operations, especially when it came to dealing with scrap currency paper and notes redeemed by the Treasury. As a result, the BEP continually tried to minimize waste by reducing scrap, reusing old notes, and recycling paper by turning it into pulp that could be sold on the open market. Looking at the first hundred years of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing's handling of waste currency paper, it is evident that the BEP basically followed the now popular maxim, "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle." The BEP always sought to reduce the amount of currency paper wasted by minimizing spoilage in production through the use of technology. The BEP also invented a way to reuse currency paper through its process of physically laundering old money that allowed its reissue. Finally, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing continually tried to find ways to recycle currency paper into a marketable product that could be used again.

Julia Cathleen Ott
Supporting the Price of Patriotism: Federal Interventions in the Bond Market, 1917-1929

This paper recovers a forgotten precursor to the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the Federal Reserve's most important tool for executing monetary policy. Sixteen years before the Banking Act of 1933 established the FOMC, Congress authorized the Treasury Department to launch a special state-administered fund to buy Liberty bonds in order to support their price in the secondary markets. At that time, policymakers' concerns were largely political—rather than economic—in nature. During the First World War, declines in the market value of Liberty bonds presented an enormous public relations problem for Woodrow Wilson's administration. Wartime propaganda had cast Liberty bond purchases as votes of confidence in the war cast by loyal citizen-investors. Policymakers fretted that as the "financially ignorant" disposed of their bonds "at a loss," they would turn against "not only Government bonds but against all kinds of securities" and lose faith in political democracy, along with private property and financial markets. Attempting to refute criticism and to stem the tide of bond redemptions, the Treasury Department called into question the efficacy of privately administered securities markets and impinged upon their "free" operations. The First World War inspired novel policy experiments and state incursions into the financial markets.

Catherine Page
Whiteness and Women Bankers: The Role of Women's Banking Departments at the Bank of Italy, 1921-1930

In the early 1920s, The Bank of Italy (later the Bank of America) opened women's banking departments in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Women's departments were created to attract female wage earners, businesswomen, and consumers by appealing to the specific needs and desires of women. However, the Bank of Italy's women's departments were not solely designed to attract female clients. They were also part of bank founder A. P. Giannini's strategy for transforming the Bank of Italy into a state-wide branch banking network. As the bank spread from San Francisco into Southern California, Giannini sought to expand the bank's clientele beyond its Italian immigrant base. Women bankers were an integral part of this successful expansion. The directors of the women's departments used their links to women's clubs and benevolent associations to attract new customers. Additionally, the presence of well-connected women bankers aided in attracting a variety of middle-class and native-born customers, not just female account-holders, because of the perceived connections between middle-class women, whiteness, and respectability. The directors also worked with groups such as the Italy-America Society to forge an image of Italian Americans that positioned them as fully white during an era when the racial status of Italians was contested.

Randall L. Patton
Planning for Progress: Lockheed, Business Voluntarism, and Desegregation in the 1960s

Much has been written about the Civil Rights movement, its successes, failures, remaining challenges, strategies, and leaders. The one aspect of the civil rights revolution that has received the least attention is employment opportunity. Frank Dobbin (Inventing Equal Opportunity) has recently highlighted the role of personnel professionals in defining equal employment opportunity in the wake of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Dobbin recognized the pivotal role of defense contractors, especially Lockheed, and the long-underestimated significance of voluntary programs such as Plans for Progress. Hugh Gordon, Lockheed personnel manager in the 1960s and 1970s, played a key role in these developments. Gordon helped develop and implement Lockheed's desegregation policies, founded the Atlanta Merit Employers Association, and eventually traveled around the South (and, indeed, the nation) encouraging other business groups to set up similar organizations in the mid- and late 1960s. Interviews with Gordon and others, and Gordon's papers, offer a revealing look into the origins of workplace integration. Gordon liked to remind listeners of Dr. King's famous injunction that freedom means little to a person without a job. Gordon's career was in many ways a testimony to the private sector's effort to address this concern without admitting the other half of King's formulation. King had also, of course, argued that "a radical redistribution of economic resources" would be necessary to achieve economic justice. Gordon and his colleagues tried to expand job opportunities without any significant restructuring by taking control of the process.

Emily Pawley
Coining Foliage into Gold: Speculation, Value, and the Mulberry Bubble, 1838-1839

In the winters of 1838 and 1839, advertisements for the Morus multicaulis mulberry tree clogged the pages of American commercial and agricultural newspapers. With its vast, copious leaves, and its useful habit of sprouting wherever a cutting had been dropped, multicaulis seemed to promise a fast-growing wealth at a time when other forms of wealth had failed. Speculators crippled by the Panic of 1837 dazzled themselves with visions of an American silk industry and bought thousands of trees to supply billions of anticipated silkworms. In October of 1839, however, the bubble popped. Within a few months the multicaulis mulberry became a byword for folly, an emblem of the speculative mania that had characterized the late 1830s. Investigating multicaulis's public career, in this paper I will illuminate the connections between the manias that marked agricultural improvement in the 1830s and 1840s and the wider instabilities of the antebellum economy. In particular, I will examine the interactions between the physical form of the plant and the requirements of speculative capitalism. The paper will argue that sold by the bud, the joint, and the inch, multicaulis became both accessible to particular kinds of calculation and projection and, ultimately, vulnerable to challenge and devaluation.

Edwin J. Perkins
Writing the Script for Survival and Resurgence: RKO Studio and the Impact of the Great Depression
  [Paper]

This paper focuses on the management strategies of the RKO movie studio (Radio-Keith-Orphem) during the height of the Great Depression. The source material for this study is, I believe, genuinely unique. In a vast archive of movie memorabilia, I discovered two file cabinets that contained the business correspondence of the studio's top management for a period of approximately eighteen months starting in early 1932. The major movie studios in the 1930s had dual headquarters. The New York offices managed the distribution and exhibition ends of the business, and they handled the most important financial affairs. In Hollywood, studio heads were in charge of the manufacturing units for feature films, shorts, and newsreels. During these trying times, the RKO studio head, David Selznick, convinced his superiors to maintain the core institutional capabilities of the firm's production facilities and ride out the crisis. His plan succeeded brilliantly.

Jason Petrulis
Marketing the American Way: The Failed Campaign To Sell the American Economic System, 1946-1950

This paper tells the story of a surprising failure. In 1946, the U.S. government joined top advertising firms to "sell" Americans on free enterprise. But despite a multimillion-dollar advertising effort, the "American Economic System" campaign fizzled. How could the same people who had successfully sold war bonds then fail to sell the economic system? I argue that the late 1940s were a time of transition—before advertisers understood how to sell policy ideas to Americans. When officials and businesspeople tried to sell free enterprise using ads that delivered ham-handed propaganda, Americans resisted. If policy was going to be sold using advertising, then Americans would insist on being treated like the political consumers they had become. They forced advertisers to stop selling ideas like products and instead use products to sell ideas—through the images created in brand advertising. In other words, when people consumed a branded product like Coca-Cola, they would also imbibe a message about the company, country, and economic system that produced it. Indeed, only by transforming citizenship into a lifestyle to be consumed—America the brand—could businesspeople and government officials convince audiences to buy into their vision of the American Way.

William H. Phillips
The Democratization of Invention in the American South: Antebellum and Postbellum Technology Markets in the United States

Patenting expanded rapidly across the postbellum South as its transportation network filled in and city growth extended markets. This was consistent with the argument of Kenneth Sokoloff and Zorina Khan (1990), who demonstrated the elastic supply of patentable ideas in early America. Successful innovation required that inventors could or did sell their property rights through "assignment" to those who commercialized new technology. The assignment characteristics of 1912 Southern patents were examined. Southern "border" state patents had a higher rate of marketable assignments than those issued to residents in the Deep South. Greater commercialization of patents in border state cities accounted for most of this difference.

Andrew Popp and Robin Holt
Entrepreneurship as Being: Phenomenological Approaches to the Historical Study of Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship studies have moved away from prescriptive, traits-based approaches to the entrepreneurial subject and had developed an increasing emphasis on entrepreneurial narratives and narrative-based methodologies. However, the narrativization of entrepreneurship studies remains directed toward the isolation of a distinct and unique entrepreneurial person and process. Conversely, business and economic history, looking to economics for conceptual tools, have tended to remain focused on the entrepreneur's function within economy and society. In this contribution, though we start from the category of "entrepreneur," our aim is to go behind or before it. In doing so we aim for the near complete absorption—or dissolving—of that category into far more fundamental frames of reference, problematizing related concepts such as entrepreneurial identity, narratives, and agency. Our empirical subject, John Shaw, a hardware factor in early nineteenth-century England, did not identify himself as an entrepreneur, yet how he acted in the world would now be defined as entrepreneurial. We would argue that Shaw did not act out the social category of entrepreneur; rather, he acted out of his everyday being, providing expressive, phenomenological testimony to the ground or base condition out of which concepts like "entrepreneur" occur and become fixed. Shaw's letters are an expression of his thrown-ness in a world where the idea of a business venture was a nascent, febrile, and uncertain possibility. The language of the letters conveys how these possibilities were exploited, transformed, and even wasted as they were acknowledged and merged, more or less sympathetically, with all the other raw materials of experience that went to make up Shaw's everyday life. Archivally based, empirically rigorous, and melding approaches from history and philosophy. the paper takes us back to beginnings of phenomena, before the fixing of habits and concepts, bringing into question our typical focus on patterns and outcomes.

Julia Rabig
Always a Fight and a Question: Corporate Philanthropy, Community Activism, and Machine Politics in the Long Urban Crisis

In 1967, Newark, New Jersey, experienced one of the most destructive urban uprisings of the 1960s. And yet, in the years that followed, Newark residents forged new alliances with which they confronted their city's crisis. Newark's first-generation community development corporations (CDCs) emerged out of this period of both creative ferment and desperation at the intersection of the civil rights, black power, and antipoverty movements. Between 1970 and 1990, Newark's first-generation CDCs became an established force in the urban political economy. Grassroots activists received measured praise from the city's corporations as they built low-income housing, expanded social services, and unrolled new businesses in neglected neighborhoods. At the same time, some CDC leaders clashed with former allies in both municipal government and the private sector over the kinds of business development that would substantially improve residents' lives. These debates culminated with attempts—some initiated by the grassroots, others lavishly funded by foundations—to foster collaborations between Newark's nonprofit and corporate sectors and to rectify the groups' often-hostile relationships with municipal officials. Yet, as one foundation executive found, cooperation on the massive scale Newark required was "always a fight and a question." My paper bridges a gap in late twentieth-century historiography by analyzing the grassroots organizing, corporate strategizing, and municipal politicking that surged in the shadow of the New Federalism and shaped neoliberal economic development policies on the ground.

Emma Robertson
"From the land where the cocoa grows": Representing the Colonial Commodity Chain at the Rowntree Factory, York, c. 1900-1970

The Rowntree confectionery firm, famous for products such as Kit Kat and Smarties, was established in 1862 in the northern English city of York. Despite its provincial location, the company depended on imports of key ingredients such as cocoa from around the world, particularly from British colonies. An analysis of the operations of this one firm can therefore illuminate the complex networks and power relations of the global chocolate industry, as well as the everyday workings of British colonialism both "at home" and in the colonies. Bringing together business and cultural history methods, this paper explores how the cocoa commodity chain was represented in gendered and raced ways for York-based workers. Focusing on the in-house journal, Cocoa Works Magazine, I consider how Rowntree management attempted to control the meanings of chocolate production and to present particular understandings of York and of empire. In so doing, I underline the potential of business history to illuminate wider questions about the social and cultural implications of colonialism in specific local contexts.

Caitlin Rosenthal
A Market for Specialties: Selling Art in Nineteenth-Century America

Today, the financial structure of elite art galleries is simple and remarkably consistent. Galleries sell work on consignment, taking a fifty percent commission. In return for this commission and exclusivity, they promote their artists, putting on individual exhibitions and attracting a network of purchasers. This structure, sometimes called the "dealer-critic system," emerged in nineteenth-century Paris, then the center of the art world. However, the triumph of this model was not inevitable. In nineteenth-century America, still at the periphery of the arts, a variety of organizations sold and funded visual art in different ways. These firms—many of which were hybrid public/private, business/community spaces—creatively encouraged the arts, often failing, but sometimes turning a profit along the way. This paper illuminates the incredible variety of models for the sale of art, focusing in particular on the dazzling but short-lived success of the American Art-Union. Founded in 1839, the Art-Union used a lottery to fund the purchase and distribution of paintings. At its peak in 1849, it advertised a distribution of 1,000 "works of art" to more than 18,000 subscribers. This brief dominance and the production it encouraged reveal the potential for differently structured art markets to stimulate diverse styles of art.

J. Andrew Ross
Trust and Antitrust: The Failure of the First National Hockey League Players Association

Based on National Hockey League club and league correspondence, congressional transcripts, and court documents, this paper examines the 1957 attempt to organize a National Hockey League Players Association (NHLPA). For just over a year, the NHLPA struggled to overcome the resistance of NHL owners, the uncertainty of its own members, and a confusing legal environment created by overlapping transnational, interstate, and inter-provincial jurisdictions. These issues and others make the NHLPA story a compelling case study of the way in which the borders between business and sport began to shift in the 1950s, a time when new forces—technological (television), legal (Congressional investigation and judicial decisions), and social (player activism—were laying the ground for the period of free agency in the 1970s.

Robert Russ, Edward N. Coffmann, Gary John Previts, and Chester H. Brearey
Enron's Leaking Bucket or the Unintended Consequence of a Regulatory Change

In the later part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century, bucket shops relieved everyday people of large quantities of money. Bucket shops were gambling establishments where individuals could place bets on the future prices of stocks and commodities. In 1922, the United States Congress passed the Grain Futures Act to eliminate bucket shops in the United States. This paper discusses the rise and fall of the bucket shops in the United States. The final elimination of the bucket shops was accomplished by legislative actions, taken first by the states and then by the federal government. The paper also discusses the evolution of federal regulations regarding futures transactions and how the reversal of the 1922 Grain Futures Act amplified the financial crisis of 2008.

Audrey Russek
Queen of Trays: Representations of American Womanhood in Waitress Beauty Contests

In the 1920s, the National Restaurant Association began featuring national beauty contests for American waitresses at their annual conventions in Atlantic City. Regional restaurants quickly followed suit, and local waitress beauty contests became a popular publicity gimmick for the industry. This emphasis on a waitress's appearance as critical to her ability to serve customers continued to rise through the next three decades. Restaurant manuals published during this time focused on methods for training and controlling waitress behavior; schools specializing in waitress instruction opened nationwide; and restaurants increasingly subjected women to physical inspections and "charm courses," evaluating women on their height, weight, age, comportment, and personality. In this paper, I argue that the rise of waitress beauty contests was one strategy used by the male-dominated restaurant industry to regulate the feminization of restaurants and control the image of gainfully employed women laboring in a public, professional role. "Service with a smile" not only brought lucrative publicity to restaurants; the public display of waitresses in industry-sponsored contests demonstrates how a lesser-known segment of twentieth-century American business, labor, and foodways reinforced visions of ideal American womanhood, beauty, and citizenship.

Karen Miller Russell and Margot Opdycke Lamme
Business Responses to the Civil Rights Movement: A Public Relations Perspective

During the 1950s and 1960s, civil rights protesters targeted businesses with demands for service, jobs, and equality. This paper considers public relations aspects of the Civil Rights movement for business by examining magazine, newspaper, and public relations trade press coverage to explore both strategies used in response to the movement and the role of public relations in devising and publicizing solutions. The analysis shows that business was slow to respond to the movement; that only mid-1960s riots drove business to take a public stand; that they used a variety of strategies, ranging from hiring and job training programs to resisting integration; and that professional public relations participation was minimal.

Fredrik Sandgren
A New Quest for Efficiency: The Post-War Program of the Federation of Swedish Wholesalers
  [Paper]

In the mid-1950s the activities of the Federation of Swedish Wholesalers (Sveriges Grossistförbund/SGF) were considered by the OEEC to be among the forerunners in the rationalization of European wholesaling. In the 1940s SGF started to develop more systematic policies and activities to promote the rationalization of Swedish wholesaling. One important effort was the formation of the Wholesale Research Institute in 1943. Another was to produce and circulate publications, some aimed at the public, others for internal use, where measures to promote and implement means to create more efficient and profitable wholesale businesses were discussed. The focus of this paper is to analyze these publications, which I have labeled "The Post War Program" of SGF. The post-war program of SGF will be put into a wider context by discussing the general debate on rationalization of the distribution sector and also the important post-war program of the Swedish labor movement, a program that stressed the need for rationalization of the economy including the threats of a planned economy and nationalization.

Abigail Schade
Bringing Expertise for Water, Power, and Agribusiness to Khuzestan: The Development & Resources Corporation in Southwestern Iran, 1953-1974

This paper traces the ideals of international technical expertise for water management projects through the example of the Development & Resources Corporation. DRC was a private consulting business headquartered in New York City and staffed by former managers of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a national agency of the United States initiated to develop and provide a power grid for the poorest sectors of the rural United States in the Great Depression. The DRC was invited by the government of the Shah of Iran in 1956 to initiate a similar dam-building and regional development project for the river systems of Khuzestan, which empty into the northern Persian Gulf. By examining mid-century American notions of modernization, scientific leadership, and international technical assistance programs for development, I relate these notions of technical expertise to the DRC's cross-continental encounter of expertise in Khuzestan.

David Schley
The B&O Railroad and the Geography of Commerce in Early Republic Baltimore

This paper examines the discourses surrounding the creation of America's first railroad, the Baltimore & Ohio, in order to understand how ideas about geography and trade influenced the railroad project. The incorporation of the B&O was predicated on an understanding of trade as a geographic practice governed by the "natural laws" of commerce. In the eyes of the city's mercantile and municipal elite, Baltimore was in decline as its once robust trade with the trans-Appalachian West had been sapped away by the opening of the Erie Canal in New York. The B&O, founded in 1827, was designed to restore Baltimore's "natural advantage" of proximity to the West by facilitating travel across the mountains, effectively restoring the prior balance of trade. Though the technology to be used was novel, the founders drew on a pre-existing understanding of the city as a geographic-mercantile entity bound to other places by commercial networks moving along natural corridors. Comparing the railroad to a waterway, the initial creators of the railroad realized that it would alter the geographic balance of trade between East and West, but did not anticipate the restructuring of the economy that historians today associate with the railroad.

Thomas A. Scott
Integrating the Southern Workplace: Lockheed and Cobb County, Georgia

The standard story of metropolitan Atlanta in the Civil Rights era features supposedly progressive Atlanta, the city "too busy to hate," and its surrounding lily-white counties, where "white flight" produced a virulent form of extreme right-wing politics. While this version of truth has some merit, it masks the reality that there was more convergence than divergence between downtown Atlanta and suburban Cobb County, the home of the Lockheed-Georgia plant. The argument of this paper is that local business and political leaders in Atlanta and Cobb were pragmatists on the question of desegregation, with a willingness to change if necessary to protect their business interests. In the case of Lockheed the desire to receive federal defense contracts, particularly in 1961 the billion-dollar C-141 StarLifter contract, was the central factor in bringing about workplace integration. In understanding how the South desegregated in the 1960s with a minimum of violence, the case of Lockheed is instructive, because it points to the recognition of enlightened self-interest as a key factor in explaining how at least some southerners found it expedient to be on the right side of history.

Hiroshi Shimizu
Pitfalls of Open Innovation: Technological Trajectory in Laser Diodes in the United States and Japan

By exploring the technological development of laser diodes in the United States, this study examines how firms began to utilize external research and development (R&D) resources and how the shift from the vertical integration model to the open innovation paradigm influenced the technological development on the technological trajectory. U.S. firms led development on the technological trajectories until the 1970s. However, innovation in laser diodes began to depart from the trajectories in the 1980s in the United States. The finding of this study suggests that cumulative features of technological development on the trajectory gradually vanished due to surges in entrepreneurial startups and utilization of external resources and paths to markets in the industry. This implies that development on the technological trajectory will be retarded if firms are not in markets that have a high concentration of rival competitors and if they explore untapped product markets when technology is still in the nascent stage.

Philip Slaby
The Contradictions of Controlled Immigration: Mines, Foreign Labor, and the State in Interwar France

In the 1920s and 1930s, France developed a multi-ethnic workforce, as employers and the state promoted immigration to remedy post-World War I labor shortages. This paper takes a business history perspective to appreciate the dynamics that shaped the incorporation of foreigners into interwar France. Examining the mines of the coal-rich department of the Pas-de-Calais, and relying on government and company archives, the analysis illuminates how firms improvised new managerial strategies and reshaped traditional ones to transform foreigners into productive miners. Through these policies foreigners became vital to the mines after the First World War, helping them to rebuild staff, to reconstruct facilities, and to regain profitability. Yet, managerial policies carried unintended consequences for employers and foreigners alike. Practices in the workplace and company paternalism toward immigrants served to isolate foreigners from their French coworkers and earned them the suspicion of local officialdom. Such anti-immigrant sentiments ultimately worked against coal firms. Indeed, as joblessness and xenophobia grew in the 1930s, the foreign labor force created by coal companies was decimated as local officials aggressively expelled non-natives in order to appease public opinion, to open positions for French workers, and to expel those held politically suspect.

Andrew Smith
Accepting Financial Globalization: The Canadian Debate on British Investment, 1836-1875

Prior to the creation of the Canadian federation in 1867, British North America was a collection of separate British colonies with their own currencies, laws, and banking systems. The integration of the financial systems of the different colonies was a crucial part of the building of the Canadian nation-state. The "Bank Act of 1871" is widely regarded as having laid the legal foundations of the modern Canadian banking sector. By 1900, Canada's banking sector was dominated by a few large corporations, each of which had a branch network extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In contrast, the United States was served by a plethora of small banks. Today, business historians often contrast Canada's banking sector with that of the United States. This paper will examine the making of the 1871 banking law. It will show that banking legislation in Canada was shaped by the following forces: the powerful examples that had been set by the 1844 Bank Act in England and the 1863 National Bank Act in the United States; the rivalry between Toronto and Montreal for financial supremacy; and the hostility of a large section of the Canadian electorate to financiers. Attitudes to British investment also informed the debate about banking law. This paper aims to refine our understanding of the development of financial systems in North America. It will also explore the role of classical liberalism in Canadian politics after 1867.

David J. Smith
Innovation, Industry Evolution and Shake-out: The Case of the Turboprop Aero Engine, 1945-1966

Studies of the turboprop engine sector of the aerospace industry note that, although the gas turbine represented a major new technological paradigm, industry evolution was not characterized by a period of shake-out with firms leaving the industry. Instead the sector has been shown to be remarkably stable. However, such studies have focused on the period since the 1960s, and as such they provide only a partial account of the introduction of this new technology and the business history of the aerospace industry. This study in contrast focuses on the early history of the gas turbine in the immediate postwar period, in particular on British companies at the forefront of developing turboprop technology for use in civil aviation. It finds that the disruptive nature of the technology combined with generous government funding gave rise to a variety of different design solutions and engine configurations. The majority of these engines proved to be both technical and commercial failures, leading to instability within the sector and ultimately to a process of shake-out that reduced the number of turboprop engine makers in the United Kingdom from four to one.

Michael Smitka
Japan's Retail Revolution: Political Economy and Concept Innovation

Twenty-five years ago two extremes dominated retailing in Japan: local shopping districts populated by small mom-and-pop stores, and large-format department stores and general merchandise stores adjacent to (and often physically above) major railway and subway stations. Shopping was done on foot or by bicycle; bulky purchases were delivered. Today neighborhood shopping streets are shuttered or in decline, as are department stores. They have been replaced by large-format roadside stores and shopping malls, remote from train stations; by medium-sized supermarkets, replete with parking lots, that operate long hours; and by small-format franchise chains (especially convenience stores). This paper traces that evolution, which reflects the diffusion of automobiles, the growth of suburbs, and the relaxation of legal restrictions on floor-space and operating hours restrictions on retailers, backed by complementary shifts in wholesaling, IT, and management methods.

Uwe Spiekermann
Claus Spreckels: A Biographical Case Study of Nineteenth-Century American Immigrant Entrepreneurship

Claus Spreckels (1828-1908) was perhaps the most successful German-American immigrant entrepreneur of the late nineteenth century. The career of the "money-making genius" consisted of building and breaking monopolies in sugar, transport, gas and electricity, real estate and newspapers, banks and breweries. The paper will use a biographical approach to discuss central questions of American immigrant entrepreneurship. It will analyze, first, the family and ethnic background of his business. Second, the paper will discuss the business development of Spreckels' widespread investments, and it will end, third, by discussing the relevance of Spreckels' immigrant status and experience to his successful career.

Michael Stamm
The Use and Abuse of Business History in the Development of American Broadcasting

This paper argues that history was an agent of change during the foundational era of American broadcasting. As radio became a big business in the 1920s and as the federal government searched for an appropriate regulatory structure, corporate leaders presented themselves as benevolent curators of what they claimed was a revolutionary new technology. Representatives of these new media corporations portrayed themselves as responsible capitalists and described what they did in terms often gauzy and romantic: broadcasting corporations were the product of a history of publicly spirited invention and experimentation, not profit-seeking. Critics of media corporations similarly drew upon historical arguments to persuade the public and policymakers to understand broadcasting differently. To some, radio was a method of circulating public information that made it part of a history that included the post office and the public school system, and as such suggested much different regulatory frameworks than did leading corporations. During the early broadcast era, policy outcomes were structured by participants' abilities to make historical claims in order to advance their interests. The business history of American broadcasting, in other words, was shaped by a process of accommodation between competing claims about that history.

Natalia Starostina
"Money was of no consideration": French Railway Companies and the Army during the Great War

My presentation is a part of my larger project investigating the social and cultural initiatives of French railway companies in modern France. Based on the archival sources (CARAN, Paris), memoirs, newspapers, and other materials, this presentation will address the role of the French railways in the Great War. The war had brought many changes in the functioning of French railways. Railways handled the movement of a large number of people. From the very beginning of the war, the military handled the functioning of railways. The war put the French railway companies in a difficult situation and almost bankrupted the wealthiest French railway network, the Réseau du Nord. As commercial enterprises, before the war, French railway companies always prioritized economy; the military claimed that the railway management did not make provisions for additional stock and for expansion of their service in the event of mobilization and military conflict. The military bitterly complained about the attitudes of railway companies because in the case of the war, "money was of no consideration," when, on the contrary, the French railway companies were naturally concerned with financial efficiency. Even though these grievances were only partially justified, this narrative had an impact on the later decision to nationalize the railways in 1937.

Kevin D. Tennent
A Retail Revolution: Changes in Music Distribution and Retailing in the United Kingdom, 1950-1980

The years between 1950 and 1980 were important years of change for the British music industry, as new forms of music and markets for it emerged, and a range of new players entered the industry. Distribution is one of Alfred D. Chandler Jr.'s three prongs considered important for corporate success. The paper shows that the four majors operating in the UK market already had an established distribution network by the mid-1960s, serving around 5,000 specialist retailers. As creative competition increased, the four existing majors defended their control over the market by further integrating into distribution. On the retailing side the abolition of Resale Price Maintenance in 1964 strengthened the position of retailers, threatening the majors' ability to control the value chain. This section of the paper will show that the majors retained control over the chain by encouraging the spread of music retailing away from specialist retailers. The majors could then provide support services to non-specialist retailers, retaining oligopolistic power over the downstream part of the industry. As a whole the paper shows that scale and scope economies remained important despite the entry of a large number of small players in the creative part of the industry.

Janice Traflet
Courting the "Little Fellow" on Wall Street: Advertising and the NYSE

Based on extensive archival research, this paper examines the role of New York Stock Exchange's advertising in the democratization of the stock market. Part One explores the NYSE's originally rigid advertising rules that once severely constricted member firms from targeting the mass market. Part Two details the gradual and important liberalization in the NYSE's advertising policies that began in the late Depression years. The evolution in Exchange advertising policies and actual advertising practices (by both member firms and the organization itself) reveals much about the shifting power relations among various factions operating within the NYSE. Exploring the history of NYSE advertising also lends insights into the changing priorities of the NYSE in the twentieth century, especially the organization's heightened willingness to court the "little fellow," as Wall Street once commonly referred to the average, middle-class American. This paper constitutes part of a larger project that contemplates the degree to which eventual heightened brokerage firm advertising helped stimulate a surge in popular interest in the stock market.

Cristina Turdean
From Catwalks to Video Cameras: Casinos and the Business of Surveillance, 1950-1980

Cheating and suspicion have been fundamental aspects of the gambling culture even from the early days of casinos in Nevada. With cash repeatedly changing hands between players and the house and without records being kept in real time due to the unpredictability of the games of chance, casinos have always struggled to protect themselves against dishonest customers and staff. In this paper I argue that casino surveillance emerged from the economically rational search of businesses for ways to protect and maximize their profits. Surveillance became a successful managerial solution—entailing new organizational structures, work practices, and the adoption of video technology—to customer cheating and employee theft, error, or collusion. Correctional and brutal in approach, the early surveillance methods focused on limiting the losses by solely protecting the game through the covert action of security staff and the physical alteration of the workplace (catwalks suspended in the ceiling above the table games). Gradually, casinos bureaucratized surveillance by creating a system of procedures and internal audit, which standardized the activity of the gaming staff and simplified the detection of cheating by the "eye in the sky."

John Turner, Graeme G. Acheson, and Qing Ye
The Character and Denomination of Shares in the Victorian Equity Market
  [Paper]

This paper examines the extent to which publicly traded company stocks in nineteenth-century Britain had the following features: high share denominations and high levels of unpaid capital. Using monthly data for the London stock market over the period 1825-1870, the effect of these features on stock returns is then assessed. We find that stocks with unpaid capital earn a higher return, which is consistent with investors being rewarded for the risk of a call on their personal assets. We also find that stocks with a high share denomination earn a lower return, which appears to be consistent with the view that this feature was conducive to superior corporate governance.

Heli Valtonen, Jari Ojala, and Jari Eloranta
What Makes "Interesting" Business History? Evaluation of the Most Cited Recent Business History Journal Articles
  [Paper]

This paper discusses the nature of the most cited articles in two premier journals in the field of business history—Business History Review, BHR (USA) and Business History, BH (UK). Why do scholars refer to them? Our analysis indicates that the majority of the articles citing business history scholarship are focused on their substance and novel findings; only seldom are the methods or theories represented in business history journals the target of their interest. In almost 90 percent of the cases the citations are neutral by nature; both critical and supportive ones are rare. It seems to be that the scholars citing business history articles often consider this field as providing complementary information to their own, or at least that they want to provide an acknowledgement of the empirical work done by business historians. In terms of the scope of the journals having citations to these two journals, we found that history-related journals seem to dominate the citations for BH, while in the case of BHR the scope is more diverse and interdisciplinary. It is fascinating that in both journals the average time lag between the published article and the article in which it is cited is the same: fourteen years.

Sean A. Vanatta
Investing in Masculinity: Gender Construction in the Banking Trade Press, 1945-1970

While aggressively acquisitive, free-market masculinity may seem systemic to the banking profession, the line connecting J. P. Morgan to Gordon Gekko is in fact a long and crooked one. Building on a deep exploration of the American banking press, this paper seeks to trace an alternative piece of this thread: a specific sort of white middle-class masculinity founded on economically stable community leadership and civic responsibility—what I term fiscal paternalism—that emerged in this literature immediately following the Second World War. Male bankers in this period used their trade press to craft a gendered identity that justified the male banker's dominance in his industry and community, and defended this dominance against the increasing encroachments of women and minorities. In doing so, the banking press constrained the possibilities for these groups within the banking industry, constructing gendered roles and spaces that denied both women and African Americans access to the banker identity—a denial with direct repercussions for their entry into actual positions in bank management. By uncovering these gendered constructions and grounding them in the lived realities of bankers and their employees, this paper takes a step toward historicizing banking culture and the shifting currents of banker masculinity.

Lee Vinsel
Establishing the State of the Art: Firms, Regulation, and the Production of Knowledge, 1970-1977

Drawing on federal records, published reports, and oral history interviews, this paper examines how regulators produce knowledge and create information both for themselves and for others, including regulated firms, their suppliers, and consumer advocates. The 1970 Clean Air Act amendments mandated that automakers drastically reduce emissions from their cars. Yet, the law also created a safety valve: the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could suspend the standards for one year if the automakers could not meet them. Between 1972 and 1975, the EPA carried out technological assessments and held a series of hearings in its efforts to decide whether to suspend the standards. Since 1969, however, the auto industry had worked under a consent decree that forbade them from sharing research on emissions controls; the decree had created an information vacuum. No one knew where current technology lay. But through its efforts the EPA and its employees established the state of the art.

Alissa Warren
A Sharp-End Renaissance: Growing Success of African American Entrepreneurs in Columbia, Missouri

In Columbia, Missouri the African American business community has diminished severely over the last century. A thriving Black-owned Columbia business district known as the "Sharp-End" was once booming with barber shops, restaurants, grocery stores, a doctor's office, taverns, and funeral homes. However, the unfortunate by-product of desegregation was the dismantling of this black business community. This research will explore success strategies that could help revive the African American business community in Columbia. The strength, courage, persistence, and prayer of many African American entrepreneurs has sustained the pathway of success and ignited a "Sharp-End" renaissance worthy of study. This success in spite of the social limitations is the impetus for my research. I will explore central phenomena of the sociology of entrepreneurship and group characteristics that aid in the development of successful business activity. These aspects may include positive community networks, family support, work ethic, and risk-taking behaviors.

Stefanie Werner
The Tip of the Iceberg: Business-Related Crime in German Print Media, 1948-2008

This paper aims at three things. First, it introduces the term "business-related crime"—i.e. crime that is either committed by corporations or directed against corporations. The meaning of the term is elaborated in comparison to the established phrases "white-collar crime," "corporate crime," and "occupational crime." Second, the paper reviews the existing research on business-related crime in postwar Western Germany. Third, it presents new data on the subject, derived from a content analysis of Die Zeit and Der Spiegel, two major German weekly newspapers. Shedding light on trends in media coverage, the data reveals that the public hardly took notice of business-related crime in the 1950s and paid increasing attention to it afterward. The data also provides an overview of the different types of business-related crime—corruption, investment fraud, industrial spying, etc.—that occurred in Germany. Finally, it allows an exploration of which industries were reportedly involved more often in crimes, both as offenders and as victims.

Wendy A. Woloson
Retail Premiums and the Promise of Nothing for Something

A spate of promotional schemes first appearing in the mid-1850s fostered a new marketing strategy that continues, in various forms, today. Long before kids in the 1920s began retrieving prizes from Cracker Jack boxes, retailers and their agents were getting consumers to purchase products by giving away free things, commonly called "premiums," "gifts," and "inducements." Premiums made purchasers think they were getting something for nothing—a bonus item. And premium systems were also conduits enabling suppliers to unload inventory they could not sell otherwise. If they were lucky, purchasers might receive inferior goods; as often, they received nothing at all in return for their money. This paper describes the three most prevalent retail premium schemes seen during the second half of the nineteenth century—gift distributions, prize packages, and gift book establishments—and attempts to answer pertinent questions about them. How did they come about? What accounted for their enduring popularity, given that so many were clearly fraudulent or deceptive? What do they tell us about Americans' evolving roles as consumers and their particular vulnerabilities when faced with a rapidly changing marketplace? And what were the significant legacies of retail premiums that make them important for us to study today?

Ryutaro Yamafuji
Organization and Credit Risk Management: A Study of Mitsui & Co. in Modern China

Mitsui & Co. is the oldest general trading company in Japan; its origin and development have been the subject of a great deal of research. Shin'ichi Yonekawa (1990) defined a general trading company as "a firm that trades all kinds of goods with all nations of the world." This definition includes the following features: dealing with all kinds of goods, and conducting business with all kinds of places throughout the world; moreover, these features result in certain organizational issues. The purpose of this paper is to study Mitsui & Co.'s organization and credit risk management in China. There were two reasons for placing focus on its Chinese branches. The first reason is the number of branches in China. Prior to the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), Mitsui & Co. had only three branches. After the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), it had eleven branches. The second reason is to shed light on the abolishment of the comprador system. The Shanghai branch abolished the comprador system in 1899; Tianjin, in 1900; Taipei, in 1901; and Hong Kong, in 1902. Therefore, we will highlight Mitsui & Co. in China around 1900.

Damon Yarnell
Hand-to-Mouth Inventory and the Model T: Outside Supply at the Ford Motor Company, 1908-1927

Between 1908 and 1923, annual production at Ford exploded from 6,000 to 1,800,000 automobiles. Henry Ford, the integrated assembly line, and the company's sprawling plant at Highland Park became icons of mass production. Most scholars have understood the Ford system as a textbook case of vertical integration. Recently, however, business historians have demonstrated that the trend at Ford has been overstated. Through 1916—several years after the introduction of the assembly line—Ford relied on outside suppliers for about half the 5,000 parts in each Model T. Moreover, company policy limited stocks for many components to only a few days' supply, a practice that actors called "hand-to-mouth inventory." In this paper, I draw on archival documents and oral histories in the Ford archives to reconstruct the daily practice of the company's procurement team. From the beginning, mass production was "networked production." Ford's purchasing agents and their colleagues developed sophisticated strategies to deal with issues such as stock turn, process innovation, short- versus long-term contracts, and distributed risk. Moreover, these workers repeatedly assigned credit to suppliers for many of Ford's celebrated price reductions.

Jeffrey Yost
Programming Enterprise: Women Entrepreneurs in Computer Services, 1965-1985

This paper begins by briefly exploring potential factors behind the relative dearth of historical studies of twentieth-century women entrepreneurs and the complete absence of historical literature on women entrepreneurs in computing and software. Drawing from and summarizing elements of four detailed case studies of women computer entrepreneurs—three from the computer services industry and one from the software products trade—the core of the paper seeks to characterize both the substantial hurdles women faced working for large computer and software organizations from the 1960s through the 1980s, as well as the entrepreneurial vision of a small number of women who helped pioneer the hitherto unstudied information technology (IT) independent contractor (IC) brokerage segment of the computer services industry. In contrast to the computer and software products trades, IT IC brokerages had very low financial barriers to entry. In addition to Grace Gentry, who launched the first IT IC brokerage, women founded and ran an estimated 20 percent of early businesses in this segment—a percentage that dwarfs other areas of the IT industry. Finally, the cases demonstrate that women had a disproportionate role in providing leadership to the primary trade association of the IT IC industry, the NACCB.

Yi-Wen Yu
Rethinking the Kirby Puzzle: A Reassessment of Chinese Company Evolution from the Public Finance Perspective, 1860-1949

This paper attempts to offer a fresh answer to the Kirby puzzle, "why the company is not well developed in China." Different from the commonly held view that the evolution of Chinese companies was the result of government intervention and inefficient legal enforcement, the conclusion of this research argues that Chinese companies evolved from different government-corporate interaction models in relation to financial arrangements. In such a process, neither the government nor the private sector always dominated. The transformation of the financial market, usually affected by warfare and global economic crisis, brought change to business-government relations and shaped the incorporated modes. This research analyzes the modes of Chinese incorporation from two angles: public finance and corporate finance. The structure of the financial market, diversified or monopolistic, defined the corporate financial capability and relative power to government. Meanwhile, the arrangement of fiscal system, concentrated or decentralized, shaped the pattern and objects of business-government cooperation. For the government, vice versa, its financial capability and alliance strategy were also subject to these two angles. Consequently, based on their financial interdependence, big business and government usually formed a community with common interests during 1860-1949.