¹ Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge, Mass., 1962)Google Scholar.

² Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977)Google Scholar.

³ Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1990)Google Scholar.

⁴ The earliest such efforts include the following: Channon, Derek F., The Strategy and Structure of British Enterprise (London, 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rumelt, Richard P., Strategy, Structure and Economic Performance (Cambridge, Mass., 1974)Google Scholar; Dyas, Gareth P. and Thanheiser, Heinz T., The Emerging European Enterprise (London, 1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ See Friedman, Walter A., “Business History, Post-Chandler,” in The New Ways of History, ed. Harlaftis, Gelina, Karapidakis, Nikos, Sbonias, Kostas and Vaiopoulos, Vaios (London, 2010)Google Scholar. On criticism of Scale and Scope, see, for example, Supple, Barry, “Scale and Scope: Alfred Chandler and the Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism,” in Economic History Review 14, no. 3 (1991): 500–14Google Scholar; Hannah, Leslie, “The American Miracle, 1875–1950, and After: A View in the European Mirror,” in Business and Economic History 24, no. 2 (1995)Google Scholar; and Sabel, Charles F. and Zeitlin, Jonathan, World of Possibilities (Cambridge, Mass., 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ Whittington, Richard and Mayer, Michael, The European Corporation: Strategy, Structure and Social Science (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar.

⁷ On criticisms of Chandler's work and methodology, see Whittington and Mayer, European Corporation, ch. 2.

⁸ On the role of political economy, see, for example, John, Richard R., ed., Ruling Passions: Political Economy in Nineteenth Century America (University Park, Pa., 2006)Google Scholar; John, Richard R., Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (Cambridge, Mass., 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ See, for example, Haggard, Stephan, Pathways from the Periphery—The Politics of Growth in the Newly Industrializing Countries (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990)Google Scholar; Albert, Michael, Capitalisme contre Capitalisme (Paris, 1991)Google Scholar; Hofstede, Geert, Cultures and Organizations (London, 1991)Google Scholar; Whitley, Richard and Kristensen, Peer H., The Changing European Firm—Limits to Convergence (London, 1996)Google Scholar; La Porta, Rafael, Lopes-de-Silanes, Florencio, and Schleifer, Andrei, “Corporate Ownership Around the World,” in Journal of Finance 54, no. 2 (1999): 471–517CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Whitley, Richard, Divergent Capitalisms—The Social Structuring and Change of Business Systems (Oxford, 1999)Google Scholar; Barca, Fabrizio and Becht, Marco, eds., The Control of Corporate Europe (Oxford, 2001)Google Scholar; Guillén, Mauro F., The Limits of Convergence: Globalization and Organizational Change in Argentina, South Korea, and Spain (Princeton, 2001)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ See Colpan, Asli M., Hikino, Takashi, and Lincoln, James R., eds., The Oxford Handbook of Business Groups (New York, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which presents an extensive theoretical and historical overview and an analysis of the economic, sociopolitical, and managerial underpinnings of business groups and extensive empirical evidence on these groups in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Africa. Business groups in western and southern Europe are not analyzed.

¹¹ On the industrial delay, see, for instance, Zamagni, Vera, Dalla Periferia al Centro—La seconda rinascita economica dell'Italia (1861–1990) (Bologna, 1990)Google Scholar; Nadal, Jordi, El Fracaso de la Revolución Industrial en España, 1814–1913 (Barcelona, 1975)Google Scholar. The state's role in these nations is described by Amatori, Franco and Colli, Andrea, Impresa e industria in Italia dall'Unità ad oggi (Venice, 1999)Google Scholar; Toninelli, Pier Angelo, Industria, Impresa e Stato: Tre saggi sullo sviluppo economico italiano (Trieste, 2003)Google Scholar; Amatori, Franco, “Entrepreneurial Typologies in the History of Industrial Italy: Reconsiderations,” Business History Review 85 (Spring 2011): 151–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carreras, Albert and Tafunell, Xavier, Historia Económica de la España Contemporánea (Barcelona, 2003)Google Scholar; Aceña, Pablo Martín and Comín, Francisco Comín, INI, 50 años de industrialización en España (Madrid, 1991)Google Scholar. On family business, see Colli, Andrea, Pérez, Paloma Fernández, and Rose, Mary, “National Determinants of Family Firm Development? Family Firms in Britain, Spain and Italy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” in Enterprise and Society 4, no. 1 (2003): 28–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Among others, small and medium enterprises and industrial districts are discussed in Becattini, Giacomo, ed., Mercato e Forze Locali: Il Distretto Industriale (Bologna, 1987)Google Scholar; Fuà, Giorgio and Zacchia, Carlo, eds., Industrializzazione Senza Fratture (Bologna, 1983)Google Scholar; Catalan, Jordi, Miranda, José Antonio, and Ramon-Muñoz, Ramón, eds., Distritos y clusters en la Europa del Sur (Madrid, 2011)Google Scholar.

¹² Among the main exceptions are the following: Pavan, Robert J., Strutture e Strategie delle Imprese Italiane (Bologna, 1976)Google Scholar; Federico, Giovanni and Toninelli, Pier Angelo, “Le strategie delle imprese dall'Unità al 1973,” in L'impresa italiana nel Novecento, ed. Giannetti, Renato and Vasta, Michelangelo, (Bologna, 2003)Google Scholar; Binda, Veronica and Iversen, Martin J., “Towards a ‘Managerial Revolution’ in European Business? The Transformation of Danish and Spanish Big Business, 1973–2003,” in Business History 49, no. 4 (2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Galan, José I. and Bueno, María J. Sánchez, “Strategy and Structure in Context: Universalism versus Institutional Effects,” in Organization Studies 30, no. 6 (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Binda, Veronica and Colli, Andrea, “Changing Big Business in Italy and Spain, 1973–2003: Strategic Responses to a New Context,” Business History 53, no. 1 (2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For works on the debates over big business, see the works by Franco Amatori on Italy and by Carreras, Albert and Tafunell, Xavier on Spain in Big Business and the Wealth of Nations, ed. Chandler, Alfred D. Jr., Amatori, Franco, and Hikino, Takashi (Cambridge, Mass., 1997)Google Scholar.

¹³ On the contrast between the manufacturing sectors that “hosted” big business and those that did not (i.e., clothing, leather goods), see Chandler, Scale and Scope, ch. 1.

¹⁴ World Bank database: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CDorder=wbapi_data_value_2008+wbapi_data_value&sort=asc.

¹⁵ Whittington and Mayer, The European Corporation. For what concerns contributors to the Harvard Program, in particular, see Rumelt, Strategy, Structure and Economic Performance; Channon, Strategy and Structure of British Enterprise; and Dyas and Thanheiser, Emerging European Enterprise. These investigations adopted a similar methodology with some small differences. They selected populations composed of the one hundred largest manufacturing companies according to turnover in, respectively, the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany in 1970. Focusing on the domestically owned enterprises, they investigated the transformation of these firms going back to 1950 using throughout a standard scheme for classifying strategies and structures. The term “Harvard Program” is used by Whittington and Mayer; see p. 12.

¹⁶ On the increasing role of services, see Nohria, Nitin, Dyer, Davis, and Dalzell, Frederick, Changing Fortunes: Remaking the Industrial Corporation (New York, 2002)Google Scholar. On the importance of the foreign investments in Italy and Spain, see Colli, Andrea, “Foreign Capital in Italian Industry (1913–1972): Early Findings and Conjectures,” in Forms of Enterprise in Twentieth Century Italy: Boundaries, Structures and Strategies, ed. Colli, Andrea and Vasta, Michelangelo (Cheltenham, 2011)Google Scholar; and Muñoz, Juan, Roldán, Santiago, and Serrano, Ángel, La internacionalización del capital en España, 1959–1977 (Madrid, 1978)Google Scholar.

¹⁷ For an analysis of the strategies and structures of manufacturing corporations in Spain, see Binda, Veronica, “Entre el Estado y las multinacionales: La empresa industrial española en los años de la integración a la CEE,” in Revista de Historia Industrial 28 (2005): 117–54Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Harvard Program categories have been adopted for categories concerning diversification strategy and organizational form.

¹⁹ Mediobanca, Le principali società italiane, 1973 (Milano, 1974)Google Scholar; Mediobanca, Le principali società italiane, 2002 (Milan, 2003)Google Scholar; Associazione fra le Società Italiane per Azioni, Notizie Statistiche (Rome, 1953)Google Scholar.

²⁰ Anuario financiero que comprende el historial de valores públicos y de sociedades anónimas de España, 1951–52: Fomento de la producción—Las mayores empresas españolas en 1973 (Barcelona, 1974)Google Scholar; Fomento de la producción—Las mayores empresas españolas en 2002 (Barcelona, 2003)Google Scholar.

²¹ Regarding Italy, see Mediobanca, Calepino dell'Azionista (Milan, various years); Mediobanca, Indici e dati relativi ad investimenti in titoli quotati nelle borse italiane (Milan, various years); Mediobanca, R & S (Milan, various years); Credito Italiano, Guida dell'azionista (Milan, various years); regarding Spain, see de Bilbao, Banco, Agenda Financiera (Bilbao, various years)Google Scholar; de Barcelona, Bolsa, Boletín Financiero (Barcelona, various years)Google Scholar; de Madrid, Bolsa, Anuario Oficial de Valores de las Bolsas de Madrid y Barcelona (Madrid, various years)Google Scholar.

²² Chandler, Strategy and Structure; Chandler, Scale and Scope.

²³ There is not enough room for a debate on U.S. conglomerates and refocusing in this article. For an effective synthesis of this topic, see Constantinos Markides, Diversification, Refocusing, and Economic Performance (Cambridge, Mass., 1995)Google Scholar.

²⁴ In investigating the United Kingdom, Channon stressed this point: “The situation in 1970 represented further considerable gains in the numbers of diversified companies. … The related product had become the major corporate form. … The trend in Britain had clearly been in the direction of the position reached by the U.S. Population” (Channon, , Strategy and Structure of British Enterprise, 70, 85Google Scholar). Dyas and Thanheiser, writing about the years between 1950 and 1970, stated: “A significant shift from low diversity strategies to full diversity occurred among the leading industrial corporations in France and Germany. The trend was remarkably parallel in both countries over the twenty-year period. The shift in the United States was in the same direction, but was more radical” (Emerging European Enterprise, 289).

²⁵ Whittington, and Mayer, , The European Corporation, 145Google Scholar.

²⁶ For examples of the role and behavior of these business groups, see: on state-owned business groups, Aceña, Pablo Martín and Comín, Francisco Comín, INI, 50 años de industrialización en España (Madrid, 1991)Google Scholar; and Carreras, Albert, Tafunell, Xavier, and Torres, Eugenio, “The Rise and Decline of Spanish State-Owned firms,” in The Rise and Fall of State-owned Enterprise in the Western World, ed. Toninelli, Pier Angelo (Cambridge, Mass., 2000)Google Scholar. On bank-owned busines groups, see Muñoz, Juan, El Poder de la banca en España (Madrid, 1969)Google Scholar; Ruiz, José Luis García, ed., Revista de la Historia de la Economía y de la Empresa (Bilbao, 2007)Google Scholar; and Puig, Núria and Torres, Eugenio, Banco Urquijo: Un Banco con Historia (Madrid, 2008)Google Scholar; on family-owned business groups, see, for instance, Valdaliso, Jesús María, La familia Aznar y sus negocios (Madrid, 2006)Google Scholar.

²⁷ Chandler, Strategy and Structure.

²⁸ “The growth of the multidivisional form was … more dramatic; it more than doubled in 10 years. By 1970 this structure was clearly the dominant organizational form” (Channon, , Strategy and Structure of British Enterprise, 70Google Scholar). Observing a similar trend, although it did not extend as far as the one in the United Kingdom, Dyas and Thanheiser claimed: [the fact] “that the divisional form of organization was eventually adopted by a large number of companies shows both that the pressure for change had become very strong, and that the capacity of European managements to adapt their convictions and behaviour was quite high” (Emerging European Enterprise, 296).

²⁹ Whittington, and Mayer, , The European Corporation, 213, 219, 226Google Scholar.

³⁰ Chandler, Scale and Scope, ch. 1.

³¹ Ibid. See discussion of the British case.

³² See, for example, Bruno, Giovanni and Segreto, Luciano, “Finanza e industria in Italia,” in Storia dell'Italia repubbicana, vol. 3 (Turin, 1996)Google Scholar; Barca, Fabrizio, Bertucci, Francesca, Capello, Graziella and Casavola, Paola, “La trasformazione proprietaria di Fiat, Pirelli e Falck dal 1947 ad oggi,” in Storia del Capitalismo Italiano dal Dopoguerra ad oggi, ed. Barca, Fabrizio (Rome, 1997)Google Scholar; or Bianchi, Marcello, Bianco, Magda, and Enriques, Luca, “Pyramidal Groups and the Separation between Ownership and Control in Italy,” in The Control of Corporate Europe, ed. Barca, Fabrizio and Becht, MarcoGoogle Scholar, regarding the experience of some large Italian corporations.

³³ Cingolani, Stefano, Le grandi famiglie del capitalismo italiano (Bari, 1990)Google Scholar; Cabrera, Mercedes and Del Rey, Fernando, El poder de los empresarios—Política y Economía en la España Contemporánea (1975–2000) (Madrid, 2002)Google Scholar.

³⁴ See Franco Amatori, “Beyond State and Market: Italy's Futile Search for a Third Way,” and Carreras, Albert, Tafunell, Xavier, and Torres, Eugenio, “The Rise and Decline of Spanish State-owned Firms,” in Rise and Fall of State-Owned Enterprise, ed. Toninelli, Google Scholar.

³⁵ Instituto Nacional de Industria, Memoria, 1973, p. 32Google Scholar.

³⁶ See, for example, Fabrizio Barca and Sandro Trento, “La parabola delle partecipazioni statali: Una missione tradita,” in Storia del Capitalismo Italiano, ed. Barca; Amatori and Colli, Impresa e Industria in Italia, ch. 13; and Comín, Francisco Comín and Aceña, Pablo Martín, “La Política Autárquica y el INI,” in Los empresarios de Franco: Política y Economía en España, 1936–1957, ed. Recio, Glicerio Sánchez and Fernández, Julio Tascón (Barcelona, 2003)Google Scholar.

³⁷ See, for example, Osti, Gian Lupo and Ranieri, Ruggero, L'industria di Stato dall'ascesa al degrado: Trent'anni nel gruppo Finsider (Bologna, 1993)Google Scholar.

³⁸ See, for example, Román, Elena San and Sudriá, Carles, “Synthetic Fuels in Spain, 1942– 66: The Failure of Franco's Autarkic Dream,” Business History 45, no. 4 (2003): 73–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁹ For a description of an interesting case in an earlier period, see Román, Elena San, “Un zaibatsu fuera de lugar: Los orígenes del Grupo Fierro (1870–1939),” Revista de Historia Económica, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History no. 3 (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a typology of business groups in Italy, see Colli, Andrea and Vasta, Michelangelo, “I Grandi Gruppi nel Capitalismo Italiano del Novecento,” in Grandi Gruppi e Informazione Finanziaria nel Novecento, vol. 5: Tra Imprese e Istituzioni 100 Anni di Assonime, ed. Coltorti, Fulvio (Rome-Bari, 2010)Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ Guillén, Limits of Convergence, ch. 3; and Amatori, Franco, “Growth via Politics: Business Groups Italian Style,” in Beyond the Firm: Business Groups in Inter national and Historical Perspective, ed. Shiba, Takao and Shimotani, Masahiro (New York, 1997)Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Bonelli, Franco, Lo sviluppo di una grande impresa in Italia: La Terni dal 1884 al 1962 (Turin, 1975)Google Scholar.

⁴² Torres, Eugenio, “Juan March Ordinas,” in Los 100 Empresarios Españoles del Siglo XX, ed. Torres, Eugenio (Madrid, 2000)Google Scholar.

⁴³ Pavan, Strutture e strategie delle imprese italiane, 169; Alberto Rinaldi, “Imprenditori e manager (1913–1972),” in L'impresa italiana nel Novecento, ed. Giannetti and Vasta.

⁴⁴ For a discussion of this case, see Albert Carreras, “La Gran Empresa durante el Primer Franquismo,” in Los empresarios de Franco, ed. Recio and Tascón Fernández; on the goals of the indemnifications offered to the electric companies and their results, La nazionalizzazione dell'energia elettrica: L'esperienza italiana e di altri Paesi (Rome-Bari, 1989)Google Scholar; Zanetti, Giovanni, ed., Storia dell'industria elettrica in Italia (Rome-Bari, 1994)Google Scholar; Bruno and Segreto, “Finanza e industria in Italia.”

⁴⁵ Guillén, Limits of Convergence.

⁴⁶ Amatori and Colli, Impresa e Industria, 295.

⁴⁷ Filippetti, Simone, “Benetton, i tanti ‘fili’ oltre il tessile,” Il Sole 24 Ore, 13 Nov. 2005Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ See Mendoza, Antonio Gómez, De mitos y Milagros: El Instituto Nacional de Autarquía, 1941–1963 (Barcelona, 2000)Google Scholar.