This article explores how clusters have reacted to the recent process of globalization by comparing the development of two clusters that are located in the same region, the county of Møre og Romsdal in Norway. These are the furniture cluster and the maritime cluster on the west coast of Norway. When international competition increased, the first one declined while the other prospered and became more global. Structural differences explain only partly the different development paths of these clusters. In addition, firms’ strategic actions and the degree of collectively shared visions about international operations mattered for how the clusters developed.

In expanding on earlier analyses of the evolution of multinational business that have drawn from concepts of competition and innovation, this study examines the strategies used by British multinationals, between 1870 and 1929, to protect the global reputation of their brands, which were crucial to their survival and success. Even after the passage of new trademark legislation in 1876, enforcement of trademarks remained expensive, and often firms preferred to negotiate, rather than to prosecute violations. Many trademark imitators were based in the newly industrializing countries of the time—the United States, Germany, and Japan—and were part of the British export supply chains as licensees, franchisees, or wholesalers. British firms responded to infringements by lobbying governments, appointing local agents to provide intelligence, and collaborating with other firms.

Were congressional demands for the remonetization of silver in the 1870's triggered and supported by large-scale mining interests seeking a guaranteed market for their product? Contemporaries and historians have generally answered “yes.” Professor Weinstein revises this traditional interpretation by analyzing the actual interrelationships between American silver producers and government coinage policies.

Between the end of the Civil War and the enactment of national Prohibition in 1920, America's brewing industry grew to become one of the nation's leading manufacturing industries. During the first thirty years of this period, the industry's growth was propelled by the emergence of a small group of nationally oriented breweries. These firms pioneered a series of important technological, scientific, and organizational innovations, which allowed them to increase annual sales. Yet, after several decades of spectacular growth, they began to see their relative position in the industry decline. From the mid-1890s until Prohibition, hundreds of regional and local breweries reasserted themselves in the market for beer. These firms often were able to provide less expensive beer and to sell it in saloons that they owned or controlled. Together, these two factors enabled regional and local breweries to present a competitive challenge to national firms in the years leading up to Prohibition.

The role of government in the ante-bellum American economy has been boldly redefined in a score of books and articles published during the past decade. Close analysis of state and local sponsorship of enterprise, initiated and supported by the Committee on Research in Economic History, has suggested a thesis that appears to invite a new view of American capitalism in its formative years. Taken together, the works here reviewed form a consistent report of economic endeavor in an almost unfamiliar land. There, the elected public official replaced the individual enterpriser as the key figure in the release of capitalist energy; the public treasury, rather than private saving, became the major source of venture capital; and community purpose outweighed personal ambition in the selection of large goals for local economies. “Mixed” enterprise was the customary organization for important innovations, and government everywhere undertook the role put on it by the people, that of planner, promoter, investor, and regulator.

Professor Stopford explores the patterns of British direct investment in overseas manufacturing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, paying special attention to the quality of Victorian entrepreneurship and the opportunities and problems presented by the Empire and then the Commonwealth.

For all its notoriety and controversial character, the history of Swiss banking secrecy remains largely unexplored. This article traces the crucial phases of its development. It reveals that the maintenance and reinforcement of banking secrecy represented a major objective of Swiss authorities throughout the twentieth century, and exerted a substantial influence on Swiss domestic and foreign policy. It demonstrates that, contrary to popular opinion, the institution of Swiss banking secrecy did not arise from a desire to protect the funds deposited in Switzerland by Jewish victims of Nazi persecution but rather had substantially different origins. Moreover, this article shows that Swiss banking secrecy gave rise to tensions between Switzerland and the Great Powers, especially during and after World War II, when it poisoned relations between Switzerland and the United States.

The literature on inventors has traditionally focused on entrepreneurs who exploited their ideas in their own businesses and on researchers who worked in large firms' R&D laboratories. For most of US history, however, it was as common for inventors to profit from their ideas by selling off or licensing the patent rights. This article traces the different ways in which inventors resolved the information problems involved in marketing their patents. We focus in particular on the patent attorneys who emerged during the last third of the nineteenth century to help inventors find buyers for their intellectual property.

Very different commodity chains had been established over the centuries in France to produce and sell wines as diverse as champagne, fine old clarets, or ordinary table wines. The major shortages caused by the vine disease phylloxera after 1875 forced merchants to search for new sources of supply, often in foreign countries or through the production of artificial wines. When domestic production revived, however, the recovery was not accompanied by a noticeable reduction in these new supplies, with the result that prices, as well as growers' profitability, fell sharply after the turn of the twentieth century, strengthening the merchants' power in the various commodity chains. To overcome this situation, growers in three very different wine-producing areas, namely the Midi, Bordeaux, and Champagne, used their political influence to achieve government intervention in order to control fraud and establish regional appellations or producer cooperatives, which helped them win back some of their market power from merchants.

In the thirteen years following the introduction of IBM's first personal computer in 1982, Microsoft rose from being a small concern to become the colossus of the PC software industry. However, Microsoft was not the only software company to profit from the PC-software boom: firms like AutoDesk, Lotus Development, WordPerfect Corp., Ashton-Tate, Novell, Borland, Adobe Systems, Aldus, Symantec, and the Santa Cruz Operation all had their time in the sun. Whereas some of these firms lost their markets to Microsoft or stumbled through strategic errors, others remained hugely successful, and their relative obscurity is largely due to the contemporary obsession with Microsoft and its billionaire founder.

This article focuses on the roles of business-government relations, technology, financing, entrepreneurship, and management in the evolution of multinational corporations. It describes the Guggenheims' successive involvements in Mexican silver, Chilean copper, and Chilean nitrates and stresses the brothers' strategic use of technical innovation and relations with host governments to accomplish these major changes in the focus of their business. The essay's findings suggest the need for a more sophisticated treatment of business-government relations and for the incorporation of entrepreneurship and organizational structure as dynamic variables in theories of the MNE. It also points to the importance of historical conjunctures that shape technology in understanding the emergence of the MNE.

In 1969, when few commercial communications networks existed, a U.S. Defense Department research agency created an experimental system that would eventually become the Internet. Driven by both research and military considerations, the designers of the Internet created a complex, robust, and flexible system that differed in significant ways from contemporary commercial communications networks. In the 1970s and 1980s, computer manufacturers (mainly based in the United States) and telecommunications carriers (mainly operating outside the United States) vied to offer commercial network products and services, but no single company or technology was able to dominate the market, in part because computer users preferred the type of nonproprietary technical standards used in the Internet. In the 1980s, the National Science Foundation took over operation of the Internet, and in the 1990s the NSF turned over the network to privatesector operators. While the Internet has rapidly increased in scale under commercial ownership, the technology also continues to reflect the systems research origins.

The market types that were the subject of an earlier essay in the Review are resurveyed in order to examine the changes that have occurred over the past fifty years. The entrepreneurial typologies identified then–one based on a market orientation, another that relies on state support, and a third, hybrid, approach–are still valid today. The liveliest components of the modern Italian economy, which operate as a fourth type of capitalism (mainly based on industrial districts), share features of the market typology, while, in southern Italy, the state's failure to support business is linked to the rise of organized crime. The more recent hybrid type features a new kind of actor, exemplified by Silvio Berlusconi, the central figure on the Italian political scene for almost two decades.

Diversified trading networks have recently drawn a great deal of attention. In the process, the importance of diversity has perhaps been overemphasized. Using the trade in port wine from Portugal to Britain as an example, this essay attempts to show how a market once dominated by general, diversified traders was taken over by dedicated specialists whose success might almost be measured by the degree to which they rejected diversification to form a dedicated “commodity chain.” The essay suggests that this strategy was better able to handle matters of quality and the specialized knowledge that port wine required. The essay also highlights the question of power in such a chain. Endemic commodity-chain struggles are clearest in the vertical brand war that broke out in the nineteenth century, which, by concentrating power, marked the final stage in the transformation of the trade from network to vertical integration.

Using newly collected patent assignment data for late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany and a standard econometric approach from the international trade literature—the gravity model—we demonstrate the existence of border effects on a historical technology market. We show that the geographic distance between assignor and assignee negatively affected the probability of patent assignments, as well as the fact that a state or international border separated the two contracting parties. Surprisingly, we show that the effect of a state border within Germany was nearly as large as the effect of an international border.

A study of the development of fifty large, diversified American corporations in recent decades reveals some of the paths business has followed since the innovation of the multidivisional firm half a century ago.

While retailing a great variety of goods under one roof and single management already existed in China by the late nineteenth century, modern style department stores on the China coast began only in 1900. Organized by Chinese entrepreneurs who had started their careers in Australia, they consciously borrowed managerial techniques from abroad. Sincere and Wing On, the two premier Chinese department stores, expanded rapidly during diese years and, in the process, developed new forms of organization and strategy based on western models as well as on traditional Chinese business practices and cultural values. When political and economic turmoil during the 1920s and 1930s slowed the growth of these companies, Wing On emerged more successfully tban Sincere. Wing On's path diverged from that of its competitor because its stronger management team was better at blending individual personality, western organization and Chinese cultural values.

This article presents a new database on U.S. multinationals active in British manufacturing between 1907 and 1962. Britain was the largest European host economy for U.S. direct investment in manufacturing and the second largest host worldwide. This article identifies the industrial distribution and mode of entry of U.S. investors, and offers explanations for the time trends which are shown. It goes on to trace the evolution of U.S. subsidiaries, and shows that rates of divestment were substantial. An examination of the characteristics of U.S. subsidiaries, including the substantial investments in R & D and high export propensity, is followed by a survey of British public policy, which made Britain an attractive host but did little to shape the form of U.S. investment.

Patterns of residential segregation in late-nineteenth-century southern cities had great influence on the type of African American business that developed. They also affected the relative stability of business enterprise. In neighborhoods with a higher degree of segregation, African American entrepreneurs were able to develop vital businesses that survived the worsening climate of race relations around the turn of the century.

Business history, if it is to comprehend the men and movements with which it deals, must of necessity invade other academic fields. This article is an attempt to trace the social and economic influences which fashioned the ultimate business activities of German-Jewish investment bankers in the late nineteenth century. Second only to the group of houses of Yankee origin, the group led by Kuhn, Loeb & Co. provides us with an outstanding example of a business elite in operation. Significant from the point of view of business history is the fact that in origins, early activities, and outlook, these family firms displayed remarkable similarities. Once established in New York they became even more tightly knit through marriage and social life. Only when all these factors have been taken into account can we claim to understand the unique role which these businesses played in the development of the American capital market.