In 1993, four years prior to the publication of Clayton Christensen's highly influential book, The Innovator's Dilemma, the Business History Review published an article by Christensen titled “The Rigid Disk Drive Industry: A History of Commercial and Technological Turbulence.” The article relates the theory of disruptive innovation to Alfred D. Chandler's work on large vertically integrated enterprises. It was published during a pivotal era of scholarship on innovation, management practice, and industry evolution, much of which used the history of firms, industries, and technologies to build theory. I survey the impact and critiques of Christensen's research agenda, highlighting how it illustrates where the boundaries associated with the “lessons of history” should be drawn.

This article provides an account of the development of the casino industry in Chile. For most of the 1930s up to the 1980s the industry remained stagnant and restricted to a few locations. From 1990 the industry grew, but in particular after 2005 following a new law that permitted the creation of new casinos in all regions, with the main aim of promoting tourism. The new casinos had to operate as part of an “integral project,” which included sizable investments in the tourism sector. This was a novel business development strategy. The new industry attracted old and new investors, including foreign operators, who often associated with Chilean business groups, providing the resources needed to finance these developments and enjoying healthy profits for most of the period.

We provide an analytically structured history of Enron's involvement in the California energy crisis, exploring its emergence as a corrupt organization and its use of an interorganizational network to manipulate California's energy supply markets. We use this history to introduce the concept of network-enabled corruption, showing how corruption, even if primarily enacted by a single dominant organization, is often highly dependent on the support of other organizations. Specifically, we show how Enron combined resources from partner firms with its own capabilities, manipulating the energy market and capitalizing on the crisis. From a methodological point of view, our study emphasizes the growing importance of digital sources for historical research, drawing particularly on telephone and email records from the period to develop a rich, fly-on-the-wall understanding of a phenomenon that is otherwise hard to observe.

This article examines the relationship between international commercial banks and military regimes in South America. The focus is on how military regimes in the Southern Cone of Latin America and Brazil in the 1970s became heavily dependent on foreign capital provided by international banks based in Britain and France. It makes use of previously unavailable archival evidence to examine the interactions between international banks and South American governments, showing how these interactions intensified once military rule was established. It shows that international capital was used for a wide variety of purposes, including arms imports. When global banks cut loans once the debt crisis erupted in 1982, they aggravated the economic crisis but also fostered democratic change.

This article examines the evolution of the video game industry in Britain from its start in 1978. The industry originated with passionate hobbyists and amateurs who benefited from the national broadcaster's campaign to expand computer literacy. Unlike the regional clustering of the industry in the United States and Japan, the British industry was dispersed geographically, consisting of mini-clusters with porous boundaries. During the 2000s, the fragmented British industry was largely acquired by U.S. and Japanese multinational companies and became part of global value chains, but the development of mobile gaming and digital distribution provided opportunities for a new generation of start-ups to emerge in Britain.

Corporations maximize shareholder returns—or so goes the conventional wisdom. It was not always so. In the middle decades of the last century, lawmakers, business leaders, and journalists agreed that the nation's largest and most powerful corporations had obligations to a raft of stakeholders that included (in addition to shareholders) employees, customers, and the localities in which they had set up shop. Some historians have labeled this consensus “corporate liberalism”; contemporaries called it “social responsibility.” Still others, including, most notably, Alfred D. Chandler Jr., regarded these corporate obligations as emblematic of a new stage in economic development—“managerial capitalism”—whose origins could be traced back to the railroad, the country's first “big business.” This consensus had durable consequences, as Kenneth J. Lipartito and others demonstrated in Corporate Responsibility: The American Experience (2012), a multiauthor survey of shifting assumptions regarding corporate governance in the United States from the colonial era to the present.

A long-standing, and deeply controversial, question in constitutional law is whether or not the Constitution's protections for “persons” and “people” extend to corporations. Law professor Adam Winkler's We the Corporations chronicles the most important legal battles launched by corporations to “win their constitutional rights,” by which he means both civil rights against discriminatory state action and civil liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution (p. xvii). Today, we think of the former as the right to be free from unequal treatment, often protected by statutory laws, and the latter as liberties that affect the ability to live one's life fully, such as the freedom of religion, speech, or association. The vim in Winkler's argument is that the court blurred this distinction when it applied liberty rights to nonprofit corporations and then, through a series of twentieth-century rulings, corporations were able to advance greater claims to liberty rights. Ultimately, those liberty rights have been employed to strike down significant bipartisan regulations, such as campaign finance laws, which were intended to advance democratic participation in the political process. At its core, this book asks, to what extent do “we the people” rule corporations and to what extent do they rule us?

Present-day advocates of antitrust reform referred to as “New Brandeisians” have invoked history in pressing the case for change. The New Brandeisians bemoan the upending of a mid-twentieth-century “golden age” of antitrust by an intellectual movement known as the Chicago School. In fact, mid-twentieth-century enforcement of antitrust was uneven and large corporations exercised substantial market power. The Chicago School also was not as decisive an agent of change as the New Brandeisians suggest. Doubts about the efficacy of government regulation and concerns about foreign competition did much to foster the late twentieth-century counterrevolution that antitrust experienced.

Gather a group of economists together and ask what most concerns them, and a wide variety of topics would soon emerge: slowing economic growth in the rich nations, the inability of many poor nations to converge toward the rich, rising income and wealth inequality, the increasing dominance of superstar firms, growing profit margins and the decline in labor's income share, globalization and the human costs of outsourcing, deaths of despair, and the threat of climate change. Decade after decade, numerous books have been written about each of these issues. But here we have in one compact package a blockbuster book that deals with all of them.

This book is a worthy successor to those commissioned by the Bank of England that cover its history from its foundation in 1694. It is written by an expert, is thoroughly researched, and provides a wealth of evidence to support the judicious conclusions that are drawn. The discussion ranges from the highly technical to the narrative, indicating the command that Harold James has over his subject. For the period it covers it will become the authorized version of what the Bank of England did and why, covering the details of how it operated as a complex organization and the decisions it made that affected both the domestic and international financial systems. What emerges is how difficult decision making was after the 1970s, following the breakdown of the postwar certainties of the 1950s and 1960s. Though the title suggests that the coverage of the book extends to 2003, it largely ends in 1997. The years that followed are treated with much less depth. That is understandable, as the elephant in the room for any recent history of the Bank of England is the banking crisis of 2007–2008. As it is, the dates chosen are those between which Eddie George, governor of the Bank of England between 1993 and 2003, exerted his greatest influence, having joined in 1962. Increasingly after 1997 Mervyn King took a leading role, becoming deputy governor in 1998 and then governor in 2003. We will have to wait for another commissioned history to discover what part the Bank of England played in the first major banking crisis to hit Britain since that of Overend and Gurney in 1866. Judging from a comment made in this book (p. 432) it is possible that a full understanding of those years will never emerge. When the Monetary Policy Committee, located in the Bank of England, was set up in 1997 it was agreed that the meetings would be recorded and a full transcript of the discussion made. Subsequently, it was decided to delete the recording and destroy the transcript, leaving only the published official record of what took place. This mirrors the Bank of England's destruction of the papers relating to its role in the secondary banking crisis of 1974.