Submission Details and Recommendations

Double space everything—text, inset quotes, bibliography and endnotes.

Observe Chicago Manual of Style format for bibliography and citations. No social science inserted references are acceptable. For endnotes, please reference your full bibliographical citations in short form, as, Zinsser, Writing Well, 22, where the full citation reads Zinsser, William K., On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Non-fiction, New York: Collins, 2006.

When you go to the E&S online submission site, be prepared to include at least three separate files:

1. a title page with your name and contact information
2. an abstract of up to 150 words, headed by the article's title (you paste this into a box on one of the screens)
3. the article (title and text only), followed by a bibliography, followed by endnotes (these will be converted to page keyed footnotes during production). All notes should be produced with Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3) as superscripts; we do not use the alternative Roman forms (i, ii, iii)

You may need to send additional files if you have tables, figures, or illustrations. Each type should be uploaded as a separate file. Be certain that no personal identification accompanies these items.

Manuscripts will be returned to authors for "repairs" prior to review/refereeing if:

• they are not double-spaced throughout, lack a bibliography or endnotes, or use incorrect citation formats
• they are forwarded without separate files for title page and abstract
• they have substantial stylistic deficiencies (see below)

Style

Enterprise & Society supports fair and accurate use of language, and the editors encourage authors to adopt a writing style sensitive to gender and other issues beyond the personal pronoun. Please refer to Enterprise & Society's style guidelines for further information.

Note: This section is chiefly intended for junior scholars or colleagues outside history submitting an article to E&S for the first time. However, it may also be useful for more experienced historians to review their prose in light of the following items.

Extensive copyediting of scholarly manuscripts is costly and slows the publication process. We hope E&S authors will pay careful attention to the following matters in advance of submission.

Passive voicing is not acceptable and authors must root it out. The passive voice defers causality, responsibility and agency, and is appropriate only when an author genuinely cannot attribute these three to one of the relevant parties or organizations. The classic political/corporate version of this is: "Mistakes were made." Saying this sets aside accounting for and explaining the mistakes (when and by whom, at a minimum). Review your manuscript to locate passive voice constructions and reframe them into active voice sentences. For the preceding example, a fix could be: "The board of directors erred in this situation" or "Vice-president Drudge committed the key mistakes."

Strive in your writing to give action/agency to your subjects, not least by seeking strong verbs and minimizing use of flat and weak verb forms (is, was, were, had, do, did). Please do not start sentences with "And" or "But"; this is casual writing. There are many alternatives: yet, moreover, however, instead, in addition, etc.

Avoid serial prepositional phrases. Example: "Critical information about the possibilities of product development for international markets of significant scale with acceptable financials needed to be gathered by the company." Overloads of prepositional phrases do not make engaging reading. Better perhaps: "Company agents sought to gather critical information about product development possibilities for large-scale, international, and financially-credible markets."

Prepositional phrases often can be replaced with possessives. "The earliest major rivals of the PRR" can be recast as "The PRR's earliest rivals."

Be certain that your essay has what William Germano, citing Konstantin Stanislavski, calls a "throughline" (in From Dissertation to Book, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005—a guide well worth owning).

A throughline is an arc of argument and evidence that carries the reader forward from your first paragraph to the final lines. It is a bit of dramatic styling that puts a hook into your reader's mind and pulls him or her into your universe, your research, your claims and findings. Narratives, even the most formally analytical of them, need to have a throughline or a trajectory, because as authors we want to connect to readers. What deeply interests you as the author has to be made interesting and accessible to your clients and readers. Vague and overlong constructions (the 10–15 line sentence with multiple sub-clauses) are obstructive. Rare are the scholars whose work is so brilliant that they can present it to readers packaged in dense and difficult prose. Equally, hardly any readers are eager to engage presentations that seem to be empirical reports from the archives: detailed, bland, unassuming, essays that lack sustained efforts to engage readers in terms of scholarly significance.

Creating a throughline involves making claims up front, pursuing them through the arc of the essay, documenting them and perhaps indicating countervailing claims and evidence. Creating a throughline also requires concluding paragraphs that show clearly and gracefully how and why your interpretation and understanding merit serious consideration, if not instant assent.

In developing this approach, authors will want to sent out their essay's thematic situation at the beginning of their story and should delineate the changed situation in the conclusion. In between, explain to your reader (the educated non-specialist) what took place in between that brought about these changes, using dates as markers for the throughline. Also, help readers recognize the contingency of outcomes by noting, where appropriate, alternative paths, countervailing forces, disagreements and conflicts among the actors or stakeholders.

One device to advance the throughline is to employ dates at the beginning of sentences, particularly in introductory or concluding matter.

In 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower asked members of Congress to reduce regulation of railroads. Seven years later, President John F. Kennedy sought broad deregulation of railroads as well as airlines and trucks. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson urged subordinates to make deregulation part of efforts to create a new Department of Transportation. By mid-1960s, the idea of deregulation had emerged as part of the institutional office of the President.

Using dates here advances a line of action. Also, putting dates at the beginning of the sentence clears the way for declarative, energetic sentences consisting of nouns, verbs, and objects.

Be as clear as you can about what you're attempting to do. Bill Germano says it well: "For academic writers, the lure of implied meanings is irresistible" and "What's clear to you may not be clear to anyone else." Before submission, do try out your essay on colleagues and other friends willing to assist you. Ask them to read and react; suggestions scribbled on hard-copy drafts can be especially valuable. As well, read your essay aloud to yourself, so as to get a sense of its throughline and its rhythm. You'll notice when it's straying, where there are overlong sentences, where more or less information is needed. Even better, read your essay aloud to one or more helpers, especially if you're new to scholarly publishing. If intelligent colleagues are willing to be honest and tell you that here, there or wherever, the text doesn't sell the argument, or the example seems not to support the claim, your work will profit. Yes, such precise, critical assistance is difficult to find, but taking these steps makes it less likely that your submission will be returned in a few days, rejected.

Specific to US practices, which E&S employs, enterprises are persons under the law and thus they are singular when you refer to them with pronouns: "The company and its finances" NOT "the railroad and their business." It is correct, though, to write of "the railroads and their businesses." Similarly, "management" is singular, whereas "managers" are plural. A Board of Directors is singular (Board governs number, not the plural prepositional object, Directors), but separately both Boards and Directors are plural. Where possible, find the full names of those responsible for actions; where sources cannot provide names, try something like "Members of the board voted 6–3…"

Punctuation matters: We do not have staff at E&S to fix authors' scattered commas, absent commas, or faulty use of semi-colons and colons. Published authors are professional writers, and professionals manage these little marks effectively. The Chicago Manual of Style may be tedious, but it is tremendously valuable.

Always have a copy of William Strunk and E. B. White, The Elements of Style [New York: Longman, 1999, 4th ed.], somewhere close to where you write and revise. Try to re-read it every year or two. Among the many virtues of this short, punchy guide to effective formal writing is its attack on over-writing, wordiness, excessive blithering, and such (which the preceding phrase exemplifies). For S&W, every word, phrase, sentence and paragraph needs to be doing some work to get your points across, your evidence in front of readers (at the right place in the throughline), and your conclusions linked to issues of significance and to implications for further thinking and research.

Other key resources for writing style include: William Zinsser, On Writing Well, New York: Collins, 2006, and Claire K. Cook, Line by Line: How to Improve Your Own Writing, New York: Harper PErennial, 1994.

Enterprise & Society aims to be a venue for first-quality research in business history and, as part of that intention, we seek contributions written in a clear and graceful manner. Deficient writing undermines fine research, just as thin research is little enhanced by elegant phrasing. All of us helping to edit and publish E&S will deeply appreciate authors' efforts to write well just as fully as we cherish their innovative and insightful research projects.

Author Biography

On the first page of your submitted manuscript please provide a short biography. The bio should be no more than two lines. Names and institutional affiliations, including country, of all contributing authors are required.

Footnote Citations

Enterprise & Society follows the Chicago Manual of Style. Please use full citation only in the Bibliography, and insert short form references in endnotes. Do not use bottom-of-the-page footnotes and do not use social science citation (in-text parentheses).

Examples:

Book [for bibliography]:

Churella, Albert. From Steam to Diesel: Managerial Customs and Organizational Capabilities in the Twentieth-Century American Locomotive Industry, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998, 231.

Short form reference [for endnote]:

Churella, From Steam to Diesel, 197.

Edited work [for bibliography]:

Smith, James, ed., Companies in Perspective, New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1996, iv.

Short form [endnote]:

Smith, Companies, 14.

Essay in edited work [bibliography]:

Rice, Bonnie. "How Compaq Did It," in Companies in Perspective, ed. James Smith, New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1996, 12–45, quotation at p. 16.

Short form [endnote]:

Rice, "Compaq," in Companies, ed. Smith, 16.

Journal article [bibliography]:

Pursell, Carroll. "The Cover Design: Women Inventors in America," Technology and Culture 22 (July 1981): 545–50.

Short form [endnote]:

Pursell, "The Cover Design," 547.

Bibliography of Works Cited

Each submission should be accompanied by a bibliography, the purpose of which is to provide readers with a conveniently collated source list. It should include only sources actually cited in the article, and should generally not list individual items in archival collections, magazines, or newspapers. If many different sources are used, material may be separated into categories.

For the Bibliography, please create separate alphabetical lists of: Books, Articles and Chapters, Newspapers and Magazines, Unpublished Materials, and Archives.

Figures

Photographs: These should be submitted in the desired final printed size so that reduction can be avoided. The type area of a printed page is 195 (height) x 120 mm (width) and photographs, including their legends, should not exceed this area. Photographs should be of sufficiently high quality with respect to detail, contrast, and fineness of grain to withstand the inevitable loss of contrast and detail inherent in the printing process. These files should be submitted with a resolution of at least 300 dpi.

Line drawings: Please provide these as clear, sharp images, suitable for reproduction when submitted. No additional artwork, redrawing, or typesetting will be done. Faint and grey shading or stippling will be lost upon reproduction and should be avoided. Where various shadings are used within one figure please ensure that it is easy to differentiate between them, using standard shadings (see the hard copy of the journal for examples). There should be sufficient white space between lines and dots to ensure the areas will not fill in and look grey. If stippling is used, this should be made up of clear black dots with visible white space between them. Ensure that the size of the lettering is in proportion with the overall dimensions of the drawing. These files should be submitted with a resolution of at least 1200 dpi.

Electronic submission of figures: Figures must be saved at a resolution of at least 300 pixels per inch at the final printed size for grayscale figures and photographs, and 1200 pixels per inch for black and white line drawings. Failure to follow these guides could result in complications and delays. For useful information on preparing your figures for publication, go to the Cambridge Journals Artwork Guide.

Figure Legends: These should be included at the end of the manuscript text. Define all symbols and abbreviations used in the figure. Common abbreviations and others in the preceding text need not be redefined in the legend.

Permissions for Illustrations and Figures: Permission to reproduce copyright material, for print and online publication in perpetuity, must be cleared and if necessary paid for by the author; this includes applications and payments to DACS, ARS, and similar licensing agencies where appropriate. Evidence in writing that such permissions have been secured from the rights-holder must be made available to the editors. It is also the author's responsibility to include acknowledgements as stipulated by the particular institutions. You can find guidance from Cambridge University Press here.

Please be sure to review the journal's ethical requirements here.