Beginning in the 1950s, advertising and marketing specialists in Yugoslavia campaigned aggressively to change public and official perceptions of their work. By casting commercial promotion in terms of categories already established as legitimate in the ideology of Yugoslav socialism, the industry gradually naturalized advertising and marketing, transforming them from suspect capitalist practices into apparent necessities of progressive, rational production and distribution. Although the rhetoric used in this campaign consistently appealed to socialist values, in practice Yugoslav advertising and marketing were largely based on Western models. Yugoslav commercial promotion was only superficially “socialist advertising”; practitioners' arguments tended to obscure the true qualities of the industry.

The history of aluminum illustrates how the concept of symbolic meanings can help connect culture with business history. Aluminum's symbolic meanings played a crucial role in its industrial history, largely through the enthusiasm that greeted the introduction and diffusion of the metal. Symbolic meanings influence technological innovation through their role in shaping expectations, a role understood by the historical actors who engage in struggles over the meanings of competing innovations. For aluminum, this struggle centered on the conflict between the material's two major meanings: aluminum as modern and aluminum as ersatz. This debate over meanings has played out differently in aviation, electric wiring, and automobiles.

Narratives of flexible specialization as an alternative to mass production are largely absent from the industrial history of twentieth-century Britain. In this article, I challenge the notion that we should relegate small firms and industrial districts to a marginal place in the historiography of this period. Drawing from a range of sources, I explore the history of Birmingham's jewelry makers to show how they adapted the traditional productive system of the district to respond in a dynamic way to the challenges of rapid product market differentiation. As jewelry increasingly became a commodity for mass consumption, the firms in the Birmingham district used a combination of specialty and mass production as a strategy to both satisfy and create demand.

In this article, I seek to expand the relatively narrow focus of most work on commercial credit in eighteenth-century England by incorporating culture into an economic analysis. I argue that the various credit regimes that operated in the regional branches of the English wool textile industry are best understood as having a cultural dimension. A comparative analysis of business strategies in these regions suggests that the different cultures of credit had important implications for the development of the textile industry during the eighteenth century, shaping the character of the entrepreneurship of each region's merchants and producers.

The diversity of paths to industrialization is illustrated by the example of the cabinet- and furniture-manufacturing industry in Ontario, Canada. Complex and unpredictable demand combined with smaller markets and lower incomes than those in the United States and the relative abundance of wood to limit mechanization and the size of enterprise in the Canadian industry. Small and unpowered workshops remained competitive throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, creating a distinctive industrial experience that reflects the unique interaction of local demand and supply.