In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the three largest life insurance companies had a presence in more than forty countries. In the 1880s they turned their attention to the Australian colonies, in which life insurance markets were expanding. The venture, however, was met with unexpected market resistance, and the expectations of the Big Three were never fully met. An eclectic paradigm provides an explanatory tool, which is applied to an investigation of the experiences of American companies. These companies were not able to realize the ownership and location, or internalize the advantages, needed to build a sustainable presence in the Australian life insurance market.

This article explores how “bank-wreckers, defaulters, and embezzlers” were popularly perceived during Gilded Age and Progressive Era America, and how they contributed to a broader concern over the safety of deposits and helped drive efforts to achieve greater financial security. Their actions, often described as “wrecking,” referred to instances in which a banking institution was damaged or destroyed due to the embezzlement or general misappropriation of depositor funds by bank officials or employees. Wrecking occurred inside and outside of the era’s major banking panics, and attracted popular and critical attention over this period, especially between the 1880s and the early 1910s. It is argued that this phenomenon resonated within the popular imagination, which was reflected, reinforced, and even instilled through the media, and that this helped sustain doubts on the reliability of the nation’s banks and bankers. This article shows how notions of class, character, and gender influenced how people thought about the problem: wrecking demonstrated that respectability could be illusory and that men of the era could be tempted to “get rich quick” through dubious means. Some of the major attempts to resolve the problem are also discussed to highlight how efforts to prevent wrecking relate to the period’s general push to bolster economic stability. Ultimately, the article shows how seemingly disparate events can aggregate into a larger problem, which can in turn motivate solutions and reforms.

This article examines the role of human resources in the business strategy of Ocean Steam Ship Company (later Ocean Transport & Trading), one of the United Kingdom’s leading shipping firms. The time under review is the 1970s, a period of rapid and disruptive change for the shipping industry and of considerable difficulties for the UK economy. As a result of uncertainty over the development of the shipping industry in general, and Ocean’s business in particular, managing staff numbers and career opportunities became key elements of the company’s overall business strategy during these years. The article also examines the changing objectives of that strategy, the means by which these objectives were pursued, and the external constraints under which these objectives had to take place. It argues that Ocean found itself privileging the requirements of running a “people business” over other strategic concerns and that external constraints prevented the firm from pursuing theoretically more appropriate strategies, such as increased use of outsourcing and extricating itself from its UK-based, human resource intensive business.

This article examines conceptions of social justice and economic fairness with regard to employment. It does so through an analysis of the management of deindustrialization in the Scottish coalfields between the 1940s and 1980s. Emphasis is placed on the historical roots and social and political constitutions of labor market practices. The analysis is grounded within Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation; industrial relations within coal mining are conceived through an ongoing conflict between commodifying, liberalizing market forces and a “counter-movement” of worker and community resistance and state regulation, which works to embed markets within social and political priorities. E. P. Thompson’s moral economy provides the basis for an understanding of the formulation of communal expectations and employment practices that acted to mitigate the disruption caused by pit closures. The analysis grounds the historical roots of the moral economy within Poalnyi’s counter-movement and illuminates the operation of specific practices of a Thompsonian character within the nationalized industry, which maintained individual and collective employment stability. This is constructed utilizing interviews with former mineworkers and members of mining families. These are supplemented by archival sources that include the minutes of Colliery Consultative Committee meetings, which took place before pit closures. They reveal the moral economy was fundamentally centered on the control of resources, collieries, and the employment they provided rather than simply elements of financial compensation for those suffering from labor market instability. Resultantly procedure centering on collective consultation was fundamental in legitimating colliery closures.

Monsanto’s transformation from a chemical firm to a biotechnology business in the 1980s and 1990s reveals that an increasingly small corporate cartel gained dominion over petroleum refining byproducts and that this concentration of ownership had profound implications for the future solvency of Monsanto. As the price of petrochemical feedstocks rose, Monsanto, a company that made 80 percent of its products from fossil fuels, began to pursue an alternative path to profits. In short, concentrated corporate ownership of critical natural resources forced some companies in the chemical commodity production business to pursue radically new ways of generating cash flow. This was especially true for scavenger capitalists such as Monsanto, firms that had historically made their money by scavenging raw material stockpiles produced by booming commercial industries. For firms invested heavily in commodity production but lacking proprietary claims to critical natural resources, the key was finding new ways to make money without depending on fossil fuels. For Monsanto, biotechnology offered a way out.

Philips Australia, the Australian subsidiary of Dutch MNE Philips Electronics, experienced difficulties during 1942–1943, when it came close to being nationalized as enemy property. In response, the company set out to improve its reputation in the local radio parts and electronics industry and in Australian markets. Its strategy of embedding itself in Australian society served the purpose of improving company performance and influencing the government policies that guided the rapid development of Australia’s postwar electronics industry. With this strategy, Philips Australia minimized the risks and maximized the commercial opportunities it faced. The firm localized senior management, maximized local procurement and local manufacturing, took a leading role in industry associations, engaged politically influential board members, and used marketing tools to build a strong brand and a positive public profile in Australia. However, the company became aware of the limitations of this strategy in 1973, when a new Labor government reduced trade protection. Increasing competition from Japanese electronics firms forced Philips Australia to restructure and downsize its production operations. Despite increasing reliance on imports from the parent company’s regional supply centers and efforts to specialize production on high-value added products, the firm saw its profitability and market share in Australia decrease.