Statistical representations are usually the result of negotiations and conventions with regard to what should be counted, and how it should be counted. A wide literature has shown that this has been the case for almost any kind of statistical data collected in the last few centuries, from censuses to demographic, social, and economic surveys and time series.

On January 31, 1957, about five weeks before the Gold Coast gained political independence from Britain, the country's first Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah inaugurated the opening of Kingsway, Accra, the country's largest department store. Owned and operated by the United Africa Company (UAC), a subsidiary of the Anglo-Dutch multinational Unilever, Kingsway Stores were well known throughout British West Africa as a chain of urban retail outlets. Although Kingsway Stores originally targeted the needs of European colonials and their families, they increasingly attracted elite and emerging middle-class African shoppers. Equipped with an elevator, a modern car park, and three floors of retail space, the new state-of-the-art Kingsway building would be the first of its kind in all of West Africa. Invited to give the inaugural speech at the store's grand opening, Nkrumah stated: “It is idle to pretend that the people of the Gold Coast . . . [have] always been on the friendliest terms with such a mighty financial power as Unilever. But . . . my government like myself and the people of the Gold Coast, does prefer the devil it knows to the devil it does not know.”

This paper analyzes the emergence of Japanese specialized industry, taking the production of Seiko watches at Hattori & Co. in the first half of the twentieth century as an example. It shows that the competitiveness of this industry, which established itself on the world market during the 1960s, was due to a process of technological hybridization between the American mass production system and the Swiss specialized production system. Starting in the 1910s and 1920s, Hattori selected a few high-precision Swiss watches and set itself the goal of producing them in mass using imported machine tools. Yet this hybrid production system ran into problems because parts were not interchangeable, as a result of which assembly continued along traditional lines until the end of the Second World War. It was only when the company hired many production engineers who had graduated from Japanese engineering faculties and when it began to work with outside research institutions, such as the Department of Precision Engineering of the University of Tokyo, that Hattori was able to implement fully a hybrid production system in the 1950s.

The 1960s have been seen as critical in the development of multinational enterprise by social scientists. Business historians have provided a context to these developments but are only now beginning to consider the 1960s in the light of access to archival material. This article analyses the nature and extent of the tension between multinational enterprise and U.S. and U.K. national governments in the 1960s caused by the tightening of controls on FDI introduced to resolve balance of payments problems. A comparative approach is adopted to illustrate that these tensions were not restricted to the U.S. The tension revolved around different conceptions of business investment decision-making and of the contribution of multinationals to the national economy. It is also suggested that the impact of these measures was at the micro-level and this highlights the value of business history approaches.