Welcome to Volume 24, No. 4 of Enterprise and Society. There is a slight deviation from tradition for this issue this year. As is well-known, the final issue of the year typically carries both the Presidential Address, delivered at the annual meeting in the spring, as well as summaries by all Krooss Prize finalists. Those of you able to attend the annual meeting in Detroit in March 2023 will have been spellbound by Dan Wadhwani’s Presidential Address, which wove together strands of his rich historical entrepreneurship scholarship with threads of his own fascinating family story. Converting such a personal address, combined with the continuous uncovering of materials, has involved intricate ongoing work. Dan and I have agreed to hold his address back to give him the opportunity to write the piece he really wants to write. Personally, I cannot wait to read it.

Capitalist ideas of productivity became central to medicine under slavery. They shaped how physicians treated enslaved patients, crafted a scientific basis for medicine, and conceived of themselves as professionals. Between the late-eighteenth-century and the mid-nineteenth-century, white male physicians in Louisiana and Cuba distinguished themselves from other healers: first, by aligning with Spanish colonialism, and then, by making themselves essential to a new form of plantation management that used clock-time discipline, hierarchical divisions of labor, and complex accounting systems. These technologies helped planters track the hours and days each enslaved person spent working, eating, sleeping, birthing, suffering from sickness and injuries, and recovering. This in turn enabled precise interpretations of enslaved health in terms of productivity, which was primarily measured in work time and the number of commodities produced. Physicians, who were seeking a rigorous intellectual foundation for medical knowledge production, latched onto planter methods of calculating and controlling enslaved health. One of those methods was what planters and physicians called “sick time,” which was an allotment of time away from work intended to manage illness enough for enslaved people to return to work. However, as physicians used plantation management to cast an air of scientific accuracy over their knowledge, enslaved people reconfigured their own medical practices to make themselves less visible and countable. Fugitive practices involving trees, animals, and natural springs helped enslaved people to heal by taking their own forms of sick time.

In this essay, I reflect on the growing political obstacles to doing business history in China and how, in my doctoral dissertation research, I attempted to overcome them. More specifically, I discuss how I drew on unconventional historical sources and novel data to examine the relationship between informal entrepreneurial activity and economic change in Maoist China (1949–1978). Through the quantitative analysis of thousands of case files of individuals prosecuted as “speculators and profiteers”—discarded administrative documents that were recovered from Chinese flea markets—I reassessed the scale and scope of informal entrepreneurial activity in Maoist China. I then went on to triangulate these data with evidence found in other sources to illustrate how, over time, informal entrepreneurial activity became more collusive, encompassing, and impossible to contain. Ultimately, I argued that China’s “Reform and Opening Up” was not the state-led watershed event that it is often made out to be; rather, economic and institutional change was, at least partly, the result of a bottom-up transformation, decades in the making. This essay thus suggests that the use of unconventional sources and mixed methods presents opportunities both for doing research in contexts where history is being actively securitized and for producing countervailing narratives that decenter the state.

“Building Blocs” charts a global history of the last great crisis of globalization—the transwar decades from the 1880s through the 1940s—by centering strategic minerals needed to make steel. Little studied, but critically important, alloying minerals like tungsten and manganese were only needed in small amounts, but they were essential to the foundations of both national prosperity and security: steel and military production. Herein lay a fundamental problem: none of the industrial powers possessed adequate domestic deposits of these minerals, which were concentrated in remote locations such as central India, the Caucasus, southern China, Brazilian jungles, the Australian outback, and southern Africa. In a world in which steel was power, “Building Blocs” shows that resource anxieties motivated interwar quests for autarky and autonomy in the form of self-contained blocs. The scramble for strategic minerals escalated tensions and put rivals on the road to war, reshaping the forms and structures of geopolitical entities and international institutions throughout the transwar period.

This paper examines the Africanization of human resources in East Africa during the latter part of the twentieth century. Focusing on the case of the East African Airways Corporation (EAAC) and later Kenya Airways, we analyze the long-term development of staffing policy in these companies and the impact of the changing political and managerial environment (colonial rule, joint ownership by three independent states, Kenyan state-owned enterprise, private enterprise with foreign ownership). This research shows that post-independence Africanization was hampered by a lack of specific local expertise. The EAAC solved this difficulty by cooperating with foreign organizations that provided adequate training for African pilots, engineers, and managers. However, indigenization was also used in a less meritocratic way and promoted clientelism.

A renewed political interest in profit sharing and employee codetermination prompts an analysis of the Swedish wage-earner funds, implemented by a Social Democratic government in 1983 and dismantled by a center-right government in 1991. This article explains the funds’ financial performance and the political decisions surrounding their dismantlement. It finds that the funds underperformed slightly in relation to financial targets. Reasons include inexperienced boards, limited investment opportunities, and a hostile attitude from the business community. For the center-right parties, getting rid of the funds was an ideological decision. Transferring the assets to research foundations and public venture capital funds would improve the business climate, compensate firms for taxes paid to finance the wage-earner funds, and ensure that the Social Democrats would not be able to reinstate the funds. The intense debate surrounding the wage-earner funds, their implementation, how they functioned in practice, and their dismantlement clearly contributed to Sweden’s sharp market turn in the 1980s and 1990s.

This essay explores the development of Sino–U.S. commercial and arbitration practices that grew out of credit transactions and operated in relation to, but distinct from, the greater Canton system that primarily served Beijing and London. Without dismissing the importance of silver and Pacific trade goods to early Sino–U.S. trade, this essay traces the financializing trade practices and emerging regulatory strategies that rose alongside the traffic in specie and commodities. Chinese merchants who traded with foreigners at Canton became increasingly eager for U.S. specie payments as China’s imperial policies as well as Britain- and India-based traders siphoned silver away from Canton. The eagerness for American specie remittances coupled with the relationships cultivated by resident American agents like John Perkins Cushing led Chinese merchants to increasingly trade with Americans on credit. Credit transactions facilitated the expansion of Sino–U.S. trade, the movement of opium, and the entry of Chinese merchants into Atlantic commodity and capital markets. Credit transactions also presented the problem of how to enforce payment and collect bad debts. Whenever the informal personal networks they had forged to secure credit relationships proved insufficient, merchants on both sides of the globe looked to U.S. legal institutions to mediate commercial disputes. Thus, even as the silver U.S. traders supplied in Canton worked to integrate Americans more firmly into Britain’s commercial empire in Asia, credit transactions and formal and informal dispute resolutions arising therefrom carved out separate avenues of direct Sino–U.S. exchange that were of mutual interest.

This article concerns the rise of young entrepreneurship education programs in 1980s Sweden, which entered schools surprisingly early and quickly, backed by organized Swedish business. The increased popularity of entrepreneurship education toward the end of the twentieth century in many European welfare states is usually associated with a shift toward neoliberal, market-oriented, policies. It is argued here that an important reason for young entrepreneurship’s success was its ability to connect with the Swedish tradition of cooperation and democratic decision making, in combination with values such as individualism and competition. A case in point is the surprising compatibility between progressive pedagogical ideas and “neoliberal” entrepreneurialism. The article is based on a study of Ung Företagsamhet (Young Entrepreneurship, henceforth UF), the Swedish version of the American organization Junior Achievement, and the ambition of the consumer cooperative movement’s think tank, Koopi, to offer a different kind of entrepreneurship education. In the analysis, the concept of “the entrepreneurial self” is applied to these two different programs, and the results show how they clashed, but also overlapped, in ways that help explain the success of UF. The article is a contribution to our understanding of how entrepreneurship discourse emerged and manifested itself in everyday environments in the late twentieth century, and as such also contributes to the history of Nordic neoliberalism.

This article examines how globalization shaped work and employment in the German shipbuilding industry in the second half of the twentieth century. Official documents show that, as a response to global competition, originally large and labor-intensive shipyards in the northwest of Germany evolved into lean and nimble high-technology companies across four decades. Oral history interviews with former migrant and nonmigrant staff of two leading shipyards reveal that this large-scale industry transformation is a hitherto hidden history of labor mobility, migration, and evolving dimensions of diversity in the workplace. Migration is a lens through which to understand how corporate responses to global developments led to persistent patterns of social exclusion and inequality between and within groups of workers with and without migrant backgrounds that have not been documented before, namely: social divisions, unequal access to vocational training and retraining programs, unequal career opportunities, unfair redundancies, and unequal impact of precarious work.

Following the seminal work of Lévi-Strauss, developed by Baker and Nelson and Duymedjian and Rüling, this paper analyzes the role that entrepreneurial bricolage played as an innovation tool in the origins and growth of four important Spanish tourism companies: Meliá, Barceló, Iberostar, and Riu. Their development has been deeply embedded in the island of Majorca (Spain), whose historical market conditions shaped and drove the companies’ bricolage actions. Entrepreneurial bricolage has generally been studied from a short-term perspective; however, this work adopts a dynamic approach that, instead of focusing on the concept of bricolage, aims to explain its evolution over time. To this end, four historical and qualitative case studies are used. The main contribution made by this paper is that the four companies did not limit their bricolage actions to contexts of scarcity but made this type of entrepreneurship a regular mechanism in their business practices, as the island’s tourism context thrived. However, the resulting innovations, as well as their main drivers, did indeed change over time.

Having emerged from World War II as a permanent feature of American political and economic life, the “glamour” of research and development (R&D) would soon take hold of Wall Street. By the 1960s, shares of high-tech electronics and aerospace firms became irresistible to the flood of young men entering the securities business with the hopes of getting rich quick off capital gains. For this generation, R&D spending today came to mean earnings growth tomorrow, and in periods of financial hardship, executives under pressure to meet earnings expectations changed R&D accounting policies to boost their bottom lines. With this change, firms experiencing significant losses could maintain the appearance of profitability while reinforcing public perceptions of R&D as a magic bullet for growth. Contrary to the mythology of the “space age,” however, those intimately involved in R&D and tracking its costs insisted that expenditures so incurred failed in practice to qualify as assets. Drawing from arguments made by industrial researchers and cost accountants, this article problematizes the “R&D underinvestment” consensus that emerged in the wake of the space age and suggests dropping the R&D asset view wherever it circulates, including in academic scholarship.