In 1968, facing a tumultuous banking environment, commercial bankers framed bank lobbying as the act of translating the complex U.S. financial and economic systems for legislators and regulators. Inspired by Science and Technology Studies research, this article demonstrates that the translations of the U.S. financial system offered by bank lobbyists were not merely descriptions of the complex banking system. Instead, their translations reflected a process that sought to create networks of congressional and public support and enroll other actors as spokespersons for these translations. The article details how the acceptance for these translations proved to be a long process of reformulations, reconfigurations, and failures. There were three primary lobbying strategies used by large U.S. commercial banks: maintaining close relationships with high-ranking decision makers, making public statements to gain public support for their translations of the economy, and advocating for long and expert studies with heavy bank consultation. The article also highlights the techniques used by bank lobbyists during this period to alter the banking environment: legislation drafting, editorial writing, letter writing, report writing, private consultations, meetings with reporters, and public statements. These lobbying techniques and strategies were instrumental in establishing the Hunt Commission and translating and actualizing the blueprint for financial “deregulation.”

This article on cotton sales in India considers the market information that was gathered mid-nineteenth century by commission agents in Bombay and by personal observations of Glasgow Turkey red entrepreneur John Matheson. The article includes an account of the rise and demise of Turkey red cotton printing in Scotland; and explores the variety of piece sizes, patterns, colors, and packaging that was necessary for sales in India. It also reveals seasonal changes in demand and an appetite for novelty patterns. What did Matheson, his contemporaries, and his agents understand about their Indian markets and consider their limited ability to shape consumer taste? The article concludes that despite the existence of much relevant information conveyed from India, there was a blindness to the realities of India’s complex textile industry and dress cultures, which had implications for product development in Britain.

Founded in 1956, the Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI) was established with the objective of professionalizing management in post-colonial India through training, research, and consultancy. It was modeled on the Administrative Staff College at Henley-on-Thames (Henley), in the United Kingdom. Like Henley, ASCI used syndicates for its management training programs. Between 1958 and 1973, ASCI received more than $1.26 million from the Ford Foundation, part of which was used to finance the development and use of the case method in ASCI’s training programs, and later more widely in its research and consultancy. This article traces the ways by which the Ford Foundation––as a dominating institution––stigmatized Henley and ASCI, their institutional practices, and the wider Indian society; and legitimized the case method pioneered at the Harvard Business School. Imbricated in the Cold War’s geo-politics, Ford Foundation’s interventions in Hyderabad should be understood as part of the emergence of the United States as the dominant neo-colonial power, which required the displacement of Britain, its institutions, and their practices as the template for India’s post-colonial management institutions.

This article analyzes how the public relations of multinational companies was affected by the double impact of decolonization and spread of television during the 1960s. It contributes to recent theoretical conceptualizations of corporate social responsibility by adding the dimension of home country stakeholders and the border-crossing character of corporate responsibility. The analysis deals with the changing media representations in Sweden of Swedish-owned firms in Liberia and South Africa before, during, and after what has been called the “postcolonial moment” (1960–1963). In its wake, Swedish industrialists faced a new policy problem: firms in overseas markets were no longer expected to do only what was legal in the host country but also what was considered right in their home country. The analysis follows the debates concerning this issue of corporate international responsibility throughout the 1960s, and how national business organizations and executives in firms such as the Liberian-American-Swedish Mining Company publicly sought to defend the role of Swedish foreign direct investment in Africa. The business community developed various public relations strategies to engage with its critics, professionalized their media relations, and organized international study tours for unions and politicians.

This article details the ways in which the executives of Du Pont used the chemical company’s 150th-anniversary festivities in 1952 and its associated sponsored media as an opportunity to explicitly link the history of the company with the history of the nation. This was an attempt to legitimatize the company’s existence and its ultraconservative worldview, espouse free trade, and fight antitrust litigation. This article explores the conflation of private and public history in Du Pont-sponsored anniversary materials to illustrate how corporate public relations meant for private corporate consumption reverberated into a shared American public culture.

Bankruptcy is a precise legal process defining, ex ante, the rules for allocation of assets when debtors fail to repay their legally constituted debts. Ultimately, these rules determine willingness to lend and to borrow, and thus economic growth. In 1706, Parliament in England passed a bankruptcy statute that allowed, for the first time, bankrupts to exit the state of bankruptcy prior to full repayment of all debts. This represented a fundamental change in English bankruptcy rules: creditors could now choose to discharge a bankrupt. Obviously, bankrupts benefitted from such a discharge, but creditors could also benefit from greater asset revelation. We document that discharge was quickly adopted, and estimate that many bankrupts received a second chance in business.