Today Philips is one of the largest foreign investors in East Asia. The foundation for the company's East Asian position was laid by investment in Taiwan in the 1960s and early 1970s, at a time when this country and the rest of the region were still largely ignored by other European investors. This article investigates the motives for Philips to play a pioneering role among European firms in large-scale investing in Taiwan. The author uses the traditional method for direct investment analysis, known as Dunning's eclectic paradigm. He also addresses shortcomings in this method regarding individual company behavior, by adding a corporate governance analysis that is based on Freeman's stakeholder theory. The resulting analysis shows that, although locational factors constituted the main precondition to direct investment by Philips, the crucial reason Philips made its early investments in Taiwan was its chief executive officer's enthusiasm for this particular project.

This article addresses two questions: Why do firms centralize, and what determines the success and failure of technology transfers? First, it argues that centralization decreases the costs of technology transfers, especially if knowledge is tacit, by reducing transaction costs. Second, it argues that an important factor for the success of a technology transfer is the capacity of a firm to mitigate agency problems. The English East India Company (EEIC) is mostly studied as a trading body. This article analyzes the company’s attempt to become a producer of raw silk in Bengal. In order to improve the quality of Bengal raw silk and thus increase the silk’s trading potential, it decided to apply Piedmontese reeling technologies that relied on a centralized system of production, which significantly decreased the transmission costs of the technology transfer and was thus the key for its success. However, because the EEIC’s management system involved in silk manufacturing was not innovated, the transfer’s effectiveness was diminished.

This article evaluates efforts to standardize quantities in the London coal trade c1830, and traces the end of the public measurement system first introduced in the fourteenth century. Increasing traffic in coal, reduction of taxes on the commodity, inefficient public meters, etc., contributed to the demise of public measurements. This outcome was the result of extensive negotiations between merchants, the various levels of state bureaucracy, and the parliament. Switching measurement standards was difficult, if not costly, to coordinate. Abolishing public measurements and switching from volume to weight measurements was part of the efforts to strengthen governance along the commodity chain, secure property rights by making quantities predictable and alter a mechanism that powerful merchants considered had become inappropriate.

Like so many of the fields that have flourished in history departments in recent years, business history has an uneasy relationship with political history. When business history first emerged in the United States as a separate field in the 1920s, its founders stressed the importance of lavishing on business records the same reverence that political historians accorded the personal papers of lawmakers. Only in this way, business historians assumed, would it be possible to convince other historians of the centrality of business leaders—and, more broadly, of economic institutions—to the making of the nation.

The management of innovative work in high-technology fields has been a “hot” topic in recent years. In fields such as innovation management, product development, organization design, corporate strategy, economic sociology, organizational economics, engineering management, and knowledge management, scholars have examined subjects ranging from the sociology of creativity to the boundaries of firms in networked industries. They have remarked on the implications of contingent work, outsourcing, globalization, and the demise of the one-company career in studies concerned with issues from regional and national competitiveness to the evolution of labor markets and the social contract. Authors of articles and books published by the popular business press have trumpeted “nimble” and “virtual” organizational forms required by unprecedented conditions, and authors of scholarly essays have addressed the management of relentless change, the option-based valuation of interfirm networks, and knowledge in relation to organizational boundaries.

Beginning in the 1870s and 1880s, many British companies relied on transnational business networks and global associations. However, the tensions produced by World War I created an environment in which consumers, journalists, and politicians actively promoted economic protectionism and consumer nationalism through various Buy British movements. Entrepreneurs under scrutiny took a variety of approaches to manage this hostile environment and avoid the financial, political, and cultural ramifications of suddenly having their and their family members’ valid citizenship questioned and outright attacked in the public sphere. During the war, neutral, passive, or absent patriotism drew suspicion. Any suspicions about loyalty could spark an avalanche of attacks, with each one being exponentially more difficult to defend as fear built in people’s minds. Citizenship was more than a legal matter; it was a layered set of dynamic activities and enterprises in which corporate actions became tied to expression of loyalty. People were judged by their cultural behavior, political associations, legal citizenship, and business decisions. I argue that some firms reacted by defining themselves, their products, and their services as “British,” erasing their “foreignness” as a defense against attacks on their citizenship and loyalty.

Using the career of director William Wyler as a case study, the article argues that by standardizing creative professions such as acting and directing during the 1920s and 1930s, the Hollywood studio system was responsible for turning creativity into a modern form of labor. I make this claim by highlighting three main themes. First, the article draws attention to the operation behind cultural industries, as opposed to the content they produce, a topic that remains understudied. Second, it traces the historical development of “directing” as a profession. Looking at how this pivotal role changed since the early days of the industry, I argue there was a structural rationale behind practices of managerial control as well as those enabling creative autonomy. Third, focusing on Wyler’s career, the article fleshes out how this dual rationale functioned day to day and how it pushed creative employees like Wyler to develop a particular professional way of being.

Sociologist of science Sheila Jasanoff tells us that “A master narrative is a compelling and frequently repeated story about the way the world works that takes hold of our imaginations and shapes the ways in which we perceive reality, as well as our possibilities for collective action.” The asbestos litigation master narrative, versions of which are available on hundreds of plaintiff-firm websites, has been spectacularly successful in generating billions of dollars in revenue for plaintiffs, attorneys, and expert witnesses since 1973.2 As of December 31, 2009, the US District Court E.D. Pa. MDL 875 (Multi-District asbestos Litigation) docket included 42,076 cases “consisting of 2,337,692 individual claims (all diseases).”

The professional institutions of loss adjusting in Australasia were shaped by a range of postcolonial developments, including adhesion to the British badge of organizational prestige, the Royal Charter. The aim of this paper is to explore how a single exogenous shock to the institution of loss adjusting in Australia enhanced a sense of national identity, altering the future of those institutions. Our conclusions are based on over sixty interviews with loss adjusters in three countries and the archives of several Australasian loss adjusting institutions dating back to the late 1800s. Archival material included correspondence, meeting minutes, various memorandum, newspaper clippings, membership lists, criteria for barriers to entry, records of lobbying efforts, disciplinary actions, and educational material. Reus-Smit (2002, 2017), Bell (2009), and Rae (2017) have developed the understanding of the role collective cultural and national identities play in institutionalism, whereas Suddaby et al. (2007, 2011) have contributed to the theory of field-level institutional change. Building on the literature of Suddaby et al., this paper appraises how a single historic natural event triggered normative changes impacting the institution of loss adjusting in the region.

The Victorian City of London’s financial center expanded and renewed its building infrastructure virtually unimpeded by considerations of urban preservation, conservation, or public opinion. The next phase of massive rebuilding, during the long post-1945 boom, appeared likely to follow the same pattern. However, by the mid-1960s, the freedom of City office owner-occupiers and developers to do as they wished with their buildings had become substantially constrained by rising conservationist sentiment. This paper explores this process through the history of the design, building, and eventual aborted demolition of Gibson Hall, the Bishopsgate headquarters of National Provincial Bank for over a century. This paper charts the life of Gibson Hall, in particular its conception, design, and, ultimately, its attempted redevelopment. We also consider the long-term consequences of the rebalancing between economic and conservation objectives for the nature of British urban redevelopment and the adoption of a “throwaway” business headquarters style—to remove any risk of popular support for preservation.

A generation of historians, working at the intersection of business history and cultural history, has examined the consumer culture that flourished in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In studies of advertising, marketing, department stores, credit systems, and other aspects of selling and buying, these scholars have shown that American businesses not only produced consumer goods but also created consumer desire.

In December 1890, when Samuel Iseman stopped in Sumter, South Carolina, he hoped to turn his luck around. The traveling grocery salesman's trip so far had not gone well. Rain had delayed his train by two hours. When Iseman finally arrived, he had time to “drum” up business with only one retailer before drying off and retiring for the evening. The next day was no better; his expense money was dangerously low. He dunned two area merchants for payment on their accounts, eager to refill his coffers, but received only the runaround for his efforts. He checked in on groceryman (and postmaster) Moses W. Harrell in nearby Timmonsville, who made good his account, with one exception. The grocer took issue with a recent delivery of hams that had come from Iseman's Charleston wholesale fi rm, 120 miles south. Harrell complained to Iseman that the hams were of poor quality and that he had sold only two or three. Harrell asked for a refund. The traveling man felt badly that the grocer had taken the meat because Iseman had talked them up. When the hams failed to satisfy, both the salesman's word and the confidence he had earned from Harrell were on the line.

This essay investigates the ways in which child safety became an enterprise during the child protection crusade of the 1980s. Americans clamored for an increased federal presence in “the battle for child safety,” but they made such calls in a climate of intense governmental distrust. The federal government did assume a larger role on the issue of missing and exploited children with the passage of the Missing Children and Missing Children’s Assistance Acts of 1982 and 1984, respectively. But, as this essay demonstrates, the state also stressed the primacy of the private sector—and specifically for-profit companies—in protecting American children. The celebration by President Ronald Reagan and others of private sector efforts to raise awareness about and “save” American youngsters laid the groundwork for a broader child safety apparatus that took hold in the final decades of the twentieth century.

Where Imperialism Could Not Reach examines the impact of the Japanese model of industrialization on China through a history of policy recommendations and economic ideas in practice. In the aftermath of the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), Chinese regional policymakers learned a Japanese-style industrial policy that focused on the use of exhibitions and schools to disseminate information and stimulate rural innovation. In focusing on the treaty ports and the impact of European and American capitalism that has a larger and more quantifiable source base, many scholars have ignored the vital intra-Asian dimensions of China’s economic development, underpinned by shared position of China and Japan on the global semiperiphery and the pursuit of labor-intensive industrialization focusing on improvements to labor quality. The dissertation also aims to demonstrate the primary importance of information and incentives for innovation—rather than overcoming capital constraints—in Chinese strategies for economic growth.