America's progression from a frontier society to a settled society took more than three hundred years. During that time, Americans had to give up their view of the resources of the public domain as “free goods” and accept the idea of public compensation for appropriation of those resources for private gain. This attitudinal change took place first on the public lands of Maine and laid the groundwork for the wood-products industry in the United States.

The article presents some new evidence concerning the conversion program in Socialist Hungary that constituted an exceptional case not only in the Socialist Bloc, but also in the early period of the Cold War. The Hungarian military industry—step by step—was reintegrated into the civil economy between 1953 and 1961. The war plants developed a dual production structure, which helped them stand the storms of the lengthy transitional period. Companies with a double profile diversified their production with a wide scale of civilian goods, new constructional and R&D departments were established. The article examines at the firm level the strategies, the changes in behaviours of the top-managers, and the consequences—what did the switch-over have for Hungarian society, to what extent contributed the increase in consumer goods to political stabilization of the system.

British industrial policy in the 1930s has generated considerable historical controversy. This article furthers the debate by using the cotton industry as a case study. The biggest constraint on active government policies toward cotton was not institutional inertia or “industrial diplomacy,” as some historians claim, but the sheer practical difficulty of intervening in such a complex industry. Cotton also poses problems for historians who see British industrial policy in the 1930s as largely about restraining competition. The government feared that restriction would make matters worse in the cotton industry and was therefore hesitant about backing schemes designed to limit competition. Its dilemma was how best to maintain private-sector confidence.

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.

During the 1970s, religious activists were heavily involved in national and international campaigns against multinationals and urged firms to adapt their behavior to align with Christian ethics. This article analyzes the strategies of Nestlé in addressing religious activism at three levels: national, international, and organizational. The analysis examines Nestlé’s collaboration with other Swiss and European multinationals and high-ranking church representatives in establishing dialogue platforms that sought to improve mutual understanding and promote tolerance for global capitalism. Nestlé also contributed to the creation of guidelines for the main churches in Switzerland that were aimed at their partial depoliticization. When Nestlé’s executives faced religious shareholder activists during its shareholders’ annual general meetings, they chose to engage with them to avoid their radicalization, although most of their demands ultimately remained unanswered. Overall, Nestlé contributed to the reorientation of religious discussions to small-scale ethical problems and business self-regulation rather than to substantial reforms of the capitalist economic system.

British Telecom’s 1984 partial privatization set in motion the privatization and deregulation of many international state-owned telecommunications carriers. Most previous research on the privatization and deregulation of state-owned telecommunications carriers has focused on the economic outcomes. However, this was also a time of changes in managerial practice and thinking influenced by organizational theory. This article presents an analysis of the use of the prescriptions of Rosabeth Kanter in the attempted reform of the organizational culture of Australia’s largest business in the 1980s: the government-owned telecommunications monopoly Telecom Australia (now Telstra). It details the attempt to transform Telecom under the incipient threat of the introduction of competition to the telecommunications market and demonstrates how the country’s largest change management program, Vision 2000, represented an alternative approach to telecommunications reform.

Scholars increasingly acknowledge the contingent, varied, complex nature of capitalism, yet overlook a viable vision of the early nineteenth-century United States: communal capitalism. Communal societies proliferated in the early United States as a way to regulate the market. The most industrious, materially successful model of this approach was George Rapp’s Harmony Society, established in 1805. Rapp was a radical Pietist, immigrating with his followers from Württemberg in order to establish a purified community that would persevere into the millennium he predicted was imminent. Despite a ban on private property, the Harmonists embraced the market, building textile factories and conducting market activity under the moniker “Rapp & Associates.” Technologically innovative, shrewd in business, and dogged in pursuit of a “divine economy,” the example of the Harmony Society helps us better understand how religious businesses helped shape the early American capitalist system and, specifically, the contributions of German Pietism to economic thought in the Atlantic world. Ultimately, we discover how the Harmonists’ communal capitalism forsook wages and private property, while embracing stocks, bonds, leases, mortgages, patents, trademarks, licenses, litigation, and contracts as they built an incredibly successful and wealthy manufacturing community in the then-western United States, even as George Rapp’s authoritarian leadership style created tensions within his workforce of immigrant women, men, and children.

Since the late seventeenth century, trust offices (administratiekantoren) that repackage securities have been a central institution in Dutch finance. Their basic form and functioning have remained largely the same, but over time, the repackaging has come to serve different purposes. Originally set up for administrative convenience, they helped to create liquidity, notably for foreign securities. From the 1930s, their primary purpose became to shield directors of large corporations from shareholder influence and hostile takeover threats. Subsequently, the trust offices evolved from general-purpose administrative units into dedicated foundations closely tied to individual companies and increasingly popular with foreign corporations as cheap anti-takeover devices. Their reincarnation as foundations also turned them into vehicles for the tax-efficient routing of international revenue flows via the Netherlands.

The transfer of American management ideas was a central part of the Cold War struggle over ideologies. A key mediator was the European Recovery Program, which conveyed American influences to European management specialists. However, a direct influence was not always possible, as in Finland, which officially blocked assistance because of foreign policy considerations. Still, it was among the first countries to follow Harvard University’s lead in launching advanced management training. We examine how and why the focal actors adopted the American model of executive education, and how they managed to translate foreign ideas persuasively to the local business elite. The translation of executive education to Finland was a lengthy process that involved modification and readjustment of the original idea according to emerging needs. The Advanced Management Program became the core of the curriculum of Finland’s leading executive education institution and thus has influenced the emergence of new business culture.

Founded in 1956 by Billy Graham, L. Nelson Bell, and a cadre of evangelical theologians and business leaders, Christianity Today (CT) was—and still is—the world’s foremost Christian periodical. From the late 1950s through the early 1970s, CT’s editors also branded it as a new vehicle for conservative discourse and public assertiveness, especially regarding the relationship of the state to church, business, and society. Given CT’s theological and political stances, it garnered financial support and institutional direction from oil executive J. Howard Pew. This essay examines Pew’s contributions as a way of understanding the crucial role played by business elites in the construction of American conservative evangelicalism. Moreover, through a case study of CT, this essay re-periodizes the origins of corporate-evangelical alliances to the early twentieth century and evaluates the relative successes and failures of conservatives in postwar evangelicalism, state policy, and cultural politics.

The rise of professional real estate brokerage is an ideal window into the internal dynamics of the cultural transformation of the American middle class in the twentieth century. Emerging as a full-time occupation in the late nineteenth century, real estate brokerage embodied a variety of early twentieth-century cultural, social, business, and economic trends, including the drive to professionalize business, the rapid expansion of white-collar labor and its feminization, the rise of independent contracting as a prominent form of labor relations, and the enormous growth of the home-building and -selling industries. As many scholars have noted, the home became a crucial site of both consumption and middle-class identification in the early twentieth century.

This is a case study of the U.S. pharmaceutical producer, Merck & Co. By 1940 this was one of the leading pharmaceutical producers in the United States, and the company went on to become one of the global industry leaders after World War II. It was founded in 1891 as the U.S. subsidiary of a much larger German pharmaceutical company, E. Merck of Darmstadt. The existing understanding of Merck & Co.’s history emphasizes how it was reacquired by the American branch of the Merck family after wartime sequestration, and from then onward it pursued a path of development separate from its former parent. This article revisits that history of the company and shows how the two Mercks began to cooperate and share technology and manufacturing know-how during the 1930s, something that was particularly to the advantage of Merck & Co.

This paper compares the corporate network strategies between multinational corporations of two different origins (United States and Spain), business groups, and state-owned enterprises in the public utility sector of a developing country going through economic and political transitions. The transitions we consider are from an import substitution industrialization model to an open market economy and from a democratic regime to a dictatorial one and back to democracy. We analyze the Chilean telecommunications sector between 1958 and 2005 and find that during a democratic regime all firms sought to build more networks with each other, while incentives decrease under an authoritarian regime. In the protectionist era, US investors built links with Chile’s corporate elite, while in times of an open economy, Spanish investors built these links with the government. State-owned corporations did not attempt to build links with other actors at any time, and business groups sought to build most networks among members of the group. Our findings challenge two commonly held assumptions: first, that open economies decrease incentives for domestic actors to build links with each other and, second, that close political regimes increase incentives to build networks among economic actors.

This comment challenges two main points of Phil Scranton’s article: his periodization, and the adequacy of the utilized sources. His interpretation neglects the efforts of the de-Stalinization attempts in Eastern European socialist countries during the mid-1950s, though these measures established all subsequent reforms. He based his argumentation on contemporaneous articles from the 1950s and 1960s while an expanding fresh literature is available on socialist economies, thanks to the large-scale declassification of formerly top-secret documents. However, his article is an extremely important contribution to the business history of communism and a delightful point of departure for many kinds of future research in this field.

During the interwar period, Lysol Disinfectant was sold throughout Canada and the United States as a contraceptive douche for women. In fact, Lysol became the leading over-the-counter contraceptive sold on the euphemistically termed “feminine hygiene” market. Though the sale of contraceptives were illegal in both Canada and the United States since the latter part of the nineteenth century, by the 1920s, astute manufacturers were selling goods with supposedly contraceptive properties, including vaginal jellies, foaming tablets, and as was the case with Lysol, vaginal douches. As contemporaries argued, advertising played a central role in the success of the feminine hygiene industry. This article investigates Lysol's interwar advertising campaign to determine how the company attempted to communicate the purpose of its product to white, literate, married, Anglo-Saxon, middle-class female consumers while evading legal ramifications. It argues that North American Lysol advertisements were designed using euphemistic language and emergent modern advertising techniques that appealed to consumers' emotions (as opposed to their sense of reason as had previously been the case) to capitalize upon contextually specific trends, including women's fear of premature aging and loss of sexual attractiveness, the danger of maternal morbidity and mortality, as well as the threat of marital disunity, to convey the intended purpose of the product. This work also demonstrates the central importance of considering the historical context of companies' intended consumers when analyzing historical advertising and marketing campaigns.