This article analyzes the structure of the Italian corporate network in the decade that followed the end of the “Golden Age” (1972–83), when the transition from the technological trajectory of the second to that of the third industrial revolution began. The article is based on a large dataset, Imita.db, which contains data on more than thirty-eight thousand Italian joint-stock companies and about three hundred thousand directors, and uses both network analysis and a prosopographic approach. The main result is that the interval considered was marked by a sharp decrease in the degree of cohesion of the Italian corporate network. In 1972, the system was very cohesive and state-owned enterprises were well represented within the most central firms. In 1983, the cohesion of the system had sharply diminished; state-owned enterprises had disappeared from the center and a new private center, hinged on Mediobanca, the only merchant bank operating in the country, had emerged.

The history of aluminum illustrates how the concept of symbolic meanings can help connect culture with business history. Aluminum's symbolic meanings played a crucial role in its industrial history, largely through the enthusiasm that greeted the introduction and diffusion of the metal. Symbolic meanings influence technological innovation through their role in shaping expectations, a role understood by the historical actors who engage in struggles over the meanings of competing innovations. For aluminum, this struggle centered on the conflict between the material's two major meanings: aluminum as modern and aluminum as ersatz. This debate over meanings has played out differently in aviation, electric wiring, and automobiles.

The department store is often seen as a revolutionary force: transforming retail practices, shopping experiences, and the high street. It is variously lauded for its role in the democratization of luxury, the introduction of price ticketing and unfettered browsing, and the creation of a fantasy world of goods. As is so often the case, reality is more complex than the image, especially when we move away from the bright lights of the metropolis and start exploring the high streets of provincial towns. Based on a thorough trawl of trade directories, I explore the regional distribution of stores in their 1930s heyday and examine how this distribution developed over time, pushing the discussion back to consider the varied origins of provincial department stores. I then turn to the spatial organization, selling practices, and shopping experience of small samples of stores, questioning the extent to which they formed a monolithic retail type.

Silicon Valley is frequently portrayed as a manifestation of postindustrial entrepreneurship, where ingenious inventor-businessmen and venture capitalists forged a dynamic, high-tech economy unencumbered by government's “heavy hand.” Closer examination reveals that government played a major role in launching and sustaining some of the region's core industries through military contracting. Focusing on leading firms in the microwave electronics, missile, satellite, and semiconductor industries, this article argues that demand for customized military technology encouraged contractors to embark on a course of flexible specialization, batch production, and continuous innovation. Thriving throughout much of the Cold War, major military contractors fell on hard times when defense markets started to shrink in the late 1980s, because specialized design and production capabilities were rarely applicable to civilian product lines. But Pentagon funding for research and development helped lay the technological groundwork for a new generation of startups, contributing to Silicon Valley's economic renaissance in the 1990s.

Beauty culture shaped the work experiences of women factory operatives and office staff at the Maidenform company in complex ways during the 1940s and 1950s. Through advertising, the company newsletter, beauty contests, “Pin-Up of the Month” competitions, and the ultra-feminine form made possible by the company's brassieres and girdles, Maidenform helped define postwar commercial beauty culture. Maidenform employees also had a hand in defining beauty culture, making it an important part of workplace sociability. In the process of producing and consuming workplace beauty culture at Maidenform, women from a wide range of class and ethnic backgrounds participated in the dominant gender ideal fostered by their employer. At the same time, however, their work culture remained rooted in their own class and ethnic identities. This article will examine the ways in which working women at Maidenform used commercial beauty culture to negotiate these divergent identities.

In this article I explore the powerful sense of regional solidarity that accompanied the rise of Silicon Valley. From the early years of Stanford University, the university's leaders saw its mission as service to the West and shaped the school accordingly. At the same time, the perceived exploitation of the West at the hands of eastern interests fueled booster-like attempts to build self-sufficient indigenous local industry. Thus, regionalism helped align Stanford's interests with those of the area's high-tech firms for the first fifty years of Silicon Valley's development. The distinctive regional ethos of the West during the first half of the twentieth century is an ingredient of Silicon Valley's already prepared environment, an ingredient that would-be replicators ignore at their peril.

Under the leadership of Tiny Rowland, Lonrho became the largest and most widely established company in post-independence Africa. Using newly available materials mainly from the National Archives London, this article investigates the activities of Lonrho in Africa and the company’s relationship with the British government during the period. Although Prime Minister Edward Heath publicly labeled the company as the “unacceptable face of capitalism,” evidence presented in this article suggests that this was at best a normative assertion. The subsequent Department of Trade and Industry investigation of Lonrho was carefully guided by the British government with the objective of protecting wider British interests in Africa. Evidence in this article therefore contradicts the view that the British government did not work “in concert” with British businesses in Africa once political independence became imminent.

Recently, environmental historians have called for histories of the environmental damage caused by chemical companies in the era before strict federal regulation, which began in the late 1960s. This article examines how chemical companies, pollution experts, and government agencies defined the problems of pollution and sought remedies for it. With a few exceptions, until the mid-1930s chemical companies dealt with pollution problems in an ad hoc fashion, acting in response to complaints. National attention to water pollution began during the New Deal, when Roosevelt appointed a National Resources Committee and legislation was introduced that would have established federal control of water pollution. These events galvanized the industry to begin to pay systematic attention to water pollution by establishing pollution engineering positions, forming trade association committees, and organizing symposia at professional meetings.

Beauty and business seem opposite terms but in fact have had an important and consequential relationship that business historians are only now exploring. This paper sketches several major themes and approaches to the topic. The first is the emergence of a large sector of the economy devoted to selling beauty aids, fashions, bodily care, and style to American women and men. Another is the deployment of beauty as a business strategy—in creating brands, sales, and marketing; in managing the workplace; and in projecting corporate identities. A third considers the sale of beauty itself, as a value added and attached to a wide range of goods, from art to bodies. These broad approaches suggest new directions for future research.

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.

The Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (Eni) was one of Italy’s most important state-owned enterprises, a key actor in the country’s transformation from a primarily agrarian to an essentially industrial nation after the Second World War. This article focuses on the history of Eni from its inception in 1953 to the death of its founder, Enrico Mattei, in 1962; it details how, in the context of Italy’s ‘economic miracle’, Eni played an important role both as an agent of economic growth, through the supply of an inexpensive source of energy, and as one of the tools used by the party in power, the Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democrats), to generate and maintain consensus.

More than ten years after the financial crisis, the challenges of European banking and of the eurozone highlight that the existence of a European common market in banking is at best partial. Examining how British and French commercial banks and banking associations responded to the plans for a European common market in banking between 1977 and 1992, this article contributes to explaining this partial character, and highlights that this project was primarily political. This challenges the widely held view that large companies tended to push for more integration. This article shows that until the mid-1980s, the banking sector was not necessarily calling for European financial integration in the form of a common market in banking for at least three reasons: they doubted the usefulness of such a move, they feared an increase in regulation, and they focused more on domestic or global matters than on European ones.

For over a century in Egypt, the Suez Canal Company reflected the role of the concession in European economic expansion overseas. Concession was a European business practice widespread in Egypt; it was an institution inherited from a system of privileges for Europeans since the Middle Ages. It promised a way for Egypt to adopt modern infrastructures and receive needed European help for digging the canal. The results of the Suez Company are indisputable: the desert of the Suez Isthmus became a lively economic region with active ports, growing cities, and an expanding labor force. And the region was linked to the rest of the country by a new road network. At the same time, however, the concession system denied Egypt full benefit of this infrastructure. The canal served the financial and strategic interests of the company, not the interests of the local economy. This outcome embodied all the contradictions of the concession system: on the one hand, concessions were a necessity for modern infrastructure development in Egypt; on the other, they were a hindrance to further national economic development.

This article highlights the benefits that rigorous use of oral history can offer to research on the contemporary business history of emerging markets. Oral history can help fill some of the major information voids arising from the absence of a strong tradition of creating and making accessible corporate archives in most countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It also permits a level of nuance that is hard to obtain even if written archives are accessible. Oral histories provide insights into why events did not occur, and why companies have chosen certain industries over others. Oral history can also shed light on hyper-sensitive topics, such corruption, which are rarely formally documented.

In the eighteenth century subcontracting was an important way of organising production in sectors producing as different commodities as clocks, coaches, footwear, furniture and scientific instruments. This article argues that subcontracting was not simply a form of cost reduction in labour-intensive and technologically unsophisticated sectors. Subcontracting could be seen as a way to respond to profound changes in the way commodities were produced, exchanged and consumed in an eighteenth-century metropolis like London. The expansion in size and complexity of the metropolitan market, the appearance of new commodities classified as semi-luxuries and fashion items, and the consequent re-assessment of traditional social structures and norms of production, made subcontracting a tool of organisational flexibility.

The Afro originated in the United States as a style worn by a tiny minority of cosmopolitan black women and developed as a prominent symbol of racial pride in the mid-1960s. Responding to the Afro's grassroots popularity, the African American beauty culture industry mounted a largely successful effort to transform the style from political statement to fashion commodity. But the commodification of the Afro was not exclusively a cynical exploitation of a political symbol. Rather, the selling of the Afro often entailed a complex blending of ideals, goals, and motivations based, to varying degrees, on considerations of fashion, politics, and the bottom line.

Executive education programs offered by business schools became a global phenomenon for developing top managers in the 1960s. These programs were established in more than 40 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America in less than two decades. This article explores the phenomenon in three different Latin American contexts: Central America, Peru, and Colombia. In all these cases, initiatives led to successful executive programs, which contributed to the growth of business schools that gradually achieved high international reputation. By studying the way that various U.S. actors interacted differently with local actors in the three cases, the article contributes to three discussions within business history: the history of Americanization, management education, and the alternative business history of emerging markets.

Unlike most nineteenth-century makers of traditional musical instruments, who did not aim at mass markets, German harmonica manufacturers were able to develop a large and worldwide market for their product. Located in regions outside Germany's industrial core districts, they epitomized successful specialty production. From the beginning, they relied on exports, especially to North America, a trade that was initially assisted by transatlantic emigrants who helped test market potential and tap into commercial networks. Hohner, the most successful harmonica manufacturer, created a well-known brand and extensively applied strategies of market segmentation and product differentiation from the 1890s onward, in part to satisfy customers' demand for myriad product variations. Sales channels and marketing methods also were far from homogeneous, being most effective when adapted to local conditions and cultures. For harmonica makers, diversity rather than uniformity was the key to global marketing success.

A growing body of research in economics and in business and economic history has shown the key role of bankruptcy and insolvency law on business organization, firms’ governance, and entrepreneurial choices. Most research, however, has focused on the formal aspects of laws, and still little is known on how various systems worked in practices. This paper fills this gap in the literature analyzing the functioning of bankruptcy procedures in four main European economies (Italy, France, England, and Germany) between ca.1880 and 1914. Using an original data set and descriptive statistics on length, organization, and return of procedures, the paper shows how the aim of attracting debtors was more successful in the less regulated English system, but how the protection of creditors’ rights was more efficiently pursued in France and Germany. Italy appears as the absolute worst performer.