This article analyses the evolving relationship between mainstream oral history and business oral history, and explores the ways in which the latter has been deployed and discussed in business history journals. Business historians have, until relatively recently, tended to utilize oral history as a means to fill gaps in the archive. Interviews thus made important contributions to business history studies, but much of their potential remained untapped. Recent critical engagement with issues of methodology and interpretation has seen a discernible shift in the ways that oral history is being understood by business historians. This article outlines this evolution and the possibilities that it raises for both business and oral history.

On the basis of articles in contemporary periodicals, literature, and company archives, this article explores the views of entrepreneurs and society about what constitutes the responsibility of entrepreneurs. From the mid-nineteenth century, we can trace discussions about how entrepreneurs should behave in their own company and toward society, but these ideas were far from constant over time. The changing views on the social responsibilities of entrepreneurs give us therefore important information about changes in the national business system. Though focused on the Dutch entrepreneurs in their relationship to Dutch society, the article includes the influence of ideas from abroad. International management literature abounded in the Netherlands, and multinational companies often picked up ideas from other countries. How companies and entrepreneurs defined their responsibilities depended to a large extent on the criticisms launched by the outside world. Entrepreneurs and company managers responded to concerns in the society of which they formed part, and the progressive ones among them, the true leaders, searched for ways of reconciling the requirements of their business with the demands of the society.

The role of business enterprise in integrating economies is one of the central historical themes of the last two centuries. Although globalization—both in its current iteration and in its nineteenth-century form—has been widely studied, the role of the firm, as opposed to macroeconomic forces, has yet to receive sufficient attention. Many research questions remain, including the role of the United States as a host country, the place of multinationals based in emerging markets, and the importance of understudied sectors such as retailing. Business historians should shift the focus of queries from “why” to “how” and go beyond the discipline's traditional organization along national lines to study the behavior of firms worldwide.

This article traces the uneven development of English cheese-making from its early commercialization to the eventual triumph of the “cheese factory.” The narrative shows how contemporary actors initiated and adapted to changes in technology, distribution, consumption, and regulation. It indicates that artisanal practices have both borrowed from and become integrated with industrial logics and strategies, exemplifying a process that Charles F. Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin termed the “recombinablility and interpenetration” of different forms of economic organization [World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in Western Industrialization (Cambridge, U.K., 1997), 2–3]. International comparisons are introduced to clarify the reasons for England’s halting and idiosyncratic transition to industrial-scale cheese-making.

First experimented with in the 1920s and 1930s in the production of automobile engines, transfer machines became dominant in U.S. engine plants in the 1940s and 1950s, as automakers invested heavily in this equipment to meet pent-up demand following the war. Transfer machines thus became identified with “Detroit automation”. But with the advent of a “horsepower race”, firms found that transfer machines could not accommodate even minor changes in design. Late in the 1950s the industry developed and applied “building-block automation” to transfer machines to attain greater flexibility. Examining these developments contributes to our understanding of both specific industries and the general history of mass production and its alternatives.

Beginning in the 1950s, advertising and marketing specialists in Yugoslavia campaigned aggressively to change public and official perceptions of their work. By casting commercial promotion in terms of categories already established as legitimate in the ideology of Yugoslav socialism, the industry gradually naturalized advertising and marketing, transforming them from suspect capitalist practices into apparent necessities of progressive, rational production and distribution. Although the rhetoric used in this campaign consistently appealed to socialist values, in practice Yugoslav advertising and marketing were largely based on Western models. Yugoslav commercial promotion was only superficially “socialist advertising”; practitioners' arguments tended to obscure the true qualities of the industry.

Today, we are all aware of the importance of technology to modern business, including process technologies as well as consumer and industrial products incorporating technology. The significant role of technology in business (and vice versa) is not, of course, new. Although the history of technology and business history have different professional organizations and often focus on different theoretical and empirical phenomena, the large number of historians who work at the intersection of the two today reflects the importance of each to the other over a much longer time period. Yet historians of both types still too often give short shrift to the role of business enterprises as technology users as well as to the actual business use of technology.

This article analyzes the emergence of public relations among corporations in interwar Britain. It adopts a discursive approach and applies the philosophy of Michel Foucault. It argues that public relations was a result of state propaganda during World War I, the emergence of a mass-media society, and criticism from a range of groups toward corporations during the period. It acted as an emergent institutional text, which taught corporations how to create corporate identities so as to garner public good will and institutional legitimacy. This was achieved by a range of strategies, including social programs and the creation of corporate narratives.

This essay is a business and cultural history of Wrigley marketing in North America from the 1890s until the early 1930s. Wrigley relied on wholesalers at a time when consumer goods makers were expanding their sales forces. A prolific advertiser, Wrigley provided favorable terms to retailers carrying chewing gum, countering the view that advertising, by enabling direct communication between manufacturer and consumer, diminished retailer clout in the chain of distribution. Wrigley advertising constructed meanings on multiple levels, discussed here with the theoretical tools of liminality and semiotics. The text of Wrigley ads championed relief for two modern conditions: indigestion and stress. The imagery, mainly that of the liminal “Spearman,” evoked notions of unworldly escape and infantile nostalgia. The ads were richly polysemic. Accordingly, Wrigley's widespread popularity and market dominance by 1930 should be assessed in terms of both marketing function and representational process.

The ‘corporate veil’ refers to the separation of legal identity between parent firms and their subsidiaries, which gives the parent protection against the liabilities of its subsidiaries. Fearing that such liability protection would facilitate illicit activity, early twentieth century courts, especially in America, would sometimes ‘pierce’ the corporate veil. This article explores Adams v. Cape (1990), in which American plaintiffs attempted to persuade the English courts to lift the corporate veil and impose liability for industrial disease on Cape Industries, a leading U.K. asbestos manufacturer. This landmark case shows how corporate strategy can be closely intertwined with international corporate law and occupational health and safety issues. It also highlights how limited liability law and separate legal personality can result in significant injustice to claimants against multinational enterprises.

This article argues that an information ecosystem emerged rapidly after World War II that made possible the movement of knowledge about computing and its uses around the world. Participants included engineers, scientists, government officials, business management, and users of the technology. Vendors, government agencies, the military, and professors participated regardless of such barriers as languages, cold war politics, or varying levels of national economic levels of prosperity.

It is London 1856. William Henry Perkin serendipitously invents the first synthetic dye while he is trying to synthesize quinine, a medicine for malaria. The nineteen-year-old Perkin leaves the Royal College of Chemistry and quickly commercializes his aniline purple dye, launching the synthetic dye industry. From that time on, the industry continues to dazzle the eye with ever new and appealing dye colors. Perkin, along with entrepreneurs from Britain and France, dominates the synthetic dye industry for the next eight years. During this period, British and French firms introduce most other innovative synthetic dyes onto the market, and they hold the largest global market share.

In the decade after the Second World War IBM rebuilt its European operations as integrated, wholly owned subsidiaries of its World Trade Corporation, chartered in 1949. Long before the European common market eliminated trade barriers, IBM created its own internal networks of trade, allocating the production of different components and products between its new subsidiaries. Their exchange relationships were managed centrally to ensure that no European subsidiary was a consistent net importer. At the heart of this system were eight national electric typewriter plants, each assembling parts produced by other European countries. IBM promoted these transnational typewriters as symbols of a new and peaceful Europe and its leader, Thomas J. Watson, Sr., was an enthusiastic supporter of early European moves toward economic integration. We argue that IBM’s humble typewriter and its innovative system of distributed manufacturing laid the groundwork for its later domination of the European computer business and provided a model for the development of transnational European institutions.

Malaysia and Indonesia account for 90 percent of global exports of palm oil, forming one of the largest agricultural clusters in the world. This article uses archival sources to trace how this cluster emerged from the rubber business in the era of British and Dutch colonialism. Specifically, the rise of palm oil in this region was due to three interrelated factors: (1) the institutional environment of the existing rubber cluster; (2) an established community of foreign traders; and (3) a trading hub in Singapore that offered a multitude of advanced services. This analysis stresses the historical dimension of clusters, which has been neglected in the previous management and strategy works, by connecting cluster emergence to the business history of trading firms. The article also extends the current literature on cluster emergence by showing that the rise of this cluster occurred parallel, and intimately related, to the product specialization within international trading houses.

Through an investigation into the origins of American food marketing, this dissertation reveals how branding—specifically, the centennial brands Quaker Oats, Coca-Cola, and Crisco—came to underpin much of today's market-driven economy. In a manner akin to alchemy, the entrepreneurs behind these three firms recognized the inherent value of an agricultural Eden, then found ways to convert common, low-cost agricultural goods—oats, sugar, and cottonseed oil—into appealing, high-revenue branded food products. In the process, these ventures devised new demand-driven business models that exploited technology and communications advances, enabling them to tap a nascent consumer culture. Their pioneering efforts generated unprecedented profits, laid the foundation for iconic billion-dollar brands, and fundamentally changed how Americans make daily food choices.

This work is a contribution to the study of the adoption and use of computers in the savings bank industry in western Europe before the arrival of the Internet. It documents the presence of a pan-European network of IT users and analyzes the role of their industry associations in the processes of adopting and disseminating technology. It describes and analyzes their situation as late technology users, indicating certain specific and original patterns in the adoption of computers. Special attention is given to the implementation of shared computer centers throughout Europe and the results in the area of online accounting systems and teleprocessing systems as steps before the development of savings bank electronic funds transfer networks. It documents that in the savings banks industry, a reciprocal influence between technology and its uses was in play over long period of time and throughout the technological changes.

How do business leaders make decisions in the face of uncertainty? More important, how do business and economic historians write a narrative that links a business problem, its proposed solution, and the outcome of this action without allowing the success or failure of the decision to determine the trajectory of the story? Counterfactual hypotheses and contextual analysis provide two tools that can help historians minimize the distortions of hindsight and recover a sense of the contingency that surrounds all decisions.

The aim of this essay is to analyze the way management sciences and practices use history or at least the kind of research which they define as history. This reflection will lead to discussing the possibility and the opportunity that an historical approach might have in creating management knowledge, especially “workable” know-how. A quick look at present-day exchanges between the two communities could lead us to the conclusion that there were tensions in the past that have not entirely evaporated. Might they explain the relative modesty of the dialogue, at least in France?

A meeting of the Business History Conference in Toronto with “The Political Economy of Enterprise” as its theme provides an opportunity to consider some historical similarities and differences between the climates of enterprise in Canada and the United States. Because much of my recent work has been on financial development in the United States in the early decades, 1790–1840, I shall focus on that period. During that period, finance, enterprise, and economic development in the United States made great strides. Across the border in British North America, progress in all three areas was limited. The contrast sheds some light on the political conditions that favor financial development, flourishing enterprise, and modern economic growth.