In emerging economies, economic development and pro-social policies are closely entwined. Multinational corporations have presented a positive image of their economic and social activities to investors and society to justify exploiting countries’ natural resources. This study examines the Arabian American Oil Company’s (Aramco) pro-social/corporate social responsibility programs in employment, housing, and healthcare from 1932 to 1974. These programs did not stem from a philanthropic rationale but were necessary to enable Aramco to create the infrastructure to find, extract, and control the oil assets. Hierarchical control was institutionalized through racism and discrimination in employment, housing, and health regulations. However, Aramco adopted impression management strategies to present a positive image of itself as a socially responsible company contributing to the economic and social development of Saudi Arabia. We analyze management statements in company reports and internal documents to identify and categorize the application of these impression management techniques up to when the Saudi government took a controlling stake in Aramco.

In the 1990s, three Scandinavian news media companies, Bonnier, Kinnevik, and Schibsted, internationalized their newspapers. Despite doing this during the same period, competing in the same industry and institutional environment, being exposed to the same opportunities by the opening of the Eastern European markets, and all belonging to a smaller language area, they differed in their internationalization models as well as in their outcomes. Despite initial successes, Bonnier and Kinnevik eventually discontinued their newspapers in the new markets, in many cases following significant losses, while Schibsted fared better. The main explanation for using different internationalization models was differences in business models, basically striving to do business internationally in a similar way as domestically. That is, they did not choose a specific internationalization model but sought to simply expand their business models internationally. Consequently, this article finds that when researching internationalization, more focus should be placed on business models.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and the social license to operate (SLO) are widespread global phenomena in mining-dependent countries. These self-regulated frameworks are used to ensure local ownership and as a response to conflict by mining companies. Over the past two decades, CSR in the mining industry has only been more prevalent in Africa and South Africa. Studies on CSR and SLO primarily focus on community perspectives. This paper interrogates how mining companies respond to civic social pressure by considering two cases that have experienced much conflict in South Africa. Based on eighteen in-depth interviews and an analysis of company and media reports, our case studies demonstrate that mining companies primarily use CSR and SLO to assert and maintain corporate control under the guise of promoting local ownership and sustainable mining. Such strategies provide temporary relief and gradually erode CSR and SLO’s legal and political imperatives.

The Czech Republic often has been cited as an example of successful economic transformation. The available literature has primarily focused on changes in the macroeconomic environment, although the actions of economic agents at the microeconomic level have emerged as the crucial factor explaining this success. Based on 101 oral history interviews, this article offers the firsthand experiences, frustrations, challenges, and human dimensions of doing business at that time and shows that the road from socialism to the market economy was a bumpy one. Our approach fills major information voids, and thus offers a unique opportunity for business historians to avoid slipping into the incomplete view of the world presented by written literature and archives.

This article analyzes a single bankruptcy case—Hancock v Halliday (1742–1752)—as it was litigated in the Court of Chancery across a ten-year period. By incorporating local sources, the work attempts to move away from assumptions surrounding the “implicit contract” of family, and to provide a more nuanced analysis of “family strategies” in action. I argue that business historians—looking at networks—and economic and social historians—analyzing the use and implementation of credit—should continue to explore the divisions within families, which will help to reemphasize the role of women within business transactions and the wider credit-based economy. Ultimately, this article makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning scholarship on the negative aspects of familial networks of credit and debt, demonstrating how the complex and multifaceted nature of family indebtedness has been overlooked, and misunderstood, in the existing literature.

The Depression housing crisis caused enormous distress, with social, economic and political implications. The roles and experiences of some major players are well established. Tenants were evicted. National statistics on foreclosures show that many property owners lost their homes. Lending institutions went under. Municipalities struggled when property tax receipts fell. The federal government stepped in, establishing new programs and agencies, with long-term consequences.

Other parts of the story have been neglected. Many borrowers surrendered their properties voluntarily, rather than await foreclosure. As vacancies rose and rents fell, landlords, many owning only one or two properties and/or renting part of their own homes, struggled. Neglected sources show they defaulted at a higher rate than homeowners. Among lenders, private individuals held more mortgages than any type of institution. Relying on investment income, many had a hard time. Both landlords and private lenders made concessions to avoid having to evict or foreclose, mitigating the effects of the Depression on tenants and borrowers. Sources exist to document local variations in the role of landlords and private lenders. These can give us a fuller picture of the Depression, one that still has relevance today.

We contribute to the argument for a “new” business history employing a quantitative approach. We illustrate opportunities for new perspectives from this approach using a novel microlevel longitudinal database comprising 131 variables for 1,419 cooperative creameries in Denmark for the period 1898–1945, which we also document and make available to the scholarly community. We present a number of applications of the data, including investigating regional productivity differences, expenditure on fire insurance, and survivorship and reporting biases.

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.

Who managed large corporations during the first half century of their emergence? How did modernizing firms navigate periods of rapid technological change such as those that swept the U.S. economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? What role did engineers play in the management of large corporations? This paper draws on an original database of tens of thousands of mining and metallurgical engineers who graduated from universities during this period, examining patterns in their employment records, job descriptions, and career trajectories, matching our data on individual engineers with a linked database of mining and metallurgical corporations. We trace two distinct phases in engineers’ managerial role that corresponded to periods of rapid technological change and technological quiescence in the industry. We argue that explaining the rise of the modern corporation and the historical dynamics of corporate management requires a better understanding of technical expertise in management.

The phonograph presented American presidential aspirants with an opportunity to surmount eighteenth-century campaigning standards and meet the challenges of an expanding democracy and electorate. Thomas Edison’s invention—with its corresponding records—arguably was the first mechanical media technology to find its way into political campaigning on a mass scale. By 1908, canned, recorded speeches were poised to become a marketable alternative to soliciting ballots in person while also facilitating a candidate’s direct engagement with voters, thus enabling contenders and media firms like Edison’s National Phonograph Company to curate personas that were sold both commercially and at the polls. As a result, the phonograph’s practical role allowed the public to hear candidates directly and in their own words, marking an important but underrecognized step forward in the democratization of access to information (and the concomitant risk of manipulation and distortion that came along with it) that one finds in today’s social media.

Despite its importance to gender inequality, household incomes, and labor markets, the reasons behind Britain being one of the last major Western nations to introduce equal pay have been relatively neglected. This article first examines the campaign for equal pay from the late Victorian era to its eventual introduction in 1970. Economists predicted that equal pay would produce substantial female unemployment, but policy makers correctly doubted this—as data collected from early adopters in West Europe and North America showed no significant rise in female unemployment. Female employment rose substantially during Britain’s equal pay implementation—while, in contrast to broadly static earnings differentials from 1950 to 1970, there was a significant reduction in the gender pay gap, followed by a longer-term trend of narrowing differentials. This article explores why equal pay expanded female employment, given the absence of any sudden rise in women workers productivity or substantial acceleration of structural change in favor of female-employing sectors. The article finds that equal pay compelled employers to reevaluate the real worth of female workers based on their substantial relative human capital growth since 1945. This had not hitherto been reflected in relative earnings, owing to barriers such as segmented labor markets, monopsonistic employers, and collective bargaining procedures that fossilized traditional gender pay differentials.

After the murder of George Floyd, businesses across the United States stepped up with pledges and commitments to lessen systematic racism, reflecting a commitment to corporate social responsibility (CSR). But are these actions really concerned with social uplift? Or a form of woke-washing? This was not the first time corporate America reacted to racial upheaval and violence. In this paper, the author examines the reaction of the Atlanta business community to the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot. At that time, Atlanta’s business elite effectively usurped municipal and state authority to manage the aftermath of the horrific events. They were determined to protect the reputation of Atlanta as progressive and a place of relative racial harmony. How do we consider their actions in the context of CSR and woke-washing? The businesses sought mainly to protect their economic future rather than truly uplifting society or improving racial relations. Still, their actions impacted Atlanta positively for many decades to come, leading to better outcomes during the Civil Rights era and beyond.

The Wawanesa Mutual Insurance Company, successful in western Canada, struggled to replicate its business model in Quebec in the 1930s. The absence of financial responsibility law in Quebec, which made purchasing automobile insurance nearly compulsory for drivers, created a unique opportunity. Wawanesa could insure taxis and fleets in a market where uninsured drivers were the norm. To accommodate this change, it became a direct writer in Quebec. The company also loosened its previously rigid management style to allow branch managers to make regionally appropriate decisions. Insurance companies that fled Quebec in the 1940s would struggle to compete upon their return, because Wawanesa became a market leader. The introduction of financial responsibility law in the province in 1961 would grow the company in the years that followed. As historians work to understand the importance of regional and legislative change to the insurance industry, this story provides a snapshot of a single company in a single market.

This article uses the case of Oppel Electric Manufacturing Co. Ltd.—the most important Chinese manufacturer of light bulbs before 1937—to explore the early development of the Chinese electrical lamp industry. The article first explores the Chinese market for electrical lamps before the 1920s and shows how the market was dominated by imports and lamps locally manufactured by foreign firms. It then traces how Oppel was established in the 1920s and subsequently grew into a successful manufacturing business able to compete with foreign products. The article explores how the fact that government institutions were major purchasers of light bulbs allowed Oppel to engage in nationalist lobbying and thereby win government contracts. The article shows how the absence of Western-style intellectual property rights allowed Oppel to transfer technology cheaply, efficiently, and without needing to enter into Sino–foreign joint ventures. These discussions of nationalist lobbying and China’s intellectual property environment contribute to our understanding of China’s early industrialization, both in terms of the rapid industrial growth early twentieth century China saw and the leading role that Chinese firms played in this growth.

The formation of the Shanghai Women’s Commercial and Savings Bank (1924–1955) uncovers the legacy of an institution founded by a group of elite women. Although the women’s bank had limited capital and a small business scope, it reflected the contributions of enterprising women to the financial field when Chinese women’s roles were evolving and feminist rhetoric appealed to women’s economic independence. This article brings the achievements of such Chinese women to the forefront, as key figures in the development and direction of the Shanghai Women’s Bank. By exploring the anxieties and endeavors of the Shanghai Women’s Bank and shifting the focus to the female figures involved in shaping the bank, this article argues that they, alongside their elite social network, contributed to the bank’s longevity and portrayal in the media landscape. Although emphasizing gender in its initial creation, the bank ultimately pursued similar business strategies to other banks with both men and women working behind-the-scenes to uphold the institution. Moreover, this article contributes to a more inclusive history of women and finance in order to illuminate the endeavors of Chinese women in Shanghai banking amongst its global counterparts.

This article offers the first extensive analysis of female agency in the marine insurance industry of early modern Europe. Drawing from a data set of more than four thousand insurance policies signed in the Royal Insurance Chamber in Paris between 1668 and 1672, the article studies the activities of Parisian women within the institution. These policies illustrate that women played a crucial role in the Chamber as underwriters, creditors, commission agents, and policyholders. Moreover, institutional papers and the records of the Parisian admiralty court reveal that women acted ably in defense of their interests when conflicts emerged, although there were limitations to their agency in the Chamber itself. In this way, the article challenges the long-standing perception that underwriting was an exclusively masculine activity in pre-modern Europe. Moreover, it sheds light on the role of women in supporting the maritime and colonial policies of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s eminent minister, thereby becoming underwriters of France’s early Atlantic Empire.

Following the seminal work of Lévi-Strauss, developed by Baker and Nelson and Duymedjian and Rüling, this paper analyzes the role that entrepreneurial bricolage played as an innovation tool in the origins and growth of four important Spanish tourism companies: Meliá, Barceló, Iberostar, and Riu. Their development has been deeply embedded in the island of Majorca (Spain), whose historical market conditions shaped and drove the companies’ bricolage actions. Entrepreneurial bricolage has generally been studied from a short-term perspective; however, this work adopts a dynamic approach that, instead of focusing on the concept of bricolage, aims to explain its evolution over time. To this end, four historical and qualitative case studies are used. The main contribution made by this paper is that the four companies did not limit their bricolage actions to contexts of scarcity but made this type of entrepreneurship a regular mechanism in their business practices, as the island’s tourism context thrived. However, the resulting innovations, as well as their main drivers, did indeed change over time.

I argue that life insurance and imperial meaning making are deeply implicated in each other. As life insurance expanded internationally in the nineteenth century, and as insurers became advocates of White settlement, they grappled with what actuarial science meant in the context of their orientalist conceptions of colonial populations. In particular, actuaries were concerned with tropical markets and the racialized/exceptionalized differences they perceived in those markets. To address these tensions, insurers attempted two strategies: (1) incorporating tropical rates as additional premiums designed to cover the “extra mortality” of tropical markets; and (2) advocating for social practices of “sanitary progress” related to public health and sanitation. These practices, framed in orientalist terms, were not adopted in any smooth manner but in fumbling and meandering ways as insurers tried to understand what kinds of lives tropical settlers might be and how those lives might be priced. They eventually liberalized life insurance rates for White settlers in tropical settings, but insurers then confronted questions on how newly socialized “native” lives might be rendered calculable. This story of tropical exposure in globalizing actuarial discourse reinforces the ways in which race and racialized/exceptionalized differences were at the core of life insurance and the calculative devices it assembled between 1852 and 1947.