Chocolate is a Sucre trademark, one of the few products that this Bolivian city regularly markets to other parts of the country. Despite Sucre's long history of chocolate production, however, the city's chocolate industry at the turn of the twenty-first century remains small, unable to export, and generally uncompetitive with products from neighboring countries. Yet Sucre's chocolate-making enterprises have not disappeared; they continue to produce on a small scale in the face of mass-produced, imported brands. In this article, the history of Sucre's chocolate industry is examined to shed light on larger issues of industrial development and “underdevelopment” in Sucre and on the roots of the city's strong artisan identity.

The social conditions that affect innovation change over time and vary across productive activities. Hence theoretical analysis of the innovative enterprise must be integrated with historical study through the use of what I call a historical-transformation methodology—a methodology that stands in sharp contrast to, but can nonetheless be complemented by, the constrained-optimization methodology favored by conventional economists. In surveying some major attempts to analyze the role of the business enterprise in generating superior economic performance in the advanced economies, including the works of Oliver Williamson, Alfred Chandler, Edith Penrose, and resource-based theorists, I explain what a historical-transformation methodology is and why such a methodology is needed for understanding how and under what conditions business enterprises can in fact be innovative enterprises.

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.

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 analyzes the goals and strategies of a medium-size machine-building enterprise located in Chemnitz, the “Saxon Manchester,” during the Nazi period. The Wanderer-Werke AG produced a broad range of goods, from machine tools to business machines, during the years before World War II. It pursued an essentially conservative strategy, adhering to its established product line and not embarking on armament production until required to do so. This policy, however, did not prevent the firm from acting on strategic opportunities offered by Nazi occupation policy, as in 1940 when it sought to establish “cooperation” with the French punch-card producer Compagnie des Machines Bull. The article considers the extent to which enterprises like Wanderer—medium-sized companies with products of some value to the war effort—could pursue autonomous strategies within the framework of the National Socialist regime.

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.

Through a study of the history of department stores and shopping centers in the Philadelphia metropolitan region between 1920 and 1980, I explore the historical role of retailing in the evolution of the "sprawl" landscape that came to dominate urban form in the United States by the end of the twentieth century. Philadelphia is an important case study for this topic because of its long history of urbanization, during which it developed from a colonial port city to a nine-teenth-century industrial metropolis to a model of twentieth-century deindustrialization. Through all the phases of its growth, Philadelphia remained an important consumer marketplace serving the regional hinterland of the Delaware Valley. I sought to understand the forces that led to the city's twentieth-century decline as the primary site of consumption for the Delaware Valley, when major sites for distributing consumer goods developed in the hinterland itself.

The Hudson's Bay Company traded European goods for furs that were hunted, trapped, and brought down to the Bayside posts by Native Americans. The process of exchange was deceptively simple: furs for goods. Yet behind this simple process lies a series of decisions on the part of the company about which goods to provide, what levels of quality to provide, and what price to set. We examine the marketing strategies used by the Hudson's Bay Company and the role played by Native traders. We find that Native Americans were demanding consumers, concerned not only with the quantity of goods they received but also with their quality and variety. In a world where neither side could coerce the other, Natives' preferences were paramount.

Conflicting interpretations of the evolution of German business between the two world wars and of Germany's corporate governance during the Third Reich are examined in this article. Alfred Chandler's view that major corporate changes emanated from managerial initiatives is contrasted with Harold James's interpretation that public and government pressures forced innovations on business. In support of James's analysis, I argue that state and political pressures, not management, initiated significant changes in German corporate governance and in the organization of German industry during the interwar period, especially in the 1930s. Using Schering AG, one of Germany's largest companies before World War II, the article traces the influences of National Socialist pressure and changes in corporate law on companies’ organizational adaptation to government social priorities during the Third Reich.

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 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 article examines the formation of China's state enterprise system, using the case of the Dadukou Iron and Steel Works (DISW). I argue that the basic institutional arrangement of the DISW, and by extension other state-owned enterprises, consisted of a bureaucratic governance structure, distinctive management and incentive mechanisms, and the provision of social services and welfare. This arrangement took shape during the Sino-Japanese War, with the sustained systemic crisis and the nature and character of the institutional endowments leading to the formation of China's state enterprise system. In considering implications for understanding institutional change, I suggest that crisis shapes radical institutional change and that both path dependence and path independence characterize such change.

Rapidly increasing numbers of women entered the field of real estate brokerage from the 1930s through the 1950s. “Rosie the Realtor” took advantage of the postwar building boom to create an expanding career niche, capturing residential brokerage as a female domain. In the process, she stretched gendered boundaries in the masculine world of brokerage to the breaking point. Employing a complex and internally antagonistic mix of liberal feminist and conservative ideologies, female realtors created their own professional space, expanding career opportunities for women at the same time that their economic and political practices reinforced the constraints of domesticity.

This article examines the role of British exchange and import controls in stimulating the dramatic increase in overseas (particularly American) multinationals in Britain from the end of the Second World War to the late 1950s, together with the ways in which the government used controls to regulate the foreign direct investment (FDI) inflow. Exchange controls were both an important stimulus to inward investment and a powerful and flexible means of regulating its volume and character. Government was relatively successful in using these powers to maximize the dollar balance and industrial benefits of FDI to Britain, given initially severe dollar and capacity constraints, and in liberalizing policy once these constraints receded and competition from other FDI hosts intensified.

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.

Numerous historians of deindustrialization argue that industries went into decline because established manufacturers moved production to cheaper locales to escape unions and high wages. A different pattern of decline occurred in the New England cotton textile industry, where downsizing began in the 1920s. Rather than fleeing their home area to build facilities elsewhere, most New England manufacturers were driven out of business by lower-cost competitors in the American South. Southerners founded, managed, and financed a heavy majority of the textile companies in their region. Although some New England firms did set up Southern plants, this was a defensive reaction to changing market realities. New competitors have brought about deindustrialization in other core U.S. industries. Recognizing this trend is important for a full understanding of the political economy of modern capitalism.