This article addresses the issue of the uses of the multidivisional form in the French context at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. Comparing two case studies, Danone and Hachette, it sheds light on specific experiences in two different industries, the food and the book industry, respectively, in order to contribute to the debate over the Chandlerian paradigm. These two cases show that the implementation of the M-form in European companies can neither be reduced to the necessary diffusion of a universal structure nor to managerial fashion. At first a matter of redistributing the power between the shareholders and the management, the M-form led to hybrid organizations with characteristics heavily dependent on intensive internal negotiations. These findings emphasize the potential diversity of the implementation of the M-form and of the relations between management and shareholders. Far from being linear, company trajectories then heavily depend on partial compromises.

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.

This article demonstrates the usefulness of the notion of embeddedness to the historical study of Italian industrial districts of small firms and of local economic change more generally. The development of gold jewelry production in two Italian towns, Valenza Po and Arezzo, shows that vertical disintegration was enabled by the creation of networks of heterogeneous social relations. In both towns, social and political ties led to the creation of institutions of collective governance, which in turn produced a workable level of trust between economic actors. The production of trust, however, never ceased to be a contentious process, endowed with multiple and often contradictory meanings embedded in specific networks and contexts, ranging from collective projects of modernization in Valenza Po to the cementing of a secretive informal economy in Arezzo. The embeddedness approach to economic action is superior both to the communitarian arguments of much of the literature on the Italian industrial districts and to transaction-cost theories, which tend to view institutions in instrumental and functionalist ways.

The sewing machine was one of the first standardized and mass-marketed complex consumer durables to have been diffused widely around the world before 1920. This global diffusion was almost the sole responsibility of one firm, Singer. Despite its American origins, Singer’s success lay principally overseas. New data provide insight into the company’s international marketing strategies. Although the firm had a reputation for marketing sophistication, Singer did not depend on price discrimination, extensive advertising, or loss-leading expansion of retail networks in its overseas markets. Rather, its success was due to the characteristics of consumer demand for sewing machines, features that combined with its strategic investments in market support services and in its selling organization to create Singer’s enormous competitive advantages in foreign markets.

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.

Crucial to the success of China’s transition to the market economy is the central government’s capacity for institutional innovation. Since 1997, Chinese politicians have sought to transform the governance of state-owned industries from decentralized administrator control to centralized corporate shareholder control. This essay examines the ideological, political, and institutional components of the central state’s strategy of “disembeddedness” that aimed to disrupt preexisting social norms and exchange relations of the planned economy. However, this authoritarian approach to organizational change has generated sociopolitical contentions and unintended economic outcomes that point to alternative conceptions of authority and exchange relations at industrial and firm levels. Focusing on the recent restructuring of the oil and petrochemical sectors into national oil corporations, I provide evidence of how certain types of informal social dynamics have shaped and constrained the implementation of asset control strategies and industrial policies favored by the state, with direct implications for the proper functioning of new market institutions.

This article examines the formation in 1890 of the United Alkali Company in order to explore new perspectives on the transition to a corporate economy. Its starting point is the process of transition itself, highlighting the role played by networks. This perspective promotes an emphasis on institutional environments and on patterns of relationships and behavior, as opposed to those of formal structure. Thus, the archives of the company are probed for evidence of how key agents conceived of the firm. Finally, governance systems are seen as interacting in a dynamic fashion with the institutional environment, and in particular with the balance of internal and external economies.

Brewing in the United Kingdom in the years following 1950 saw a shift from a production to a retailing orientation. As part of this shift, the role of the area manager started to move from production and sales discipline to retail development. This article explores the job of the area manager during the period, seeking to demonstrate the weakness in recent accounts that suggest that area managers serve only as an “information relay” between senior managers and unit managers. Although the evidence is limited, because of problems with the survival of records, it suggests a more complex picture, which has implications for area managers in retail and service industries more generally.

This article argues that the embeddedness of Chinese enterprises in Singapore society explains the limited success of the nationalist movement in Singapore. To respond to the economic crisis in the 1930s, Chinese business elites employed nationalist rhetoric to appeal to their compatriots in the British colony to support Chinese “national products.” With dual allegiance to both British rule and Chinese national identity, Chinese business nationalists took a transnational approach. Because Chinese business communities in Singapore were organized along subethnic lines, Chinese transnationalism failed to surmount these social divisions.

In Japanese society the pinnacle of economic and political power resides in Tokyo conglomerates and elite ministries: the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) and the Ministry of Finance. Until now, the story of this power arrangement has been told from the perspective of national bureaucrats and big business executives. The image projected to the outside world has been of cooperative, trust-based relational contracting with big business at the top “taking care” of its suppliers and subsidiaries below. The story from the bottom, however, is one of technology expropriation (of patentable technology) and monopsony squeeze (unilateral cost-down demands, for example). Firms unwilling to toe the line have been wholly excluded from access to the benefits reserved for those at the top of the pyramid, where one finds lucrative main bank financing, government support, and copious technological information.

This article offers a historical narrative of the political struggle by independent-minded entrepreneurs in postwar Japan. Central to the struggle has been the challenge of building broad-based coalitions to avoid becoming embedded in these hierarchies while at the same time trying to obtain alternative sources of finance and technological know-how. The most successful example of such efforts is the Association of Small and Medium Size Enterprise Entrepreneurs (SME Doyukai). The SME Doyukai has somehow managed to remain completely independent from the state, while most other small business associations have not. This independence has not been free, and the association has gone through a number of institutional dilemmas as a result. We analyze these dilemmas over time and offer comparative lessons.