This article analyzes the career paths of family business executives in institutional business elites in Finland using an empirical database based on a Bourdieusian prosopographical approach. The results indicate that career paths became more complex but shortened in length toward the beginning of the twenty-first century. The early career paths of family executives changed from positions as assistants and salesmen in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to governance, chief executive officer (CEO), and management positions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Compared with the founder generation, next-generation family members benefited from more rapid institutional business elite career paths. The complexity of the career paths in the institutional business elite increased in subsequent generations. However, although there were few family executives with a third- or fourth-generation background in family businesses, founder-generation family executives existed in each cohort, apart from the pioneering generation.

In early December 1923 in Memphis, Tennessee, Minnie Geddings Cox sat in a hastily arranged board meeting across from Heman Perry, clear now that the man she had believed her advocate was most assuredly her adversary. Cox and Perry, a man Forbes magazine would describe in 1924 as the richest Negro in the world, spent nearly a year maneuvering a merger to join her company, Mississippi Life Insurance Company, the third largest black-owned life insurance company in the United States, with his Standard Life of Atlanta, which ranked second.1 They shared a vision to create the largest black-owned life insurance company in the United States—or so Cox thought.

The backwardness of actuarial techniques in Spain and the lack of Spanish mortality tables had a bearing on the development of life insurance in Spain. The actuaries of the domestic and foreign companies operating in this country used other countries’ mortality tables, corrected upwards, to draw up their policies. With actuarial reports from the Gresham Life Assurance Society, established in Spain in the 1890s, the difficulties actuaries had to confront to adjust expectations to Spanish reality can be followed for decades. On the basis of statistical information from 1896 to 1937, a comparison is made between expected and actual death rates. Furthermore, the information from this company enables a comparison with other countries in which it operated (more developed and less developed than Spain) and with the profit and loss results of other domestic and foreign companies operating in the country. Moreover, the problems caused for actuaries by unforeseen events that affected the Spanish population in particular, such as the “Spanish Influenza” or the Civil War, can also be studied. On the basis of this valuable documentation, certain patterns of the difficulties faced by actuaries operating in economically backward countries before World War II can be established.

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.

The commercial traveler, or traveling salesman, was an agent of commercialism and modernization as well as a stock character in British popular culture. To C. Wright Mills, salesmen faced particularly challenging demands to conform to managerial direction. This article examines how British salesmen negotiated their occupational identity during the twentieth century. Developments in marketing, corporate growth, and periods of war and recession all challenged salesmen’s status and autonomy. These influences prompted a lengthy and recurring debate about how best to present, defend, and justify their work and identity. New marketing techniques and management systems evolved steadily, rather than producing sudden or uniform changes in the ways in which salesmen worked. Their culture of enterprise and individualism persisted, in part as it was shared by employers and managers. The impact of new marketing methods proved greatest in confectionery, tobacco, and other consumer goods trades as sales of branded, packaged goods expanded. Even then, salesmen contributed to shaping their work and occupational identity, proving unable to establish professional credentials and dividing over whether adopting trade union methods could improve their position.

In their 2013 book Reimagining Business History, Philip Scranton and Patrick Fridenson called on business historians to reassess militarization and the “two-way exchanges” between the military and the private sector. The call is timely. The extensive business-historical scholarship on the relationship between companies and war sensibly focuses on companies that profited from their involvement in the military-industrial complex.1 The business-historical literature is virtually silent, however, on the role of business in preventing wars from starting in the first place. In other words, business historians have missed a productive opportunity to engage with capitalist peace theory (CPT), an increasingly important theory in the discipline of international relations (IR). Many IR scholars now argue that the mutual economic interdependence characteristic of global capitalism reduces the likelihood of war. Their research suggests that while extensive cross-border economic linkages do not preclude the possibility of war, the creation of a transnational community of economic interests tends, ceteris paribus, to reduce the frequency, duration, and intensity of warfare.2

Just months after the outbreak of World War I, rumors spread throughout the Russian Empire that Singer Manufacturing Company’s wholly owned Russian subsidiary, Kompaniia Zinger, was a German company that was actively engaged in espionage on behalf of the German military. Even though these rumors were untrue, they unleashed a wave of actions against the company that Singer’s officials were unable to stop, ultimately leading to tremendous losses for the firm. The central argument of this article is that the power of the accusations of Singer’s German ties rested far more on the nature of the company’s business model than on the national affiliation of its personnel or evidence of espionage. In the context of World War I–era Russia, many Russians took Singer’s operations not as those of an international capitalist enterprise, but rather as evidence of the company’s questionable foreign character. This perspective helps us to understand why Singer’s management had such difficulty shaking the accusations of its German ties; if what was suspicious about the company was the very foundation of its business model, then its continued operation meant that it necessarily exhibited characteristics that reinforced the basis for said suspicion. These findings have implications for international business history, the history of late-Tsarist Russia, and the history of capitalism.

This article examines the impact of structural changes in the postwar film industry on the activities and effectiveness of the foreign distribution subsidiaries of American firms. As these subsidiaries saw their regular supply of films from their in-house Hollywood studios decline, they sought out alternative sources of product content, often from local markets. Unable to rely on the traditional “ownership” advantages bestowed on them by their parent firms, these subsidiaries increasingly needed to integrate into local networks and forge closer relationships with local producers and exhibitors. Our focus is on Italy, one of the most important film markets for US companies in the 1960s. We collect data on the box office revenues and screen time allocated to every film released into the first-run cinema market and compare the effectiveness of American versus Italian distributors in maximizing the exposure of their most popular films. We explore the attempts by US firms to form partnerships with Italian distributors and producers. Finally, we examine available archival records to reveal the detailed activities of US distribution offices in Italy and their attempts to integrate into local business networks. We conclude that while US subsidiaries did not fully succeed in becoming “insiders” within the Italian film industry in this period, they did actively work toward such an objective.

La Porta et al. see common law as most favorable to corporate development and economic growth, but Japanese legislators explicitly based their system on German civil law. However, Japan’s commercial code of 1899 omitted the GmbH (private company) form, which Guinnane et al. see as the jewel in the crown of Germany’s organizational menu. Neither apparent “mistake” retarded Japan’s adoption of the corporate form, because its commercial code offered flexible governance and liability options, implemented liberally. It was this liberal flexibility, not choice of legal family or hybrid corporate forms emphasized by previous writers, that drove corporatization forward in Japan and more widely. Surprisingly (given that Germany’s superficially fuller organizational menu predated Japan’s by many decades and the country was wealthier), by the 1930s Japan already had not only more corporations than Germany, but also more commandite partnerships (with some corporate characteristics). After the introduction of the yugen kaisha (private company) in 1940, corporate forms became nearly as widely used in Japan as in the United States, United Kingdom, or Switzerland.

Banking experienced large growth in colonial India along with a process of commercialization of agriculture. Yet, the rate of aggregate saving or investment remained low. This article is an attempt to resolve this paradox. It suggests that traditional forms of banking were helped by the formalization of indigenous negotiable instruments, but that transactions between bankers, merchants, and peasants were characterized by a limited use of legal instruments. The limited circulation of bills in this sphere is attributed, among other factors, to high seasonality in the demand for money. Seasonality-induced distortions in the organization of the money market made indigenous banking an unsuitable agent to promote saving and finance industrialization.

Using the career of director William Wyler as a case study, the article argues that by standardizing creative professions such as acting and directing during the 1920s and 1930s, the Hollywood studio system was responsible for turning creativity into a modern form of labor. I make this claim by highlighting three main themes. First, the article draws attention to the operation behind cultural industries, as opposed to the content they produce, a topic that remains understudied. Second, it traces the historical development of “directing” as a profession. Looking at how this pivotal role changed since the early days of the industry, I argue there was a structural rationale behind practices of managerial control as well as those enabling creative autonomy. Third, focusing on Wyler’s career, the article fleshes out how this dual rationale functioned day to day and how it pushed creative employees like Wyler to develop a particular professional way of being.

This essay investigates the ways in which child safety became an enterprise during the child protection crusade of the 1980s. Americans clamored for an increased federal presence in “the battle for child safety,” but they made such calls in a climate of intense governmental distrust. The federal government did assume a larger role on the issue of missing and exploited children with the passage of the Missing Children and Missing Children’s Assistance Acts of 1982 and 1984, respectively. But, as this essay demonstrates, the state also stressed the primacy of the private sector—and specifically for-profit companies—in protecting American children. The celebration by President Ronald Reagan and others of private sector efforts to raise awareness about and “save” American youngsters laid the groundwork for a broader child safety apparatus that took hold in the final decades of the twentieth century.

This article examines, from the viewpoint of a core group of Vermont milk producers, the period in the mid-1990s when organic dairy became mainstream. We look at the rise and subsequent takeover of one of the first organic milk-processing companies, The Organic Cow of Vermont, through the eyes of the farmers involved. In so doing, we provide needed perspective on the role of food producers working in industries subject to growth and consolidation. As producers of a commodity that grew out of the conventional system, organic dairy farmers faced unique choices that set them apart from other organic producers at that time. We demonstrate that the market for organic milk and dairy provided the opportunity for a new kind of farmer-processor relationship in which producers were supported through stable pay-prices and an intimate business relationship with processors. This article challenges the idea that the organic dairy industry was built by corporations trying to profit from booming consumer demand for organic foods and offers important contributions to debates surrounding the growth and conventionalization of organic food systems.

Post-World War I Federal Reserve System policy focused on reducing price levels. Faith in liquidationist ideas led Federal Reserve officials to maintain tight-money policies during the depression of 1920–1921. Farmers suffering through this economic crisis objected to contemporary monetary policy. Organized labor and leading Progressive reformer Robert M. La Follette Sr. seconded their criticism. Postwar challenges to the nation’s financial leadership and its priorities bore tangible results by producing a number of notable reforms, including modifications of Federal Reserve policy and the Agricultural Credits Act of 1923. In the absence of similar political pressure during the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve System adhered to liquidationist ideas and did not pursue monetary expansion.