It is my pleasure to introduce Volume 25, No. 2 of Enterprise and Society. In this issue, we are pleased to present a special section on “Corporate Responses to Racial Unrest,” guest-edited by Michael Thate and Tyesha Maddox. The section commences with a scene-setting introduction from the guest editors, followed by three papers. The first is from Keith Hollingsworth on the aftermath of the Atlanta race riot of 1906, followed by Mattie Webb on an exercise in the art of the possible, waging the battle against Apartheid in South African workplaces. This section is rounded off by Sethulego Matebesi’s exploration of responses to civil society mobilization among South African mining companies. Taken together, these four essays break important new ground and indicate promising lines of future research.

The year 2020 set into motion a perfect storm that would lead to the global panic ignited by the murder of George Floyd in late May of that year. The COVID-19 virus impacted billions of people around the world. With many forced to shelter in place at home, some Americans for the first time (and an exhaustingly innumerable time for others) observed up close the inequality apparent in American policing. On average, Black Americans are 2.9 times more likely to be shot and killed by the police, with very few officers held accountable and prosecuted for these deaths.1 One cannot make sense of this special section on Corporate Responses to Racial Unrest without an examination of this fact and the events leading up to Floyd’s murder. Statistically speaking, however, the year 2020 did not signal anything unusual. In that year, according to Statistica.com, U.S. police killed 1,020 people. Fatalities had been rising steadily from 981 in 2017 to 983 in 2018 and 999 in 2019. 2 It is not immediately apparent how best to interpret these numbers. What justifies police use of deadly force, and in turn, what is an acceptable rate of police killings per year? Or is this even a productive line of thought? The effectiveness of police power in the United States has been a standing debate since the foundations of American government.3 And the nature of inequality marked by race within policing has been demonstrated countless times in the literature.4 Reforming the phenomenon of “policing” in the United States, however, though simple to call for, is complicated to enact—not least owing to the “blue wall of silence” that protects police officers from the consequences of misconduct and the near-term spikes in crime and expenses that the very communities who are most disadvantaged by current policing practices are forced to bear.

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 Wiehahn Commission, a government body that proposed a multipronged 1979 South African labor reform, accelerated the corporate recognition of Black trade unions in apartheid era South Africa. Gradually implemented over the course of two years, the reforms complemented international workplace codes and the burgeoning reformist push for ethically sound business practices in the workplace. Although U.S. multinational firms in South Africa did not initially voice support for Black trade unions, in the aftermath of Soweto, many were faced with cascading internal and external pressures to negotiate with these emerging unions. By incorporating the Sullivan Principles, a U.S. code for ethical business conduct, into the broader scholarship on the South African trade union movement and the late apartheid era Wiehahn Commission reforms, this article examines how corporate reforms landed in South Africa, probing the business response to worker demands. South African workers were not merely passive recipients of workplace reform, but rather active participants, shaping the form and direction of U.S. and South African policy.

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.

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.

This study seeks to analyze the continuity and survival of the mining sector in one of the most long-lived mining districts in the world, and the socioeconomic externalities that arose over a period of 150 years. Its most characteristic element was the development of two diametrically opposed business models in the same space: one based on a system of very small-scale mines, which were highly labor-intensive with a low capitalization, and another that was implemented in the 1950s based on a large-scale model, which was intensive in capital but with lower profit margins. In both cases, the activity had a growing impact on the environment and little spillover effects on other economic activities. The process of environmental degradation culminated in the 1960s–1980s with the pollution of an extensive stretch of the Mediterranean coastline and the complete disappearance of Portmán Bay, in what was possibly the most important environmental disaster in the history of the Mediterranean Sea. The institutional framework in which this activity took place played a key role in all of this.

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.

The history of Indian management education is overwhelmingly focused on the period from the 1950s and 1960s onward. This article traces the hitherto underexplored history of how, from the 1860s until the 1950s, Indians thought about and implemented education and training for managers. In particular, it demonstrates how Indian nationalist politicians articulated the nation-building utility of managers and managerial training, and how business education became yoked to nationalists’ broader visions of India’s economic regeneration. Beginning in the early twentieth century, Indian nationalists championed commercial education, advocating its evolution out of its vocational roots into something more scientific and specialized for producing skilled indigenous managers. The precise evolution of Indian commercial education exercised long-term influences on postcolonial management programs. First, Indians established a tradition of surveying the latest pedagogical methods and institutional models from around the world and adapting them to Indian conditions. Second, Indian advocates of commercial education carved out an important role for the state, working on commercial education endeavors with British officials in the colonial era and, later on, placing management education within the ambit of centralized state planning. Management had a fundamentally political valence in India. For this reason, commercial and management education programs in India, unlike in the West, largely avoided questions about their legitimacy.

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.

Recent work on white women in Jamaica has shown that they were active participants in Jamaica’s slave economy. This article adds to this recent literature through an innovative use of social network analysis (SNA) to examine the credit networks in which women operated in the thriving eighteenth-century British Atlantic town of Kingston, Jamaica. In particular, it uses closeness and centrality measures to quantify the distinctive role that white women had in local credit networks. These were different from those of men involved in transatlantic trade, but were vital in facilitating female access to credit enabling domestic retail trade. White female traders in particular facilitated female access to credit networks, acting as significant conduits of money and information in ways that were crucial to the local economy. Their connectedness within trade networks increased over time, despite their greater exposure than larger traders to economic shocks. We therefore demonstrate that white women were active protagonists in the developing economy of eighteenth-century Jamaica.

Reconnecting Fligstein’s and Chandler’s models of long-term organizational change, this article challenges the idea that corporate financialization is alien to the Chandlerian enterprise. Based on the case of the French automotive firm Peugeot Société Anonyme (PSA), it shows that this historical transformation has been intrinsically linked to Chandlerian dynamics. The article first highlights the crucial role played by the French government and financial institutions in the establishment of large multidivisional companies in France. It then draws on PSA, public, and private archives, and an interview with a former financial executive to examine a decisive financial restructuring of the family business in 1965. In describing the challenges faced by the business in the 1960s, the article analyzes how the creation of a multilevel structure of holding companies was meant to deal with Chandlerian challenges while paving the way for the further financialization of the business.

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.

Historians have long explored the links between the environmental and the economic. Yet as the global climate crisis deepens with every passing month, it becomes ever more obvious just how related the environmental and the economic are. Driven by the by-products of economic growth, rising sea levels, floods, droughts, and extreme heat devastate ecosystems and claim increasing numbers of lives. They also continue to wreck enormous economic damage, itself the cause of untold immiseration. The climate crisis, most obviously, is an environmental crisis. But it is also an economic crisis and a crisis of political and social action.