The Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) has aggressively and persistently supported technologies key to the personal computer (PC) revolution. Uncovering this political-economic link provides an important corrective to the popular lore surrounding the origins of the PC. In their emphases on private sector initiative and entrepreneurial risk-taking, conventional PC histories conform to orthodox market-based explanations of technological and economic progress. In contradistinction, this article “brings the state back in” to the PC realm of apparent market purity.

In 1996, the Finnish government initiated an Action Plan aimed at the more effective control of economic crime and the grey economy, involving wide-scale reform in legislation, regulatory agencies, enforcement practice, and research activities. The emergence of this Action Plan forms the empirical focus of this article, which addresses two specific research questions. First, what were the economic, social and political factors that produced this Action Plan? Second, how can this initiative contribute to a critical assessment of the claims of “globalization discourses,” which seem to render such an idiosyncratic nation-state development as unlikely? The article critically examines some of the elements of globalization discourses with particular respect to the implications for the nature of contemporary states and the possibilities for the more effective regulation of corporate activity. It then outlines the processes and events that allowed the Finnish Action Plan to emerge. Finally, it asks what lessons are to be learnt from the Finnish case, before identifying some further lines of enquiry to be pursued. This Finnish initiative seems to represent one important instance of the extent to which states can develop relatively autonomous economic and social policy, even where this appears to be detrimental to the interests of “capital.”

This case, and the accompanying teaching note, is based on extensive interviews in the early months of the year 2000 with many of the participants involved in Global 2000—an organization set up to preempt a possible global business meltdown as a result of the “Millenium Bug.” Global 2000 emerged between November 1997 and April 1998 as a coordinated project among managers at various international banks to monitor suspicious private and public organizations from around the world, engage national and multilateral regulators, and develop and implement a workable strategy to forestall the worst potential consequences of the Year 2000 (Y2K) bug. This project involved maintaining control over a rapidly expanding network, establishing readily implementable procedures, setting incentives for a diverse community of players, and agreeing on effective country assessment charts. If they succeeded, they ran the risk of being criticized for crying wolf; if they failed, the world financial system would be at stake. This article tells the story of Global 2000's efforts to squash the Y2K bug and discusses the lessons of this story for our understanding of issues of collective action, network dynamics, and voluntary compliance.

This article analyzes the early-1980s Israeli bank-share crash at different points of its development to demonstrate the vital contribution of managers' professional and personal ethical norms to a fruitful collaboration between government authorities and the business sector. After presenting the case and discussing pertinent problems of external versus internal business regulation, this article provides a phase model of ethical decisionmaking in business that reconstructs the moral problems faced by the major players and probes appropriate responses to these problems. The application of the model to the bank-share affair shows how different stages in the evolution of the crisis introduce different ethical problems, inviting different moral considerations and calling for different solutions.