In this essay, Professor Gitelman draws upon new primary source materials to help clarify the outlook of American business leaders in the years immediately preceding U.S. entry into World War I. He shows how business leaders brooded, at periodic private conferences, over the profound loss in public esteem they believed business had suffered. This “crisis of confidence,” he concludes, precipitated defensive associational efforts. The creation of conference boards—the brainchild of Magnus W. Alexander—provided an institutional base for these efforts, and pointed the way to the creation of the National Industrial Conference Board.

Though Canada was, in the opening decades of the twentieth century, a net capital importer, Canadian-based companies dominated the Mexican public utilities industry. In this article, Professors Armstrong and Nelles explain how this “curious capital flow” came about. Their explanation stresses the personal ties linking Canadian businessmen to the maverick American engineer-entrepreneur F.S. Pearson. In addition to detailing these ties, they describe the methods used to finance the promotions, speculate about the insiders' rates of return, and estimate the origins and magnitude of the capital involved.

In this article, Professors Dutton, Thomas, and Butler trace the sixty-year history of a major managerial technology—the progress function—from its discovery in post-World War I airplane manufacture to its post-World War II popularity among management consultants. By statistically analyzing the large number of progress function studies, they demonstrate that its investigation has become balkanized by academic discipline, and that applied researchers have frequently ignored the contingencies stressed in the leading theoretical studies. Their article is thus a revealing example of how social scientific concepts get translated into business practice.

In this article, Professors Doucet and Weaver examine the North American shelter business between 1860 and 1920. Drawing upon the business records of the Hamilton, Ontario, real estate firm of Moore and Davis, they analyze the construction, ownership, and management of the North American shelter staple—the single-family detached dwelling. Since these activities had significant effects on the everyday lives of urban dwellers, they reveal significant social as well as business patterns. Doucet and Weaver conclude that this firm, and by implication the industry as a whole, preferred the prudent and routine to the innovative and daring, suggesting, in contrast to the work of recent scholars, that continuity rather than change typified urban development during these decades.