Prizes for innovations are currently experiencing a renaissance, following their marked decline during the nineteenth century. Debates about such incentive mechanisms tend to employ canonical historical anecdotes to motivate and support the analysis and policy proposals. Daguerre's “patent buyout,” the Longitude Prize, inducement prizes for butter substitutes and billiard balls, the activities of the Royal Society of Arts and other “encouragement” institutions—all comprise potentially misleading case studies. The article surveys and summarizes extensive empirical research using samples drawn from Britain, France, and the United States, including “great inventors” and their ordinary counterparts, and prizes at industrial exhibitions. The results suggest that administered systems of rewards to innovators suffered from a number of disadvantages in design and practice, which might be inherent to their nonmarket orientation.

This article addresses the issue of whether large shareholders in Victorian public companies were active in the control of companies or were simply wealthy rentiers. Using ownership records for 890 firm-years, we examine the control rights, socio-occupational background, and wealth of large shareholders. We find that many large shareholders had limited voting rights and neither they nor family members were directors. This implies that the majority of public companies in the second half of the nineteenth century cannot be characterized as family companies and that large shareholders are better viewed as wealthy gentlemen capitalists rather than entrepreneurs.

This article explores how clusters have reacted to the recent process of globalization by comparing the development of two clusters that are located in the same region, the county of Møre og Romsdal in Norway. These are the furniture cluster and the maritime cluster on the west coast of Norway. When international competition increased, the first one declined while the other prospered and became more global. Structural differences explain only partly the different development paths of these clusters. In addition, firms’ strategic actions and the degree of collectively shared visions about international operations mattered for how the clusters developed.

Executives of today's public companies face a considerably different set of opportunities and constraints than did their counterparts in the managerial capitalism era, which reached its apex in the 1950s and 1960s. The growing importance of corporate governance featured prominently as circumstances changed for those running public companies. This article explores these developments, taking into account high-profile corporate scandals occurring in the first half of the 1970s and the early 2000s, the 1980s “Deal Decade,” the “imperial” chief executive phenomenon, and changes to the roles played by directors and shareholders of public companies.

Four giant volumes (plus a companion one on Humble Oil) appeared between 1955 and 1988 on the history of Standard Oil Company (New Jersey) and its successor (as of 1972) Exxon Corporation. These well-documented volumes took the story to 1975. As related by the publisher and author of this book, about four years after the 1999 megamerger of Exxon and Mobil and the formation of ExxonMobil, the merged unit gave a collection of its historical files—containing some four million documents—to the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History (DBC) at the University of Texas at Austin. When the document transfer was made, in 2003, William Hale, a thirty-year Exxon/ExxonMobil manager (most recently in the public relations department) suggested that it was time for a fifth volume of Exxon history. ExxonMobil's top management approved, and in 2005 the DBC asked Joseph Pratt to write it. He agreed, and the book under review, which covers the period 1973 through the merger to 2005, was written by Pratt “with the assistance of William Hale” and published by DBC.