In this suggestive essay, Professor Galambos surveys the large number of books and articles, published since 1970, that together point toward a new “organizational synthesis” in American history. Expanding upon an earlier, more tentative essay on the same subject published in the Autumn 1970 issue of the Business History Review, he contrasts the widely disparate postures adopted in recent years by historians studying organizational behavior. His survey reveals a rich diversity of opinion, less reliant than was previous scholarship upon abstractions drawn from the social sciences. This diversity of opinion, Galambos concludes, provides the organizational synthesis with much of its continued vitality, and makes possible “the kind of moral judgments that have always characterized the best historical scholarship.”

Fisheries are paradigmatic of renewable resources because of their ecological delicacy, their vulnerability to the indirect effects of economic activity, and, above all, their nonexclusive or “common-property” nature. In this article, Professor McEvoy shows how the California fishing industry, drawing upon some of the most fertile renewable resources in the world, underwent massive, thoroughgoing modernization in the first quarter of this century, triggered by the mechanization of fishing and the coincident opening of worldwide markets to local fish processors. Public agencies charged with the oversight of the industry and the conservation of fishery resources made valiant efforts to keep pace with new problems thrust upon them by the sudden industrialization of fishing. Their failure to do so effectively illustrates in stark relief the nature of twentieth-century problems in the management of wildlife, air, water, and other shared resources in a competitive economy.

By the 1920s the production of men's clothing was clearly divided into two sectors. The first consisted of a relative handful of large firms, technologically and organizationally sophisticated and engaged in the manufacture of better-quality garments. The “secondary sector” included a great many small and technically more primitive enterprises producing mainly lower-priced and lower-quality clothing. In this article, Dr. Fraser examines the development of the industry from the period following the Civil War through the post-World War I era in order to explain why this dualistic industrial structure emerged. In so doing, he draws on a thesis developed by Michael Piore and Alfred Chandler regarding the relationship between industrial organization and the structure of the market. Fraser argues that the expansion of the mass market does not necessarily lead to the concentration of production. It may, on the contrary, and especially in those cases where demand is particularly unstable, encourage the growth of a “secondary sector” whose minimal fixed investment makes it well-suited to handle the more variable component of demand.

The late nineteenth century was a critical epoch in the history of French industry. During this period, many French industrialists adopted, for the first time, entrepreneurial attitudes towards business. At the same time, however, traditional skilled trades continued to play an important role in the national economy. In this article, Professor Weissbach explores the attitudes and practices of nineteenth-century entrepreneurs in the French luxury trade. By focusing specifically on the Patronage industriel des enfants de l'ébénisterie—an organization established to assist, educate, and moralize children apprentices in the French furniture industry—Weissbach reveals that traditional and entrepreneurial attitudes and practices coexisted throughout the nineteenth century.