An examination of the fortunes of three hotel groups in the 1920s and 1930s suggests that the collapse of international demand and the growth of a middle-class motorized trade were the major influences on differential performance. While trading difficulties led to an effort to exit from unprofitable outlets or to rationalize supplies and services, opportunities for economy were restricted by customers' rising expectations of facilities and the need to protect a preeminent position in the market. Company organization appears to have contributed little, with the best performance achieved by the group with the smallest individual units and the least opportunity for structural specialization or economies.

The system of personal finance that developed in the United States was more fragmented than comparative arrangements in most industrializing countries, where savings banks had become large, diversified financial institutions. The federalist political structure of the U.S., combined with lobbying by existing intermediaries, inhibited the establishment of a centralized public provider of financial services for households such as emerged elsewhere. Moreover, the United States did not develop strong, diversified savings institutions at the local level, due in part to regulations that stifled innovation by savings banks and in part to the risk-averse organizational culture of the banks themselves. These factors enabled the proliferation of specialized intermediaries that aggressively marketed new financial services to households and facilitated the growth of new patterns of financial behavior among ordinary Americans.

This article examines in detail how John Maynard Keynes approached investing in the U.S. stock market on behalf of his Cambridge College after the 1929 Wall Street Crash. We exploit the considerable archival material documenting his portfolio holdings, his correspondence with investment advisors, and his two visits to the United States in the 1930s. While he displayed an enthusiasm for investing in common stocks, he was equally attracted to preferred stocks. His U.S. stock picks reflected his detailed analysis of company fundamentals and a pronounced value approach. Already in this period, therefore, it is possible to see the origins of some of the investment techniques adopted by professional investors in the latter half of the twentieth century.

“Corporate reputation” is a term that on the face of it hardly needs explanation. Historians have long used it in an unproblematic fashion to refer to the way a firm is perceived by others. Yet as with many such terms, corporate reputation can be theorized or at least formally defined. Scholars in the fields of marketing and organization increasingly are doing both; since the 1980s they have attempted to distinguish reputation from the related constructs of image, identity, status, legitimacy, celebrity, and brand equity. The project is ongoing, and a strong consensus has not yet been reached on how to define corporate reputation. Charles Fombrun, whose definitions have been perhaps the most widely used, suggests the following: “a collective assessment of a company's attractiveness to a specific group of stakeholders relative to a reference group of companies with which the company competes for resources.” Fombrun's definition contains three core ideas: firms have multiple reputations, depending on which stakeholders are being considered; corporate reputation is a comparative construct, because a firm is always judged in relation to something else—in this case, the firm's competitors; and firms' reputations are a source of competitive advantage or disadvantage.

Historians, who for valid intellectual reasons rarely attempt the formal definition of terms, have not participated in the theorizing of corporate reputation. Yet the peculiar skills of historians are much needed; for if the study of corporate reputation has underemphasized the role of institutional phenomena such as rules, norms, processes, and structures, it has all but ignored historical context and historical processes.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the United Fruit Company, based in Boston, Massachusetts, created an impressive network that produced bananas in Colombia for distribution to the U.S. market. The company grew its own fruit but relied as well on local entrepreneurs. United Fruit imposed draconian contracts on the growers, forcing them to trade on terms that were very favorable to the company. These practices set the standards for other exporters operating in the country, even those based in Colombia.

This cross-sectional study of small business tests conventional assumptions regarding backgrounds, motivation, characteristics, function, risks, and longevity, proving many of those assumptions to be imprecise or false. Quantification in historical depth reveals definite patterns both of fixity and change.

An 1890s loan book of the Bank of A. Levy permits a detailed examination of the lending operations of a private bank in California during the National Banking Era (1864–1914). This period has been intensively analyzed at the national and state level, but there are few studies of banks at the firm level. This unregulated bank was integrated into money markets and lent to a broad cross section of the community. Although the bank appeared to adhere to the real bills doctrine, it provided businesses with medium-term, uncollateralized financing. The bank priced risk carefully, offering rates equal to the lowest in the country to its best customers while charging extraordinarily high rates to borrowers deemed risky. In the absence of modern accounting, the bank's close scrutiny of borrowers' businesses and personal lives enabled it to fulfill a special intermediary role.

This article examines how the marketing and advertising of toothpaste brands evolved in the twentieth century, particularly from the 1950s to the 1980s. During these decades, the promotional strategies employed by leading toothpaste manufacturers were at odds with general developments in consumer product marketing. As branding strategies were being revolutionized by the discovery of a “Pepsi Generation,” the toothpaste market was itself being transformed by a technical innovation that was to have far-reaching consequences for the marketing of leading brands.

The National Association of Manufacturers was influential in establishing public relations as a permanent fixture in American corporate life. The Association took up the use of public relations in the depths of the depression, promoted its use strongly, and increased its stature.

This article analyzes the performance of foreign electric-utility companies and the evolution of the electric-power industry in Argentina from 1890 until the end of the 1950s, when the electric utilities were nationalized. It focuses on the decisions and strategies of the subsidiaries controlled by two holding companies: the Société Financière de Transports et d'Entreprises Industrielles (SOFINA) and the American & Foreign Power Company. The study suggests that the divergence in the performance of these two companies was determined both by their investment patterns and by their financial styles and management decisions. The impact of private decisions and public regulation on the Argentinean electric-power system is also explored.

Taking issue with such earlier theorists as Schumpeter, who believed that the rise of bureaucratic structures would stifle the innovative process that lies at the heart of capitalism and thus lead on to socialism, Professor Livesay discusses the careers of three innovative leaders who used the bureaucratic form of organization to keep innovation alive and to realize its implications. He argues that with shrewd leaders like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford II (and less well-known ones like Howard Stoddard) at the helm, bureaucratic organizations have been the mechanism of highly dynamic policies rather than the agency of socialistic stasis.

Utilizing data from a single state, Professor Keehn examines a number of important hypotheses about banking history and the role of banking in the process of economic growth and development in America from the Civil War to the creation of the Federal Reserve System.

This article focuses on the involvement of Siemens in the market for radiology equipment in Japan between 1900 and 1945. It explores why the German multinational company was unable to keep its dominant position in the Japanese market in the interwar years despite its technological competitiveness. At this time the Japanese medical market was already well structured when the country opened up to the West. In particular, it examines the firm's strategic choices in relation to the changing economic and technological environment, highlighting the importance for foreign multinationals of working together with national trading firms involved in the distribution of drugs and products for doctors.

The American city, following a half-century of rapid and choatic growth, was the subject of much attention after 1900. Efforts to reform its political structure and to improve and expand its service facilities demanded improvements in municipal accounting procedures as well. Professor Potts discusses the relative merits of commercial accounting, as applied to cities, and of new philosophies of accounting advanced in the light of the city's unique place in society. He explains how cities have oscillated between the two approaches, and concludes that the problem may be more adaptable to accounting philosophies designed for profit-making enterprises than has been generally supposed.

Were banks in the Jacksonian era merely bastions of privilege or were they vehicles of upward mobility for those without capital? The authors attempt to answer these questions by analyzing changes in the wealthholdings of directors of banks in Providence, Rhode Island, during the period 1830 to 1845. They find that bank charters granted in the 1830s did tend to benefit men with relatively little property and that they provided a rising group of entrepreneurs with the financial wherewithal to challenge the established elite.

Arguing that the American bituminous coal industry suffered from “excessive competition,” this study traces the industry's repeated failures to control output or prices, whether by various kinds of trade associations, mergers, or by attempts to secure government sanctions for cooperation. Although an over-zealous Department of Justice must bear some responsibility for the industry's “sick” condition, Professor Graebner concludes, the fundamental problem lay in the basic economic conditions in the industry.

Transnational history emerged strongly as globalization intensified in the 1990s, questioning national historiographies and creating new research agendas. Business history has not been part of this, but recent calls within the field to engage more visibly and authoritatively with debates on the history of globalization warrant a closer inspection of transnational history. The article draws on key concepts from transnational history and discusses their application in the work of, among others, Sven Beckert, Jessica Lepler, Stephanie Decker, Ray Stokes, and Michael Miller. The article argues that transnational history provides opportunities to increase business history's engagement with the history of globalization.

Taking a fresh look at the factors bearing on profitability of carrying coal from Newcastle to London in the eighteenth century, Professor Hausman finds that average ship loads rose and technology improved during the period. He notes that this is consistent with Adam Smith's dictum that England's effort to monopolize the colonial carrying trade, through the Navigation Acts, would divert capital from domestic to colonial shipping, thereby raising rates of return in the former and lowering them in the latter.

In this article, Professor Dintenfass reexamines entrepreneurial efficiency in the interwar British coal industry. Using previously neglected company documents, he shows that cost-reducing and price-enhancing innovations in coal extraction, organizational practice, and marketing were not widely diffused, though neither geology, finance, nor industrial relations inhibited their adoption. He concludes that mismanagement was an important cause of the British coal industry's misfortunes in the 1920s and 1930s, but that the coalowners' failure to employ the new techniques cannot be attributed to the structure of the industry or to the survival of outmoded forms of business organization.

In the early 1900s, a powerful antismoke movement in Chicago forced the Pennsylvania Railroad to develop strategies for reducing public protest against the company, limiting fines, and blocking legislation forcing railroads to electrify. The company pursued a policy of least steps, by retrofitting locomotives with ameliorative technology, through fuel substitutions, and by training firemen and engineers in efficient combustion methods. By 1909, however, pressure for electrification in Chicago intensified, and Pennsylvania managers worked to retain control over the pace of technological change. In coordination with other railroads, management attempted to obey smoke ordinances without interfering with railroad operations and profitability. Company archives reveal an earnest learning process and differences among railroad managers regarding appropriate responses to antismoke regulations.