This paper explores the origins of the Silicon Valley model for regional economic development, and attempts to deploy this model elsewhere in the United States and abroad. Frederick Terman, Stanford's provost, first envisioned its unique partnership of academia and industry, and trained the first generation of students who effected it. He patiently cultivated an aggressively entrepreneurial culture in what he called “the newly emerging community of technical scholars.” Beginning in the 1960s, business groups elsewhere set out to build their own versions of Silicon Valley, some enlisting the assistance of Terman and his proteges. After discussing the emergence of the Stanford-Silicon Valley effort, the paper examines in detail the New Jersey Institute of Science and Technology, an effort led by Bell Laboratories; the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest and the SMU Foundaton for Science and Engineering in Dallas, Texas; and the Korea Advanced Insitute of Science and Technology, Terman's last and arguably most successful attempt. The paper discusses the reasons for the difficulties in creating new versions, and suggests explanations for the apparent success of the Korean experiment.

The performance of industrial securities in the depression of 1893-97 went far toward ridding the financial community of the idea that such securities generally lacked investment quality. This ship in investing sentiment was a factor of major significance in accelerating the merger movement, the promoters of which, in turn, broadened the market for industrials still further. This they accomplished by offering wide participations in promising ventures, by sweetening those participations through extensive recourse to preferred stocks, and by employing promotional techniques new to the field of industrial security marketing. The creation of a broad market for industrial stocks, hitherto highly inflexible administrative tools, meant vastly increased fluidity of ownership. By the turn of the century the transition was well under way from closely held, “inside” ownership of American business to semipublic, “outside” hands.

This article suggests that the business history of emerging markets should be seen as an alternative business history, rather than merely adding new settings to explore established core debates. The discipline of business history evolved around the corporate strategies and structures of developed economies. The growing literature on the business history of emerging markets addresses contexts that are different from those of developed markets. These regions had long eras of foreign domination, had extensive state intervention, faced institutional inefficiencies, and experienced extended turbulence. This article suggests that this context drove different business responses than are found in the developed world. Entrepreneurs counted more than managerial hierarchies; immigrants and diaspora were critical sources of entrepreneurship; illegal and informal forms of business were common; diversified business groups rather than the M-form became the major form of large-scale business; corporate strategies to deal with turbulence were essential; and radical corporate social-responsibility concepts were pursued by some firms.

Two decades have passed since the publication of The Visible Hand, Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.'s, magisterial account of the rise of the modern business enterprise in the United States. Although Chandlers pathbreaking work has been widely hailed as a landmark in business history, only rarely has anyone considered systematically its influence on the large body of historical scholarship on related topics. This essay is intended to help fill this gap. It is divided into two sections. The first section reviews Chandlers argument, touches on the relationship of Chandlers oeuvre to his personal background, and locates The Visible Hand in the context of American historical writing. The second considers how three groups of historians have responded to Chandlers ideas. These groups consist of champions who creatively elaborated on Chandler's intellectual agenda; critics who probed anomalies between Chandler's argument and their own research; and skeptics who rejected Chandlers analysis outright.

Professor McCraw surveys the state of the art of understanding regulatory commissions in American history, evaluating the relevant literature in history, economics, political science, and law.

During the 1960s, many academics, consultants, computer vendors, and journalists promoted the “totally integrated management information system” (MIS) as the destiny of corporate computing and of management itself. This concept evolved out of the frustrated hopes of 1950s corporate “systems men” (represented by the Systems and Procedures Association) to establish themselves as powerful “generalist” staff experts in administrative techniques. By redefining the computer as a managerial “information system,” rather than a simple technical extension of punch-card “data processing,” the systems men sought to establish jurisdiction over corporate computing and to replace accountants as the primary agents of managerial control. The apparently unlimited power of the computer supported a new conception of information, defined as the exclusive domain of the systems men (assisted by operations research specialists and computer technicians). While MIS proved impossible to construct during the 1960s, both its dream of all-encompassing automated information systems and the resulting association of information with the computer endured into the twenty-first century.

In coping with large-scale problems of management, the railroads had to devise new methods for mobilizing, controlling, and apportioning capital, for operating a widely dispersed plant, and for supervising thousands of specialized workers. In these activities, Professor Chandler argues, were created basic plans for the structural form of the modern American corporation.

This article begins with an overview of the changing context of U.S. industrial enterprise from the Second Industrial Revolution of the late nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War. It then examines the changes in the nature of competition, in the financial markets, and in corporate management that transformed the industrial environment in the postwar decades. Against that historical background, the essay describes in detail the results of an empirical study aimed at discovering how U.S. companies maintained, increased, or dissipated their organizational capabilities and how the market for corporate control affected that behavior.

International telecommunication is not only a business but also a political enterprise, the subject of great-power rivalries. In the late nineteenth century, British firms held a near monopoly, because Britain had more advanced industry, a wealthier capital market, and a merchant marine and colonial empire that provided customers for the new service. After the 1880s, they encountered increasing competition on the North Atlantic from American, German, and French firms. Elsewhere, the British conglomerate Eastern and Associated retained its hegemony until the 1920s. Following World War I, radiotelegraphy threatened the dominance of cables. In the 1930s, cable companies were almost bankrupted by the Depression and by competition from shortwave radio.

In this important study Professor Lazonick provides an astute reappraisal of why Britain's once dominant economy has failed to meet the challenges of international competition in the twentieth century. The vehicle for his discussion is cotton manufacture, the industry which, through the technological and commercial innovations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, made Britain the leading industrial power. Among Dr. Lazonick's questions are why did Britain's preeminance in this industry come to an end? Why did technological innovation yield to stagnation? Why did inefficient modes of economic organization persist in the face of manifest inadequacy? And what does the history of this industry have to teach us about recent economic theory?

The growth of big business in America in the last two decades of the nineteenth century was primarily a response to the rise of urban markets — a result, in turn, of the spreading railroad network. Then, as a new century began to unfold, the dominant influence upon big business development came to be technological. Discernible patterns of integration, combination, diversification, and administration influenced and were influenced by the rise of huge companies and oligopolistic industries. Price competition yielded to other weapons, and the economy adjusted to make room for the young giants in its midst.

Even in laissez-faire days there was a “corporate conscience,” well defined and with active, if limited, manifestations. Over the course of years not only criticism but changing social forces and modifications of the economic system itself exerted a broadening influence on the attitude of American business toward its public responsibilities.

This study of the accounting records of a mid-nineteenth-century New England textile enterprise sheds new light on the emergence of modern cost accounting as a specialized tool of management.

Offering a significant revision of prevailing views, Professor Nelson examines the actual implementation of scientific management in industry and finds that it bore only a superficial resemblance to the system described by Taylor and his disciples. Rather than a “partial solution of the labor problem,” the Taylor system was a comprehensive answer to the problems of factory coordination, a refinement and extension of the earlier ideas known as systematic management.

A common lament is that business history has been marginalized within mainstream business and management research. We propose that the remedy lies in part with more extensive engagement with organization theory. We illustrate our argument by exploring the potentialities for business history of three cognitive frameworks: institutional entrepreneurship, evolutionary theory, and Bourdieusian social theory. Exhibiting a higher level of theoretical fluency might enable business historians to accrue scholarly capital within the business and management field by producing theoretically informed historical discourse, demonstrating the potential of business history to extend theory, generate constructs, and elucidate complexities in unfolding relationships, situations, and events.

The authors of this article argue that companies' high cost of capital or short investment horizons do not explain the decline in global competitiveness of many U.S. industries in the 1970s and 1980s. Instead, they find the source of malaise in the capital-budgeting and financial-planning systems that arose after the Second World War. Although they allowed managers in large companies to evaluate some aspects of their business efficiently and comprehensively, these systems also obscured the value of investment in organizational capabilities, because such investments were hard to quantify—indeed, even to describe—within the financial models in widespread use. As a result, companies often invested vigorously—but in the wrong things. The authors define a set of desirable capabilities and, using case studies, describe both the problems of the recent past and the requirements for successful investment in the future.

In the wake of the Great Recession, a new cycle of scholarship opened on the history of American capitalism. This occurred, however, without much specification of the subject at hand. In this essay, I offer a conceptualization of capitalism, by focusing on its root—capital. Much historical writing has treated capital as a physical factor of production. Against such a “materialist” capital concept, I define capital as a pecuniary process of forward-looking valuation, associated with investment. Engaging recent work across literatures, I try to show how this conceptualization of capital and capitalism helps illuminate many core dynamics of modern economic life.

The methods used to account for business assets in Britain and the United States during the nineteenth century are here examined in a context of interplay between “internal economic criteria” and “external constraints.”

Research on entrepreneurship remains fragmented in business history. A lack of conceptual clarity inhibits comparisons between studies and dialogue among scholars. To address these issues, we propose to reinvent entrepreneurial history as a research field. We define “new entrepreneurial history” as the study of the creative processes that propel economic change. Rather than putting actors, hierarchies, or institutions at the center of the analysis, we focus explicitly on three distinct entrepreneurial processes as primary objects of study: envisioning and valuing opportunities, allocating and reconfiguring resources, and legitimizing novelty. The article elaborates on the historiography, premises, and potential contributions of new entrepreneurial history.