Organizational networks had a strong influence on the diffusion of green knowledge within the Swedish pulp-and-paper industry from the mid-1960s to the 1980s. The environmental adaptations made by this industrial sector were not merely the result of a corporate initiative or of the response by firms or industries to environmental regulation. An examination of the innovation-system approach that was used to further the industry's environmental goals reveals that the knowledge and technology development underpinning the project depended on a network of diverse actors. Within this network, the semi-governmental Institute for Water and Air Protection, working with a consulting company, was a critical generator and intermediary of knowledge. Thus, the success of the project was largely due to the Institute's balanced relations with government and industry.

The literature on multinational corporations argues that a foreign firm can legitimize its activities, improve its reputation in a host country, and reduce the risk of hostile actions by the host government (including expropriation) by approaching and incorporating influential members of the domestic elite in its business. By using the concept of obsolescing political legitimacy, we argue that this legitimating strategy can lead to a loss of reputation and eventual illegitimacy when the host country undergoes significant social and institutional changes. When these changes take place, the domestic society can perceive that the multinational benefited from a previous social and institutional order increasingly considered as illegitimate. Under these circumstances, the new order will question the legitimacy of the multinational's operations, increasing the risk of expropriation. We illustrate our hypothesis with the case of the political strategies of the International Telephone and Telegraph Company (ITT) in Chile in the twentieth century.

In their debates over the functions of advertising (such as “tell versus sell” and “inform versus manipulate”), practitioners have employed various conceptualizations of the “nature” of man. Implicitly and explicitly, as Professor Curti reveals, these views also tell us much about the “nature” of American society in the twentieth century.

This article assesses the brand-building strategies of Henry Heinz. Heinz began selling bottled horseradish to Pittsburgh residents in 1869. When he died in 1919, his company, H.J. Heinz, was one of the largest food processors in the world. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., and other scholars have pointed to Heinz's ability to make use of supply-side innovations such as improved transportation and continuous canning technology. But Heinz also paid attention to economic and social changes that were altering the demand side of the economy. Between 1860 and 1920, rising incomes, population growth, and urbanization helped shape the wants and needs of consumers. Heinz understood that shifting household priorities represented an important strategic opportunity. Acting on input from consumers and his own intuitions about the demand side, he created quality products and a meaningful brand. The entrepreneur also invested in a range of organizational capabilities that would support his products and corporate identity. Heinz's success in manufacturing, branding, and distributing condiments and other foods, many of which had previously been prepared at home, helped create a mass market for additional foodstuffs and eventually other consumer products.

Economics and history both strive to understand causation: economics by using instrumental variables econometrics, and history by weighing the plausibility of alternative narratives. Instrumental variables can lose value with repeated use because of an econometric tragedy of the commons: each successful use of an instrument creates an additional latent variable problem for all other uses of that instrument. Economists should therefore consider historians' approach to inferring causality from detailed context, the plausibility of alternative narratives, external consistency, and recognition that free will makes human decisions intrinsically exogenous.

In developing techniques and guides for many of the regular or routine activities of managers, the Systematic Management movement of the late nineteenth century performed an important service for American business. The movement's response to breakdowns in the internal co-ordination of manufacturing firms was especially significant and forms the basis for Professor Litterer's analysis of the relevant literature.

The appearance of large, integrated industrial firms at the turn of the century encouraged the introduction of innovative accounting practices. Professor Johnson examines the centralized management accounting system that made it possible for one such firm, the DuPont Powder Co., to plan its long-term development and to avoid the internal inefficiency that sometimes accompanies enormous size.

In this brief history of U.S. consumer finance since World War II, the sector is defined based on the functions delivered by firms in the form of payments, savings and investing, borrowing, managing risk, and providing advice. Evidence of major trends in consumption, savings, and borrowing is drawn from time-series studies. An examination of consumer decisions, changes in regulation, and business practices identifies four major themes that characterized the consumer finance sector: innovation that increased the choices available to consumers; enhanced access in the form of consumers' broadening participation in financial activities; do-it-yourself consumer finance, which both allowed and forced consumers to take greater responsibility for their own financial lives; and a resultant increase in household risk taking.

Dr. Lee analyzes the process whereby the relatively unsophisticated accounting practices of the eighteenth century were transformed, by the end of the nineteenth, into something resembling the more regular and consistent methods of today. He concentrates primarily on net asset valuation and profit determination but also on the development of costing techniques.

A comparative examination of late nineteenth-century worker productivity, machine utilization, and management methodology reveals the importance of process-oriented organization in American factories, where the highest technical skills were directed not at making products, as in Europe, but at making production lines. This orientation, together with a rapidly changing environment, required a particular kind of management and a new awareness of the management function.

From nineteenth-century traditions of corporate secrecy, American manufacturers have moved slowly toward more public and credible financial disclosure practices. Professor Hawkins examines the variety of pressures from the business community, the accounting profession, the government, and the public which has impelled this movement and governed its direction and tempo.

An important factor in the poor performance of the British economy in the twentieth century is the low level of investment by British firms in research and development. In this article, Professor Mowery compares the development of industrial research in Great Britain and the United States between 1900 and 1950, focusing on the reasons for the much lower levels of industrial research investment in Britain. He concludes that the substantial British lag can be attributed to differences in corporate structure, educational systems, and government policy.

Introduction of the multidivisional enterprise, which has generally replaced the functional or departmental form of organization in the twentieth century, required management accounting techniques that provided both divisional and top management with data with which to evaluate individual managers' performance, company-wide performance, and future company policy. Professor Johnson discusses the development of these controls at General Motors, the results obtained with them in practice, and their alleged shortcomings, especially in respect to division managers' attitudes towards constructive decisions that might tend to limit in the short run the rate of return on the investment entrusted to them. He concludes with some observations on the influence that organization has had on corporate goals.

Most scholars know little about the panic of 1792, America's first financial market crash, during which securities prices dropped nearly 25 percent in two weeks. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton adroitly intervened to stem the crisis, minimizing its effect on the nascent nation's fragile economic and political systems. U.S. policymakers soon forgot the crisis-management techniques Hamilton invented but failed to codify. Many of them were later rediscovered and became theoretical and practical standards of modern central-bank crisis management. Hamilton, for example, formulated and implemented “Bagehot's rules” for central-bank crisis management eight decades before Walter Bagehot wrote about them in Lombard Street.

Business history has never paid much attention to the environment. Brushing aside the firm's reliance and impact on the natural world, early business historians zeroed in on the role of the entrepreneur in big business's rise. They found it easy to truncate, marginalize or altogether ignore the physical processes by which the stuff of nature—“raw” materials—was carved or coaxed out of mountains, forests, and deserts, channeled into factories and squeezed and cajoled into commodities. They scarcely considered the ever-changing varieties of “waste” generated by businesses and customers, which so often infiltrated, polluted, and otherwise altered the world beyond factory and office. They devoted equally little attention to the effects of resource extraction and use on plants, animals, land, air, or water, much less entire ecosystems and climate.

Professor Chandler traces the rise and spread of the factory system in American industry, suggesting an explanation for the timing and the pattern of development of the industrial revolution in the United States.

Punched-card tabulating equipment, an important commercial predecessor of the computer, was used for processing large amounts of data in many business firms during the first half of the twentieth century. Life insurance was an information-intensive business dependent on firms' abilities to manage large quantities of data. This article examines both the role that tabulating machinery played in shaping insurance firms' business processes and the simultaneous role that life insurance as a user industry played in shaping the development of tabulating technology between 1890 and 1950. The ongoing interaction between the life insurance and tabulating industries shaped both in significant ways, setting the stage for continued interaction between the two industries during the transition to computers beginning at mid-century.

Over the course of the twentieth century, entrepreneurs developed a number of successful global brands in consumer-goods industries. However, few independent brands survived the merger waves of the 1980s. To address the question of why so few independent brands survived, this paper examines successful brands in industries that rely principally on advertising for competitive success. Successful consumer-goods brands in several industries and countries are compared in order to highlight innovative strategies pursued by brand managers. The analyzed brands are mainly owned by Europeans, although a few examples of American and Japanese brands are covered as well.

Punched-card tabulating equipment, an important commercial predecessor of the computer, was used for processing large amounts of data in many business firms during die first half of the twentieth century. Life insurance was an information-intensive business dependent on firms' abilities to manage large quantities of data. This article examines both the role that tabulating machinery played in shaping insurance firms' business processes and the simultaneous role that Ufe insurance as a user industry played in shaping the development of tabulating technology between 1890 and 1950. The ongoing interaction between the Ufe insurance and tabulating industries shaped both in significant ways, setting the stage for continued interaction between the two industries during the transition to computers beginning at mid-century.

Most studies of the early-modern Atlantic world give its emergence a sense of inevitability. Historians who have tried to understand networks in the early-modern Atlantic have focused solely on their successes, which skews our understanding. This analysis of the role played by Scottish networks in the production, distribution, and consumption of Madeira wine during that product's golden age, which lasted from 1640 to 1815, attempts to correct the record. Networks succeeded when they led to profitable sharing of information, goods, and services, and they failed when individuals were unable to get networks to function for them. Problems arose among the parties in the course of negotiating terms for sharing, monitoring the agreements, responding to disasters, and estimating the costs of transactions. At times, networks worked so well that they metamorphosed into other social and commercial forms, helping to establish critical nonmetropolitan links within and between the British and Portuguese empires.