This special issue is concerned with new approaches in business history to exploration of the role of business in both creating and addressing the mounting environmental crisis that has become apparent over the last half century. Two decades have passed since Business History Review published a pioneering special issue on business and the natural environment. The guest editors of that issue, Christine Rosen and Christopher Sellers, called for an “ecocultural approach” to business history and noted that strikingly little attention had been given to the issue of business and the natural environment in the field.

As in other countries, textile and apparel production in Germany is considered a victim of globalization. Domestic production and employment declined dramatically after its postwar peak in the late 1950s. Research has often attributed this trajectory to the trade liberalization policy of the German governments. However, this interpretation is puzzling. German trade policy was not as liberal as is claimed, nor did the industry disappear. This article addresses the issue using statistical evidence as well as archival material. The West German textile and apparel industry was using outward processing strategies comparatively early and was supported in that by German politicians starting in the early 1960s. As a result, the industry moved up the global value chain of textile production.

We define philanthropy as voluntary giving by households or corporate bodies to promote charitable causes, projects, and organizations or, alternatively, as “voluntary action for the public good.” Entrepreneurial philanthropy refers specifically to “the pursuit by entrepreneurs on a not-for-profit basis of big social objectives through active investment of their economic, cultural, social and symbolic resources.” Government projects financed by taxation and interfamily resource transfers are never philanthropic. Gifts only qualify as philanthropic when the donor is under no compulsion to give, when the gift benefits people with whom the donor is not directly connected, when the gift is made from the donor's own resources, and when the donor receives no direct economic benefit as a consequence of making the gift. In other words, philanthropists invest their own resources in causes they believe will benefit others and that yield no direct benefit to themselves or their families.

This article investigates the history of the Progressive Era effort to develop new techniques and technologies of control over American business and corporations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A revolution in Progressive economic regulation was rooted in the intellectual work of the so-called institutional economists—particularly in the context of what economists and lawyers like Richard Ely, John Commons, and Walton Hamilton ultimately talked about as the movement for the “social control” of business, with distinct emphasis on the legal and regulatory “foundations” of modern capitalism. With increased attention to dynamics rather than statics, the real social economy rather than ideal rational actors, and historical and institutional rather than theoretical and abstract renderings of business, industry, and the market, the institutionalists were directly concerned with problems of control, particularly those mechanisms of control available through law, politics, the state, and new technologies of legislative and administrative regulation.

The ability to combine technological innovation with innovation in product design has been recognized by business historians as an important characteristic of a successful business. This article examines the use of product design as a source of competitive advantage by leading firms in the Manchester cotton, Macclesfield silk, and Staffordshire pottery sectors in the period 1750–1860. Four design strategies are identified: copying (direct imitation and adaptation), commissioning, capacity building, and collaboration. Distinction is made between proactive firms, which innovated whenever there was an opportunity, and reactive firms, which innovated only when necessary.

In the late 1970s, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) unveiled the bubble policy as a central part of Jimmy Carter's plan to reform environmental regulations that many believed had grown too proscriptive and too costly for American industry. Since the EPA's formation, regulators had dictated method and means for reducing air pollution. The bubble returned the prerogative to business. But despite bipartisan support, the bubble never took off. Drawing on EPA records and interviews, this article shows how skeptical regulators intentionally made the bubble unwieldy, driving away businesses wary of uncertainty. Though Ronald Reagan's election seemed to lift the bubble's fortunes, his undiscerning assault on the administrative state ironically deflated the EPA's development of a viable alternative to the proscriptive model.

While entrepreneurs are increasingly recognized as important participants in the medieval economy, their philanthropic activities have received less attention than those of the gentry and nobility. This article identifies the contribution that the study of medieval entrepreneurs can make to broader business history debates surrounding the identity of philanthropists and their beneficiaries, the types of causes they supported, and their impact on wider society. Philanthropic entrepreneurs used the profits of commerce to provide infrastructure, health care, and education to their local communities. Their patterns of philanthropy differed from those of gentry, lawyers, and administrators. Support for municipal infrastructure emerges as a distinctive feature of entrepreneurial philanthropy, reflecting a belief in the importance of trade networks and civic reputation.

Using internal debates and surviving account books, this article traces the eighteenth-century history of the Norwegian glass industry, created to exploit Norway's immense natural resource wealth, and of the chartered company that would later become Norway's iconic Christiania Glasmagasin. The investors in the company, many of them among Norway's “founding fathers,” were individually responsible for its losses and it operated, remarkably, at an annual loss for nearly five decades. The article asks why, beyond the anticipation of a royal import ban on foreign glass, private investors might have continued to accept such losses. It focuses on tensions between cameralist and liberal ideologies in the creation of an important national industry, and on older (and perhaps more sustainable) ways of thinking about profitability.

This article focuses on chemical retailers Jack and Charles Colbert to, first, show the externalization processes linked to the greening of U.S. industry through stricter consumer and environmental protection regulations and, second, illustrate the limitations of nationally framed environmentalism targeting businesses in a global market. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Colberts traded chemicals that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had banned for use in the United States. They exported them legally to countries where the material was still a permitted commodity—primarily in the global South. Rare interview material illustrates how the exporters justified their unequal business deals by misappropriating the meaning of recycling.

William J. Novak's engaging historiography is at once a recovery project and a prolegomenon to a revised history of political economy. His article chronicles the achievements of Progressive Era institutional economists and critiques the way they have been obscured by the shadow of the Chicago School of economics. Why do the Progressives deserve to be recovered and remembered? According to Novak, it is because they “underwrote one of the more fundamental governmental revolutions in modern times” and created the foundations for the “social control of business” (pp. 676, 672).

The article analyzes the relationship between entrepreneurial philanthropy and the competitive process. Competitive conditions interacted significantly with entrepreneurial responses to ethical problems posed by the rapid emergence of factory production following the British Industrial Revolution. Entrepreneurs’ attitudes toward regulation and the labor process are used to identify the major differences and similarities in competitive behavior. These variations are explored using nineteenth-century case studies highlighting examples of philanthropy and competitive behavior. The analysis leads to a typology showing that entrepreneurial philanthropic behavior is conditioned by business strategy variables: specifically, combinations of technological and labor resources controlled by individual entrepreneurs and their businesses.

Looking across the long twentieth century, this article tracks the rise and fall of one form of anti-competition regulation: the certificate of public convenience. Designed to curb “destructive competition” in certain industries, such as transportation and banking, certificate laws prevented firms from entering those industries unless they could convince regulators that they would satisfy an unmet public demand for goods or services. This history highlights how lawmakers used similar techniques in governing infrastructure and finance—two fields that are not often studied together. It also shows that state regulation both prefigured legal change at the federal level and then lagged behind it, suggesting that different dynamics have been in play at each level of governance in devising competition policy over the last century.

We examine the factors leading to the onset of organizational rigidities in the dominant vacuum cleaner firms of the 1920s, Hoover and Eureka. Strategies aimed at strengthening organizational commitment, in conjunction with low levels of organizational diversity—owing to managerial hierarchies dominated by men recruited from the sales force—restricted organizational flexibility and adaptability while accentuating resistance to change. In conjunction with core competencies that largely reflected conditions in the previous rapid-growth phases of both firms, organization rigidity left them vulnerable to the new conditions of the Depression, including product and value chain innovation by a new entrant, Electrolux.

Recent literature on philanthropy and business has focused on the returns to businesses and entrepreneurs from giving. In this article, we show how historical context impacts the motivations and organizational forms created over time in philanthropic giving that effect and affect such returns. We do this through the prism of the changing ownership structures in the Scotch whisky industry in the twentieth century using an institutional theory lens. In doing so, we capture the story of three sisters who inherited a Scotch whisky business in the 1940s and transformed it into a hybrid philanthropic-commercial vehicle that remains in operation today. We present an extended theoretical model illustrating the interplay of context, motivation, and organizational structure over time on exchanges of capital in entrepreneurial philanthropy.

In 1989, Edgar Woolard began his tenure as chief executive of the chemical giant DuPont by calling for a new “corporate environmentalism.” DuPont has changed dramatically since then to become more environmentally sustainable, but the company still has a poor record in some areas. The sustainability push also had mixed financial consequences. Though eco-efficiencies saved DuPont billions of dollars, the effort to create more sustainable engines of corporate growth failed to meet Wall Street expectations. The DuPont story offers important insights into the difficulties of greening an established industrial enterprise.