A great deal of attention has recently been focused on the extent of Japanese direct investment in the United States. In the following historical survey, Professor Wilkins details the size and scope of these investments from the late nineteenth century, showing that Japanese involvements in America have deep historical roots. At the same time, she analyzes the ways in which late twentieth century Japanese direct investment differs from the earlier phenomenon and attempts to explain why it has aroused such concern among both business leaders and the general public.

Examining the efforts to restructure the electric power industry during the early 1920s, this article challenges the view that proponents of corporate liberalism shared a belief in the legitimacy of corporate capitalism and that conflicts among them involved only technical and managerial issues. It argues, rather, that corporate liberals could disagree about the goals of economic planning as well as about tactics and strategy and that they often held conflicting perceptions of the nature of corporate capitalism in American society.

Scholars generally have studied the emergence of American film stars in one of two ways: as an aesthetic, cultural phenomenon or as part of the larger story of corporate consolidation in the film industry. This article combines these approaches, arguing that the early film star played two overlapping roles. Within the new long feature films, stars served as focal points for continuity across complex narratives; within the new vertically integrated film corporations, they became focal points for the coordination of production, distribution, and promotion. The article concludes by suggesting that the interconnections between aesthetic practice and industrial organization bear further examination.

The following article examines U.S. investment in Mexico at the turn of the century, focusing on the tropical plantation companies and their promises of enormous profits. Viewed in the light—or shadow—of Dollar Diplomacy, the usual interpretation of such events has been that American investors exported profits and undermined internal development while the U.S. government established political hegemony. This article calls both of these outcomes into question.

Labor policies based on age have been variously explained as benevolent, maliciously anti-union, rational, or prejudicial. Nineteenth-century devices to stabilize the work force set the stage for the Pennsylvania Railroad's 1900 program of age limits, mandatory retirement, and pensions, but its immediate cause was the conviction that the seniority system already in place seriously reduced the efficiency of older workers. As the following article shows, this economic calculation remained appealing to some executives in the twentieth century, even as the actual costs of pensions became painfully apparent. For others, the old fear of workers' unrest reappeared as a justification for ignoring the impending crisis of the 1930s.

The Arabian American Oil Company's plan to build a pipe-line from eastern Saudi Arabia to the Mediterranean seemed to many an ideal project for business-government cooperation. A sound business project for the company would give American policymakers more and cheaper oil to aid plans to rebuild Western Europe, as well as a significant presence in the Middle East. Events in that tumultuous region, however, soon embroiled both the company and the U.S. government in a more complex relationship than had been envisioned.

The following article traces TVA director David Lilienthal's efforts to establish the Electric Home and Farm Authority the Tennessee Valley and analyzes the outcome of that program in the early 1930s. The essay demonstrates that, contrary to some interpretations, administrators like Lilienthal were advocating state-sponsored consumption-driven economic growth well before the late 1930s.

Although the existing academic literature on management practices contrasts national styles, it does not pose or answer key questions about the effectiveness of different approaches. Industrial relations specialists and engineers both offer highly specialized work that provides little detailed analysis of the productivity and profit results of changes in production techniques or of the interaction between the two. The applied economics literature on profit and productivity is equally unhelpful, because it relates differences of output to general differences in factor input, rather than to the detailed organization of production. This article provides some tentative answers to new questions about the efficacy of different approaches to production management, and it contributes to the ongoing debate about whether the significance of the “labor problem” has been over-rated in Britain.

The record industry in the United States was controlled until the 1950s by a half dozen major companies, which produced music directed primarily toward the white middle class. The following article uses the history of Ace Records, a small, regional, independent company, to examine the nature of the record industry in the 1950s and 1960s. The article explains the shifts in demography and technology that made possible the growth of the independents, as well as the obstacles and events that made their demise more likely. It also traces the changes that such companies, by recording and promoting rhythm and blues and early rock ‘n’ roll, introduced to the cultural mainstream.

In his efforts to secure passage of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, John F. Kennedy had to placate not only oil and coal interests at home, but also traditional trade partners like Venezuela abroad, and he also had to foster the broad national security aim of retaining domestic oil reserves. This article argues that Kennedy was able to utilize a fair trade doctrine to gain enactment of legislation that would both lower trade barriers and assist domestic producers hurt by increased imports.

In Scale and Scope, Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., sets out a complex and sustained interpretation of “the dynamics of industrial capitalism.” His work, the culmination of decades of study, spanning three major economies (the United States, Great Britain, and Germany) from the 1880s to the 1940s, will undoubtedly be a central point of reference for all business historians for a very long time to come. More than that, it also makes contributions to, and has wide implications for, a great variety of fields of scholarship, research, and debate. It is hard to imagine any single book review that could do justice to the scale and the scope of Chandler's work.

Low second-class postage made it easy for national magazines and regional newspapers to reach their readers in the late nineteenth century. But the Post Office and some members of Congress questioned the wisdom of a policy that enabled advertising-filled publications to circulate at subsidized rates. This article traces the efforts to reform the postal policy governing periodicals, which became enmeshed in Progressive Era debates about the value of mass culture and government's role in promoting it.

Although many have studied regulatory policy in the United States, few have viewed it as a process, shaping markets and industries and, in turn, being affected by the structures it helped to create. By looking at the forty-year history of airline regulation and then focusing on one company's adaptations to deregulation, this article demonstrates that monocausal explanations fail to capture the complex and dynamic nature of the interaction between regulation and competition in America.

I am extremely grateful for the valuable and challenging comments of the contributors to this review colloquium on Scale and Scope. Their remarks have allowed me to clarify and to define more sharply the basic concepts, focus, and aims of the book. In discussing each reviewer's comments, I attempt whenever possible to place them in the larger context of my views on the development of industrial capitalism.

Although lawyers made crucial contributions to the development of business, scholars have said little about their role. As the following article explains, lawyers fought restrictions on business growth, worked to make laws uniform, and helped to establish legal rules in the areas of corporate reorganization, finance, and regulation. Pioneering a new type of organization—the large firm—they moved beyond the realm of legal doctrine and acquired the political influence, local knowledge, and community connections needed to reform the nation's decentralized legal system in ways that fit the demands of national-scale business.

In the following essay on the railroad industry, Maury Klein examines preconceptions and misunderstandings surrounding Americans' views of regulation and competition. He argues that the United States seems to want competition without losers and that, at least in the case of railroads, regulation has often tried to ensure this outcome without a real understanding of the economics of the industry.

In attempting to meet government-mandated profitability and efficiency goals, the British Rail Board behaved not simply as the government directed, but rather according to internal needs and initiatives, as this careful examination of the implementation of sector management demonstrates. Even in the early days of movement toward privatization, the board tried to develop its own policies, and, though it soon became clear that full divestiture was to be the goal, events proceeded through various stages, rather than in a forced march along a government-designed path.