What is it to wear a uniform? Some occupations involve enforced adoption of a uniform, the police and armed services most obviously. Yet other occupations—such as management consultants—adopt styles or codes of dress that, while not enforced, have a currency and coherence such that we might think of them as a tacit uniform. Why—and to what effect—do some occupational groups voluntarily adopt tacit dress codes? This essay will explore those questions in relation to depictions of English traveling salesmen from the start of the nineteenth century to the eve of World War II. Representations of English traveling salesmen (“commercial travelers” in British parlance, the usage that will be adopted hereafter) frequently highlighted their physical appearance and in particular their modes of dress, showing remarkable continuity, certainly across the greater part of the period covered here.

Why is there no SEAT Barcelona? Barcelona is a well-named place brand, but SEAT consciously has disassociated itself from its geographic origins. This seems rather strange decision if one takes into account the increasing importance of the place-of-origin effect in automotive industry. This article describes how SEAT has constructed its Spanish identity and hidden its Catalan-Barcelona origins, and discusses SEAT’s own growing “denationalization” because of the acquisition by Volkswagen Group by using banal nationalism to gain the loyalty of the country’s nationalist consumers and to fashion a corporate image in line with Spain’s Marca España, or national brand. Through this decision, SEAT has lost the opportunity to associate itself with Marca Barcelona, a successful urban brand.

Today, in the aftermath of the subprime crisis, there is a foreboding sense that it is too easy for Americans to borrow. Living beyond our means on our cards and our mortgages, Americans borrowed at an unsustainable pace, and what put us here, the logic goes, was the unfortunate collision of lenders' greed and borrower's cupidity. Yet free-for-all borrowing defined another moment's economy as well, but without the ill consequences: the postwar period. After World War II, cheap credit underpinned the suburban prosperity, through government-insured loans, auto financing, and even department store Charga-Plates.

The half-century following the Civil War witnessed an epochal transformation in American telecommunications. In the 1870s, the telegraph network became a spawning ground for a remarkable spate of inventions that included the phonograph and the telephone, and around 1900 the telephone network became the first electrical communications medium that network providers intended to be accessible to the entire population. This transformation was a centerpiece of the still unprecedented burst of inventive activity that economic historians call the Second Industrial Revolution.

While co-operatives are traditionally associated with workers, consumers, and farmers, the business model, with its emphasis on democracy and community, has also been adopted by small business owners, the self-employed, and professionals. These business co-operatives are distinct phenomenon, because they primarily consist of independent organizational entities that are not co-operatives and are generally in direct competition with one another. They are unique in that they bring together separate organizations that seek to combat market threats while adopting a philosophy based on co-operative principles. This article begins with an overview of the Australian co-operative landscape. It then defines the concept of business co-operatives and then draws upon the Visual Atlas of Australian Co-operatives History Project, which has developed a large database of Australian co-operatives over time and space, to examine the development of business co-operatives in Australia. It looks at where business co-operatives formed in the economy, the motivation underlying their formation, their average life spans, and their relationships with the broader co-operative movement. The article highlights the value of business co-operatives in introducing the values of participatory democracy and working for the common good into unanticipated markets and reinforcing the co-operative movement.

Why do the United States and France, both capitalist economies that were dominated by private railways in the 19th and early 20th centuries, have very different transport systems today? After World War II France developed 200 mph high speed trains, while railways in the United States declined to near irrelevance. This paper argues that cross-national divergence was caused by private and public actions that structured capitalmarkets and controlled planning. In the United States private financial institutions used capital markets to shape rail development. In France, by way of contrast, the state directly intervened in financial markets and controlled planning. Both systems thrived until World War I. But, then, faced with growing competition from cars, buses and trucks and burdened by excessive debt, they declined towards bankruptcy. The Great Depression became a defining moment as a Socialist-dominated government in France nationalized railways while in the United States, President Roosevelt's New Deal failed to enact policies to ensure the competitive viability of rail in relation to motorized transport. Rarely used archival sources provide much of the evidence for this argument.

This article contributes to literature on the role of “firms” in the early modern English economy by exploring contracts for works between the Crown, the City of London, and large construction firms that built the Greenwich Hospital, City churches, and St. Paul’s Cathedral from 1670 to 1712. Primary sources show varying arrangements to pricing, mitigating risk, and securing finance occurred without the costs of intermediaries. Clients pushed financial and operating risks onto contractors through complex contracting systems that enabled and supported a number of coordination mechanisms in the market. The article argues that contracts rather than firms should be the unit of analysis for those wishing to examine productivity and changes in early modern business.

The Mexican Revolution (1910) brought important changes to the social, political and economic spheres of Mexico. New legislation was passed to protect workers and redistribute land. The state acquired rights to petroleum, water, and subsoil minerals. For entrepreneurs this was an abrupt change from the previous regime. They had to adapt to the new policies and administrative state structure. Business lawyers aided companies in a country where the government had circumscribed the private sector's participation in the economy. Lawyers offered their clients important services, such as lobbying and aid in corporate restructuring. This article explores how in the midst of these new revolutionary regimes an important investment group used the services of business lawyer Manuel Gómez Morin to create Mexico's first holding company and to issue the first mortgage bonds in the country.

During 1870–1914, business actors were concerned about the increasing uncertainty and occasional cheating in commercial relationships. In such situations, economic actors seek to improve the information they have, so as to benefit from strong comparative advantages over their competitors. This essay analyzes the acquisition and circulation of information and the actors and rules involved between 1870 and 1914, through a comparative approach (France and Italy). It considers individual trading firms, professional associations, information intermediating agencies, and state offices. We argue that these agencies (and therefore markets and institutions) acted much less as rivals than as complements in this era. Indeed, product information is different from information on the reputation of economic actors, the latter generating further distinctions between reputation for payment, respect of deadlines, and fidelity to the terms and objects of the contract. In turn, such kinds of situated micro-information differ from general statistics on market evolution and prices. We show that most economic actors were much more interested in the former (specifics) than in the latter kinds of information. To demonstrate this point, we compare the way traders, their associations, and private and state agencies intervened in the gathering, circulation, and interpretation of economic information in two countries, Italy and France, between 1870 and 1914. We argue that their opposite outcomes were not simply the result of different “mentalities” or attitudes to risk (as exogenously given), but rather can be traced to the different institutional settings and economic segmentation of the market for information in these two countries. In fact, unlike the Italian government, French ministries refused to provide their traders with micro-information on potential overseas correspondents and product characteristics. That is to say, “attitude to risk” and “animal spirits” are not exogenous and cannot be studied outside a given historical and institutional context.

Despite the widely held notion that U.S. government assistance to African American entrepreneurs commenced in the late 1960s, the evidence indicates that government interest in promoting black business actually began in the 1920s. Beginning with the appointment of James A. Jackson in November 1927, the U.S. Commerce Department’s agenda, until the mid-1950s, included “Negro Affairs.” Jackson’s actions did not generate the direct financial assistance to black entrepreneurs associated with such later government initiatives as Richard Nixon’s “Black Capitalism.” Nevertheless, Jackson’s pioneering efforts, to provide black businesspeople with useful information, helped to positively reshape contemporary African American entrepreneurs’ beliefs about the role of government in their lives.

The antimonopoly critique of big business that flourished in the United States during the 1880s is a neglected chapter in the history of American reform. In this essay, a revised version of Richard R. John's 2011 Business History Conference presidential address, John shows how this critique found expression in a gallery of influential cartoons that ran in the New York City–based satirical magazines Puck and Judge. Among the topics that the cartoonists featured was the manipulation of the nation's financial markets by financier Jay Gould.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the three largest life insurance companies had a presence in more than forty countries. In the 1880s they turned their attention to the Australian colonies, in which life insurance markets were expanding. The venture, however, was met with unexpected market resistance, and the expectations of the Big Three were never fully met. An eclectic paradigm provides an explanatory tool, which is applied to an investigation of the experiences of American companies. These companies were not able to realize the ownership and location, or internalize the advantages, needed to build a sustainable presence in the Australian life insurance market.

This article examines the business–government relations during the policy and decision-making processes that preceded the 1938 corporate tax reform in Sweden. This reform involved creating a new tax system under the turbulent economic conditions of the interwar period. But while literature on tax history has found that such circumstances often disable actors from agreeing on tax policies, a constructive outcome was still reached in the Swedish case. In this regard, it is demonstrated that one crucial factor behind the creation of the 1938 corporate tax reform was the formation of a coalition between the Social Democratic party and the business peak associations around a number of areas where their taxation interests coincided. Here, the Social Democrats agreed to shelter profits from corporations as long as they were managed according to the intentions of their countercyclical economic policy that encouraged industrial investments and employment expansion.

This article investigates the dynamics that characterized the top fashion industry companies in Italy and Spain in the last three decades of the twentieth century and the first thirteen years of the new millennium. The first section describes the sources and the methodology adopted. The second compares the features and transformations of the largest firms in the industry. The third focuses on these companies in 2013. The fourth discusses our findings, focusing on the impact that globalization and a possible “advantage of backwardness” had on the emergence of Italy and Spain as trendsetters.

Since the 1970s, a stretch of Broadway Avenue in Wichita, Kansas, has seen the growth of both Latino and Asian businesses. Using mapping, data analysis, and historical research, this study compares the growth of ethnic entrepreneurship between both populations. The results not only reveal similarities but also illustrate the degree to which ethnic entrepreneurship varies, depending on a population’s situation in a given location.

This article is a case study of a Chinese indigenous firm in the refrigerated egg-packing industry during the interwar period. I argue that the China Egg Produce Company (CEPC) was quick to grasp Western management in terms of vertical integration and business diversification. In addition, this firm took advantage of embedded social relations and social networks to construct a strong “internal architecture.” As a result, CEPC not only rivaled some six to eight British and American enterprises, but also took the lead in persuading them to form an international cartel during the 1930s. The data presented in this case study shows the surprising vitality and adaptability of Chinese businesses and suggests that China was in the process of developing a modern business system prior to the chaotic events of the late 1940s.

In this article I examine corporative management practices in electronics firms in Boston and in Silicon Valley from the 1920s to the 1960s. Managers in several key firms developed these practices in response to political and professional ideologies and as a way to address the problems of hiring, using, and retaining a highly skilled work force. They did this independently of the welfare capitalism plans of corporations such as Eastman Kodak and before the guru theorists and work empowerment programs of the 1960s. The corporatist methods first developed in Boston and further refined in Silicon Valley later diffused to most U.S. firms in the software, computer, Internet, and biotechnology industries.