By looking at the policy termination of state aid to shipbuilders in Amsterdam, this article illustrates how a major policy paradigm shift within recent history, and the change from Keynesian to neoliberal policies, can be explained. The article is informed by a multilevel governance approach to policy change analysis and is based on different types of sources. It presents an in-depth case study of the closing of the Amsterdam shipyards and analyzes the role of policy change at different governance levels (i.e., city government, national Parliament, national government, and the European Commission). In doing so, we are able to illustrate how new actors—in this case the European Commission and the Commissioner for Competition—were able to terminate long-existing policies of state aid to shipbuilders under the auspices of improving competition and the free market at the start of the 1980s.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, millions of theatergoers, students, and industrial workers saw one or more animated short films, shot in Technicolor and running eight to nine minutes, that were designed to build public support for the principles and practices of free enterprise. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation quietly funded the production of this series of cartoons, titled Fun and Facts about American Business, through multiple grants to industrial animation house John Sutherland Productions via Harding College, an evangelical college in rural Arkansas that would become known nationally for its anti-communist and conservative political activism. This article examines the creation and distribution of the Fun and Facts films in the years 1946 through 1952 as a notable case of ephemeral film and as an example of the Cold War public relations movement known as “economic education.” Further, the article examines the consequences of economic education as a conceptual category on the production and distribution of Cold War industrial propaganda.

After reflecting on the thematic evolution of business history as a field over the past 50 years, this revised presidential address invites readers to consider the potential payoffs of expanding the contexts in which business historians work together on research projects, as well as with colleagues from cognate fields and with students. In addition to charting the steady growth in collaborative research among business historians since 2000, the essay also identifies areas that especially lend themselves to this mode of historical inquiry, including comparative or transnational analysis that requires detailed knowledge of multiple societies, the development of oral history projects, and the use of data science techniques. It concludes by exploring the advantages of incorporating interdisciplinary research teams into curricular structures, using the example of the Bass Connections program at Duke University.

In his Farewell Address, President Eisenhower warned that the military-industrial complex (MIC) threatened to dominate American research, crowding out commercial innovation. Ironically, a number of analysts point to spin-off benefits of the 1950s' military effort as a crucial source of American high-tech competitiveness, often citing the key example of the relationship between military jet aircraft and the Boeing's 707. But the huge military investment in jet aviation had both benefits and costs for the commercial industry. This article compares the development of the Boeing 707 and its relationship to military projects like the KC-135 tanker to the contemporary development of commercial jet aircraft by other companies that were also integral parts of the military-industrial complex (MIC), including Douglas Aircraft and its commercial DC-8 and Convair and its commercial 880 and 990. Using evidence from archives, interviews with retired company executives, contemporary trade press, and academic studies, the article concludes that membership in the MIC did not offer firms a leg up in commercial markets. President Eisenhower was generally right about the costs of the military effort, but military spending remained low enough to allow commercial industry to thrive in parallel to the defense industry.

The transfer of American management ideas was a central part of the Cold War struggle over ideologies. A key mediator was the European Recovery Program, which conveyed American influences to European management specialists. However, a direct influence was not always possible, as in Finland, which officially blocked assistance because of foreign policy considerations. Still, it was among the first countries to follow Harvard University’s lead in launching advanced management training. We examine how and why the focal actors adopted the American model of executive education, and how they managed to translate foreign ideas persuasively to the local business elite. The translation of executive education to Finland was a lengthy process that involved modification and readjustment of the original idea according to emerging needs. The Advanced Management Program became the core of the curriculum of Finland’s leading executive education institution and thus has influenced the emergence of new business culture.

Explanations of why firms exist and evolve and how intellectual property—including trademarks—contributes to their growth, survival, and impact on globalization and deglobalization have been widely studied in business history and in other fields. Drawing on the study of firms with multinational activity, this article argues that ownership of strong brands can have multiple impacts on the nature of the firm, on the dynamics of industries, on processes of globalization and deglobalization, and on shifts of power and wealth. In the process of doing so, this paper also argues that business history has great potential to have an impact beyond the field, serving as a “hub” for dialogue between disciplines. To achieve that, business historians need to remain truthful to their core competences, which include conducting well-grounded archival-based research, taking into account the uniqueness of the firm and the complexity of the environment, and conducting research that is comparative and international. This article is based my presidential address presented at the Business History Conference on March 16, 2019, in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia.

This article examines the efforts of one British steel company to acquire knowledge about American industrial productivity in the first post-World War II decade. It argues that company information-gathering initiatives in this period were overshadowed by the work of the formal productivity missions of the Marshall Plan era. In particular, it compares the activities of the Steel Company of Wales with the Anglo-American Council on Productivity (AACP), whose iron and steel industry productivity team report was published in 1952. Based on evidence from its business records, this study shows that the Steel Company of Wales was undertaking its own international productivity investigations, which started earlier and were more extensive and differently focused from those of the AACP. It makes the case for viewing companies as active participants in the gathering and dissemination of productivity knowledge in Britain’s steel sector after 1945.

The Social Democratic Party not only ruled Sweden for most of the twentieth century but also owned one of the country’s largest advertising groups. The company, founded in 1947 as Folkreklam and later renamed Förenade ARE-Bolagen, rapidly became dominant in outdoor advertising in Sweden and remained in that position until the late 1980s. This paper expands the previous research on party-owned enterprises, a type of businesses that is rare in the Western democratic world, covering the history of ARE from its inception to its eventual merger with JCDecaux in 1997. It is shown that the owner relationship with the party was highly beneficial for the company, as it provided preferential access to adverting space and public contracts from government agencies and municipalities without formal competition. The party benefited from the control over sensitive information pretraining to strategies in political propaganda during elections and from the financial contribution of ARE.

In Japanese society the pinnacle of economic and political power resides in Tokyo conglomerates and elite ministries: the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) and the Ministry of Finance. Until now, the story of this power arrangement has been told from the perspective of national bureaucrats and big business executives. The image projected to the outside world has been of cooperative, trust-based relational contracting with big business at the top “taking care” of its suppliers and subsidiaries below. The story from the bottom, however, is one of technology expropriation (of patentable technology) and monopsony squeeze (unilateral cost-down demands, for example). Firms unwilling to toe the line have been wholly excluded from access to the benefits reserved for those at the top of the pyramid, where one finds lucrative main bank financing, government support, and copious technological information.

This article offers a historical narrative of the political struggle by independent-minded entrepreneurs in postwar Japan. Central to the struggle has been the challenge of building broad-based coalitions to avoid becoming embedded in these hierarchies while at the same time trying to obtain alternative sources of finance and technological know-how. The most successful example of such efforts is the Association of Small and Medium Size Enterprise Entrepreneurs (SME Doyukai). The SME Doyukai has somehow managed to remain completely independent from the state, while most other small business associations have not. This independence has not been free, and the association has gone through a number of institutional dilemmas as a result. We analyze these dilemmas over time and offer comparative lessons.

The state played an important role as political and economic manager in postwar New Zealand. By fostering manufacturing, governments aimed to provide paid, productive employment, conserve foreign exchange, and support a welfare state. The history of pulp and papermaking using state-planted pine forests is a good example of a government-business joint venture to create a new export industry and new national wealth. Governments of both major political parties cooperated in capital formation, land use, hydroelectricity, roads, railroads, a modern port, and town construction. This longterm state commitment helped propel the industry toward largescale vertical integration so that it could achieve economies of scale and scope and compete in world markets.

Why did subcontracting remain, well until the end of the nineteenth century, a viable way to organize metropolitan manufacturing? This article addresses historically and theoretically the reasons for the permanence of subcontracting as a viable alternative to centralized forms of production in London. It also questions the literature that equates the decline of subcontracting with the rise of sweating and argues for a reinterpretation of traditional explanations that saw the “sweater” as a central figure in the “degeneration” of the metropolitan productive system. The article concludes by proposing a reinterpretation of the “decline of subcontracting” and argues that the logic of flexibility of subcontracting was challenged by the increasing power of London wholesalers and retailers and the demands of fin-de-siècle mass consumption.

A renewed political interest in profit sharing and employee codetermination prompts an analysis of the Swedish wage-earner funds, implemented by a Social Democratic government in 1983 and dismantled by a center-right government in 1991. This article explains the funds’ financial performance and the political decisions surrounding their dismantlement. It finds that the funds underperformed slightly in relation to financial targets. Reasons include inexperienced boards, limited investment opportunities, and a hostile attitude from the business community. For the center-right parties, getting rid of the funds was an ideological decision. Transferring the assets to research foundations and public venture capital funds would improve the business climate, compensate firms for taxes paid to finance the wage-earner funds, and ensure that the Social Democrats would not be able to reinstate the funds. The intense debate surrounding the wage-earner funds, their implementation, how they functioned in practice, and their dismantlement clearly contributed to Sweden’s sharp market turn in the 1980s and 1990s.

When the Sears, Roebuck Company opened its first store in Mexico City on February 28, 1947, an observer reported that the crowds on opening day were generally “well behaved, but impatient; they wanted to buy! buy! and buy!” Saleswomen panicked “as a sea of hands thrust pesos toward them, into their pockets, into their blouses, anywhere—just to complete a purchase.” Customers not only refused to leave at the end of the day; they stayed outside the store after closing. They jammed the street at night trying to look through the windows. On Saturday, two days after the store opened, Sears observers reported that customers outside the store screamed, “Let us in! Let us in! They waved money at us. They tried to sneak in through the back doors, and they cut the ropes guarding the entrance.” About 110,000 guests visited the store during its first three days of operation. So many customers visited Sears during its first two weeks in Mexico City that, according to John F. Gallagher, the vice-president of Sears' Latin American operations, “There were employees and lady customers who fainted due to the heat, agitation, and the crowdedness in the store.”

Despite the relevance of bankruptcy law for a number of key issues regarding business functioning and organization, little is known about the features and evolution of these legal institutions over time and space. This paper starts to fill this gap in current knowledge by analyzing a new data set providing consistent information about key features of bankruptcy law between 1850 and 2015 in the thirty largest European economies. Regarding institutional change, our analysis supports the established view of a link between macroeconomic changes and the introduction of procedures alternative to bankruptcy. However, this process shows significant differences at the national level, making it difficult to support the idea of change as the result of belonging to a given legal system (French; common law; Scandinavia; Germanic), or the degree of economic development. Instead, change in bankruptcy institutions seems to be a product of, and contributor to, the wider process of individual state formation. Similarly, the features of bankruptcy procedures seem to confirm this picture: Looking at their possible outcomes, the right to begin proceedings, and degree of application to different types of debtors, national differences appear deep and persistent, despite a generalized pattern of convergence over time toward a less punitive approach to bankruptcy. Contact Information: University of Birmingham, Birmingtonham Business School, University House, Edgbaston Park Road, Birmingham, West Midlands, B15 2TY, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. E-mail: [email protected]

Naval shipbuilding was one of the most ambitious industrial undertakings of World War II. A marginal business, in 1939 employing only twelve shipyards, it expanded over the course of the war into a massive network of shipbuilding firms, engineering works, steel mills, and specialty producers that built the world's largest fleet. At its peak in 1944, warship building employed one million shipyard workers, a million others in collateral industries, and consumed one-fifth of the nation's steel output in the construction of aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and thousands of smaller combatants.

The idea, and to a lesser extent the reality, of themodern home improvement store was born in the first quarter of the twentieth century. After 1905 the manufacturers of mail-order kit houses soon grew to threaten the local monopoly of retail building suppliers. Themost important of these suppliers were the lumber merchants who provided most of the materials and credit used by building contractors. At first dealers responded by mounting boycotts and by supporting trade-at-home campaigns, but these were successfully challenged in court. A survey of trade journals shows that after 1914 dealers began to act more constructively. Encouraged by the trade press, and helped by state and national associations, by the 1920s they were advertising more effectively and offering a widening range of goods and services to consumers, including house plans. Because many new customers were women, dealers had to hire more courteous staff, clean up their yards, mount better displays, build showrooms and, in time, relocate to more salubrious and heavily-trafficked parts of town. The emergence of the home improvement store is a significant chapter in the history of urban housing, and especially the marketing of housing services, in the twentieth century.

American merchant networks facilitated, and were in turn transformed by, the War for Independence. They also played a crucial role in the establishment of financial and political institutions in the new republic. John Carter (a.k.a. John Barker Church) and Jeremiah Wadsworth were among the foremost merchants and financiers of the Revolutionary era. This article follows their careers from the beginning of their wartime activities through to the end of the Federalist Era in 1800. It explains how they created and manipulated networks of supply and credit, and how they invested the proceeds of their success in the years after the war. Through this case study, the article demonstrates how wartime requirements reshaped merchant networks, not simply by increasing risk and encouraging retrenchment, but by creating influxes of credit and pressures for expansion. It argues that war led to increased inequality among merchants in terms of wealth and credit. Furthermore, this increased inequality impacted the nature of postwar finance and commerce. It shaped the economic and political structures of the new republic, in part through the agency of successful merchants like Carter and Wadsworth.

Histories of semiconductor and computing technology in the United States have emphasized the supporting role of the U.S. state, especially the military, in answer to libertarian denials of state aid that are influential in Silicon Valley today. Somewhat implicit in that historiography, though, is the leading role of actors and organizations that blur any distinction between public and private. Some industries of this sort—telecommunications, aerospace, auto manufacturing—do figure in the historiography, but the class should be expanded further. One such industry—oil—has been exceptionally but almost invisibly influential in the development of computing and semiconductor manufacturing in the United States. Oil firms invested heavily in semiconductors and computing. There was also an “oil spillover” of personnel and technology from oil firms to computing and semiconductor manufacturing. Oil shows up in the biographies of many prominent individuals and organizations in the history of those technologies, from Fairchild Semiconductor to Edsger Dijkstra. These ties potentially hold important implications for the much-needed transition to a more sustainable energy regime.