Historians generally agree that modern brands arose from the vertically integrated corporations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and were used as competitive weapons between like firms. Looking at the alcoholic beverage trade and drawing on trade press, court reports, newspaper advertising, business records, and accounts of consumer behavior, I suggest that, on the contrary, supply chains made up of small firms played both an earlier and a significant part in the genesis of modern brands. In these chains, firms used branding not only to fight direct competitors but also to discipline and subordinate other links in the chain over whom they had no direct control and with whom they had to cooperate.

Beginning in the 1950s, advertising and marketing specialists in Yugoslavia campaigned aggressively to change public and official perceptions of their work. By casting commercial promotion in terms of categories already established as legitimate in the ideology of Yugoslav socialism, the industry gradually naturalized advertising and marketing, transforming them from suspect capitalist practices into apparent necessities of progressive, rational production and distribution. Although the rhetoric used in this campaign consistently appealed to socialist values, in practice Yugoslav advertising and marketing were largely based on Western models. Yugoslav commercial promotion was only superficially “socialist advertising”; practitioners' arguments tended to obscure the true qualities of the industry.

In this article I explore the protean organizational forms used by the Kaiser and Bechtel construction companies between 1930 and 1950. Kaiser and Bechtel prospered during the Depression and World War II because, as members of the Six Companies consortium of construction firms, they refused to adopt a “best practice” model of corporate organization drawn from the diversified manufacturing and distribution sectors. Instead, Kaiser and Bechtel used a variety of organizational forms to win numerous government contracts for public works and defense production, transforming themselves from small regional firms into substantial national and global corporations. I contribute to modern academic debate over the historical forms of business enterprise and the conjunction of state consumption and private production.

We provide here a complement to recent work on family business, which has demonstrated the need to go beyond the generic definition of the family firm to place personal capitalism in an appropriate institutional, historical, and cultural framework. By focusing on the nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century experiences in Britain, Spain, and Italy, we challenge the notion that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there was anything so simple as a Mediterranean model for family business. Rather, we demonstrate the need to consider family businesses in national and regional contexts if we are to understand their various capabilities and characteristics. We use similarities and differences in the experiences and responses of families and firms in the three countries to support this claim.

In this article, we explore how reformers, manufacturers, and traders perceived British food consumers and the significance of those perceptions in debates about food quality and regulation. By considering basic commodities, our analysis extends a literature on consumption that is otherwise derived primarily from the study of luxury commodities, and it identifies conflicting images of the interests, competence, and concerns of early twentieth-century consumers. We find that discussions of appropriate policy involved competing interpretations of modernity and its implications for food consumers, and these discussions anticipated later twentieth-century debates.

The history of aluminum illustrates how the concept of symbolic meanings can help connect culture with business history. Aluminum's symbolic meanings played a crucial role in its industrial history, largely through the enthusiasm that greeted the introduction and diffusion of the metal. Symbolic meanings influence technological innovation through their role in shaping expectations, a role understood by the historical actors who engage in struggles over the meanings of competing innovations. For aluminum, this struggle centered on the conflict between the material's two major meanings: aluminum as modern and aluminum as ersatz. This debate over meanings has played out differently in aviation, electric wiring, and automobiles.

Tensions arose in the X-ray department of the Philips research laboratory during the interwar period, caused by the interplay among technological development, organizational culture, and individual behavior. This article traces the efforts of Philips researchers to find a balance between their professional goals and status and the company's strategy. The X-ray research, overseen by Gilles Holst, the laboratory's director, and Albert Bouwers, the group leader for the X-ray department, was a financial failure despite technological successes. Nevertheless, Bouwers was able to continue his X-ray research, having gained the support of company owner Anton Philips. The narrative of the X-ray department allows us to explore not only the personal tensions between Holst and Bouwers, but also the interaction between individual goals and company strategy in an industrial research laboratory.

J. Walter Thompson (JWT), the leading American advertising agency until the 1970s, established a branch office in Paris in 1927. While many of JWT's worldwide branches became the leading agencies in their respective countries, notably Great Britain and Germany, JWT-Paris foundered from the late 1920s through the early 1960s. This article focuses on the reasons why: cultural clashes between the French and Americans, a regulated and protected French market, anti-Americanism among French businesses, and American condescension and insensitivity. It concludes with an analysis of and the reasons for JWT-Paris's achievement of limited success by the late 1960s.

Narratives of flexible specialization as an alternative to mass production are largely absent from the industrial history of twentieth-century Britain. In this article, I challenge the notion that we should relegate small firms and industrial districts to a marginal place in the historiography of this period. Drawing from a range of sources, I explore the history of Birmingham's jewelry makers to show how they adapted the traditional productive system of the district to respond in a dynamic way to the challenges of rapid product market differentiation. As jewelry increasingly became a commodity for mass consumption, the firms in the Birmingham district used a combination of specialty and mass production as a strategy to both satisfy and create demand.

In this article, I seek to expand the relatively narrow focus of most work on commercial credit in eighteenth-century England by incorporating culture into an economic analysis. I argue that the various credit regimes that operated in the regional branches of the English wool textile industry are best understood as having a cultural dimension. A comparative analysis of business strategies in these regions suggests that the different cultures of credit had important implications for the development of the textile industry during the eighteenth century, shaping the character of the entrepreneurship of each region's merchants and producers.

Jardine Matheson & Company, a Hong Kong conglomerate founded in 1832, has survived political upheaval and global and regional economic crises, transforming itself several times. From their beginnings in the commission business, William Jardine and James Matheson developed a reputation for sound financial management that furthered their trading relationships and supported their firm's expansion from agency house to managing agent to investment house between 1832 and 1885. Fundamental to Jardine Matheson's success was the strategic decision to eschew speculation and to concentrate on building a pattern of relationships within and outside the business that would foster the flow of information, the knowledge with which to interpret it, the ability to influence others, and a reputation for probity that would attract and retain trading partners.

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.

In this article I explore the powerful sense of regional solidarity that accompanied the rise of Silicon Valley. From the early years of Stanford University, the university's leaders saw its mission as service to the West and shaped the school accordingly. At the same time, the perceived exploitation of the West at the hands of eastern interests fueled booster-like attempts to build self-sufficient indigenous local industry. Thus, regionalism helped align Stanford's interests with those of the area's high-tech firms for the first fifty years of Silicon Valley's development. The distinctive regional ethos of the West during the first half of the twentieth century is an ingredient of Silicon Valley's already prepared environment, an ingredient that would-be replicators ignore at their peril.

The diversity of paths to industrialization is illustrated by the example of the cabinet- and furniture-manufacturing industry in Ontario, Canada. Complex and unpredictable demand combined with smaller markets and lower incomes than those in the United States and the relative abundance of wood to limit mechanization and the size of enterprise in the Canadian industry. Small and unpowered workshops remained competitive throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, creating a distinctive industrial experience that reflects the unique interaction of local demand and supply.