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.

Interlocking directorates can encourage innovation, cooperation, and adherence to best practices or can contribute to collusion, corruption, and the stagnation of ideas. Research has identified the contingent nature of director networks, with outcomes dependent on the nature of the tie; the firms and individuals involved; and the institutional, sociopolitical, and cultural context. Distinguishing between helpful and harmful interlocks thus requires understanding the foundations on which they were built. This article is the first systematic, longitudinal analysis of the antecedents of interlocking directorates in Australia, complementing substantial international efforts to understand and compare director networks across the twentieth century. The network has been characterized by a relatively consistent long-run level of connection but substantial variation in the causes of interlocks. The director network in Australia has responded to the pragmatics of the board member occupation, with corporate governance regulations, the progress of the professions, banking and prudential practices, and the form of large organizations encouraging ties that were built on professional expertise and geographic proximity. These findings are important for policy makers, regulatory bodies, and scholars, highlighting the importance of understanding the contextual foundations of interlocks when assessing their potential for harm.

“The Other Kitchen Debate” places the history of the microwave oven in the context of Cold War anxieties and gender politics. Discrepancies between Soviet and U.S. safety standards, Soviet deployment of microwave espionage, and the prospect of nuclear war triggered fears about the possible dangers of kitchen appliances powered by low-level radiation. During the 1970s and early 1980s, politicians, government regulators, industry representatives, advertisers, home economists, media, and consumers engaged in lively debates over oven safety and the merits of microwave cookery. By the late eighties and early nineties, as East–West tensions waned and record numbers of American women entered the paid labor force, American media perceived fewer distinctions between the hazards posed by electronic ovens and those presented by their conventional counterparts. New definitions of safety redefined microwave ovens as purely domestic appliances, leaving questions about the potential risks of nonionizing radiation unresolved.

Having emerged from World War II as a permanent feature of American political and economic life, the “glamour” of research and development (R&D) would soon take hold of Wall Street. By the 1960s, shares of high-tech electronics and aerospace firms became irresistible to the flood of young men entering the securities business with the hopes of getting rich quick off capital gains. For this generation, R&D spending today came to mean earnings growth tomorrow, and in periods of financial hardship, executives under pressure to meet earnings expectations changed R&D accounting policies to boost their bottom lines. With this change, firms experiencing significant losses could maintain the appearance of profitability while reinforcing public perceptions of R&D as a magic bullet for growth. Contrary to the mythology of the “space age,” however, those intimately involved in R&D and tracking its costs insisted that expenditures so incurred failed in practice to qualify as assets. Drawing from arguments made by industrial researchers and cost accountants, this article problematizes the “R&D underinvestment” consensus that emerged in the wake of the space age and suggests dropping the R&D asset view wherever it circulates, including in academic scholarship.

China’s reemergence among the world’s leading economic and political powers has been one of the most defining changes in the international order since the end of the Cold War. Underpinning China’s ascent were the economic reforms instituted across the late 1970s and early 1980s that opened its economy to foreign direct investments. Preceding these reforms were the ambitions entertained for China’s continental shelf, optimistically forecasting it as nothing less than “the world’s richest petroleum reservoir.” This article will attempt to link these phenomena by examining the economic readjustment in conjunction with the capital- and technology-intensive requirements of the offshore oil industry. It will explore how petroleum knowledge was diffused between Norway and China: notably, how Chinese reformers abandoned the Daqinigst doctrine of self-reliance in favor of a hybrid Norwegian model of petroleum governance. Even though exploration efforts proved disappointing, the episode had both long-term political and commercial ramifications. It was during this often-overlooked episode of Chinese, international, and indeed Norwegian petroleum history that Norway’s national oil company, Statoil, took its first steps outside the Norwegian continental shelf and inspired the formation of China’s own national offshore oil company, China National Offshore Oil Corporation.

We examine the Scotch Whisky Association’s (SWA) role in protecting “Scotch whisky” between c. 1945 and c. 1990. Using new archival evidence, we demonstrate that the SWA intensively lobbied the UK government to achieve coordination between domestic and European regulations governing Scotch whisky and whisky. The SWA’s nonmarket activities were consonant with some trade associations but in other respects they were atypical. The SWA extended its activities to supranational bodies and engaged in extensive domestic and foreign litigation. The key message from this article is that the SWA built the world-renowned appellation “Scotch whisky” even though this marque was not registered as an appellation until the late twentieth century.