The first two articles in this issue of Enterprise & Society shed new light on the performance of the postwar Italian economy, an intriguing paradox for economic and business historians. Italy has been notorious for its political instability, inflation, massive public debt, and clientelism. Its political and economic institutions are often derided and labeled dysfunctional. Yet, in historical perspective, the country has frequently performed better than its more stable and “efficient” European neighbors and other developed economies. Between 1950 and 1973, for example, Italy’s Gross National Product grew at 6.8 percent per annum and its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita at a rate of 4.8 percent (matching Germany and second only to Japan). Even more remarkably, since 1973 its GDP, manufacturing output, exports, and productivity have all grown faster than that of any other major European economy.

Is manufacturing flexibility a purely contemporary phenomenon, an outgrowth of computer-controlled technologies, volatile markets, and sophisticated consumers that did not exist in a previous age of Fordist mass production? Or did mass manufacturers in earlier periods face comparable problems of combining high productivity, low costs, rapid product innovation, and frequent adjustments to shifting demand? And if so, what technological and organizational solutions did they develop in response? Did the flexible manufacturing practices made famous by Japanese firms in the 1970s and 1980s such as just-in-time logistics, collaborative supplier relations, joint product development, quick tooling changes, and mixed-model assembly represent a sharp break with the canonical principles of Western mass production? Or were these innovations anticipated—and even to some extent inspired—by earlier experiments with manufacturing flexibility pioneered by American and European firms during the heyday of mass production itself ? Focusing on the archetypal mass production industry at the height of the Fordist era between the 1920s and the 1970s, the papers in this special issue of Enterprise & Society offer new and surprising answers to these questions.

Beauty and business seem opposite terms but in fact have had an important and consequential relationship that business historians are only now exploring. This paper sketches several major themes and approaches to the topic. The first is the emergence of a large sector of the economy devoted to selling beauty aids, fashions, bodily care, and style to American women and men. Another is the deployment of beauty as a business strategy—in creating brands, sales, and marketing; in managing the workplace; and in projecting corporate identities. A third considers the sale of beauty itself, as a value added and attached to a wide range of goods, from art to bodies. These broad approaches suggest new directions for future research.

Business history forces historians and economists to take a wider view of individuals' actions as economic agents. The risk-managing strategies of Lord Londonderry (also known as “the Money Pitt”) during the financial boom and bust of the South Sea Bubble illustrate this theme well. He dealt in staggering sums for the time but hedged his bets along at least three dimensions: the pecuniary, the personal, and the political. His skills, however, remain unappreciated because he could not manage the ultimate uncertainty always present in human affairs—when will fate bring down the final curtain on one's partners, family and friends, patrons, or one's own person?

Detachable collars, essential to men’s appearance from the 1840s to the 1920s, have left a lasting legacy: the term ‘white collar’ and the “Arrow Man,” the centerpiece of Arrow collar advertisements from 1907 until 1931. The Arrow Man was the visual representation of the “New Man,” and Arrow collars were preserved in American culture through the lyrics of a 1934 Cole Porter song, “You’re the Top.” Both the Arrow collar and the Arrow Man derived from business decisions that reflected emerging and changing American consumer tastes and markets, an expanding middle class, and shifts in culture, especially in new ideal images of manliness that were less class-based, contributing to Americans’ impression that social distinctions were more blurred than in the past. The Arrow Man embodied in a single compelling image the resolution of social contradictions that persisted beneath the increased similarity of men of different backgrounds.

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Great Britain utilized its extensive coal reserves to emerge as the world's leading industrial power. “If a patch of a few square miles has done so much for central England,” one British writer pondered in 1856, “what may fields containing many hundred square leagues do for the United States?” In the story of American coal, the two most important states on the eve of the nineteenth century were Virginia and Pennsylvania. Virginia was endowed with bituminous coal reserves in both the James River Basin and its western counties, while Pennsylvania enjoyed a virtual monopoly on American anthracite coal as well as a massive bituminous region west of the Allegheny Mountains.

This article contests the view that “stages of development” determine a uniquely appropriate set of production and marketing strategies for a given industry in a given period. Looking closely at the British automobile industry after World War II, it instead presents the argument that opportunities for significant choices between more or less flexible technologies and organizational forms constitute a continuous feature of modern economic history. Moreover, piecemeal borrowing and selective adaptation have been more common than wholesale imitation of any particular system, and modification and hybridization of imported technologies represent not resistance to “foreign” elements, but creative attempts to fit those elements to local conditions.

The Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (Eni) was one of Italy’s most important state-owned enterprises, a key actor in the country’s transformation from a primarily agrarian to an essentially industrial nation after the Second World War. This article focuses on the history of Eni from its inception in 1953 to the death of its founder, Enrico Mattei, in 1962; it details how, in the context of Italy’s ‘economic miracle’, Eni played an important role both as an agent of economic growth, through the supply of an inexpensive source of energy, and as one of the tools used by the party in power, the Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democrats), to generate and maintain consensus.

During the two decades before World War II, as this article demonstrates, the relationship between the Big Three American automakers and their parts suppliers was remarkably similar to the celebrated cooperation of Japanese auto assemblers and their trading partners after 1980. Unlike the arms-length multisourcing that characterized American firms after 1960, the prewar Detroit production culture featured collaborative development, cost sharing, and long-term innovative relationships. This system nurtured the rise of Chrysler, which not only grew from a standing start in 1920 to convert the General Motors-Ford duopoly into the “Big Three” by 1930, but also established itself as the industry's leader in innovation and profitability.

The chemical industry was a leading sector in Italy’s “economic miracle,” but after remarkable growth in the 1950s, it declined in the next decade. Montecatini rose to a dominant position in inorganic chemicals and fertilizers in the 1950s, but its quasi-monopoly of traditional chemicals was soon challenged, first by the state-owned Eni and then by Edison, one of Italy’s giant electric power companies, which was diversifying into new sectors. The “chemical wars” of the late 1950s and early 1960s pitted the three companies against one another, as they competed for state support by building plants in Italy’s underdeveloped south, often with little commercial rationale. Although the “war” was finally resolved by a merger of Montecatini and Edison, the new company failed to achieve internal rationalization or to develop advanced chemical products. By the 1970s the sector was in disarray, and the opportunities of Italy’s rapid postwar development in chemicals had been squandered.

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.”

The Afro originated in the United States as a style worn by a tiny minority of cosmopolitan black women and developed as a prominent symbol of racial pride in the mid-1960s. Responding to the Afro's grassroots popularity, the African American beauty culture industry mounted a largely successful effort to transform the style from political statement to fashion commodity. But the commodification of the Afro was not exclusively a cynical exploitation of a political symbol. Rather, the selling of the Afro often entailed a complex blending of ideals, goals, and motivations based, to varying degrees, on considerations of fashion, politics, and the bottom line.

A generation of historians, working at the intersection of business history and cultural history, has examined the consumer culture that flourished in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In studies of advertising, marketing, department stores, credit systems, and other aspects of selling and buying, these scholars have shown that American businesses not only produced consumer goods but also created consumer desire.

First experimented with in the 1920s and 1930s in the production of automobile engines, transfer machines became dominant in U.S. engine plants in the 1940s and 1950s, as automakers invested heavily in this equipment to meet pent-up demand following the war. Transfer machines thus became identified with “Detroit automation”. But with the advent of a “horsepower race”, firms found that transfer machines could not accommodate even minor changes in design. Late in the 1950s the industry developed and applied “building-block automation” to transfer machines to attain greater flexibility. Examining these developments contributes to our understanding of both specific industries and the general history of mass production and its alternatives.

As the public discussion of all cancers, and of breast cancer in particular, expanded after World War II, capitalist ventures emerged to meet the demands of those affected by the disease. For women who had mastectomies this meant a greater choice of breast prostheses but also a clearer message that the scars from surgery should be hidden from public view. This work analyzes the breast prosthesis industry as a beauty business. Considering the use of breast prostheses as a contested part of cancer recovery, the article traces the evolution and expansion of the breast prosthesis industry from 1945 to 2000 and examines how the industry has responded to consumer demand, created a niche for itself within the “healing process,“ and capitalized on notions of feminine beauty.

Drawing from newly available archival material, this article explores the early history of one of today’s most ubiquitous financial instruments, the bank credit card. It focuses on the managerial decisions that led to the implementation and development of charge card programs at the two largest American banks of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Even though the initial performance of the two programs was comparable, top management at each bank ultimately adopted different business strategies. The differences resulted from managers’ contrasting interpretations of the appropriate market for the credit card, interpretations formed within the context of two distinct banking cultures.