Conceptual metaphors, like Galambos and Amatori’s “entrepreneurial multiplier,” play a pivotal but largely unexamined role in historical interpretation. They do this by allowing historians to see one set of historical associations or relationships in terms of another, more familiar, one. I highlight this interpretive role by comparing Galambos and Amatori’s construct to Joseph Schumpeter’s “gale of creative destruction” and Arthur Cole’s “entrepreneurial stream” as metaphors that attempt to explain the relationship between entrepreneurship and historical change. I also point out the risks that taken-for-granted metaphors can have in narrowing room for interpretation, and argue that reflexivity and playfulness are essential to keeping conceptual metaphors alive as interpretive devices. I conclude by suggesting that metaphors are an intrinsic form of theorizing in historical interpretation, and illustrate my argument by briefly examining “industrial revolution” as a construct in business and economic history.

Galambos and Amatori applaud this discourse over entrepreneurship but contend that the multiplier is not a metaphor. They acknowledge Wadhwani’s insightful analyses and look forward to further fruitful discussions focused on innovation, capitalism’s major strength. They briefly argue for scalar evaluations rather than binary evaluations of innovation and the socio-economic problems they inevitably create.

This article analyzes the causes for the long-term success of the Barcelona (Spain) and São Paulo (Brazil) automobile industry clusters. Comparative evidence suggests that both clusters emerged in the early twentieth century through the formation of Marshallian external economies. Nevertheless, neither Barcelona nor São Paulo reached mass automobile production before 1950. The consolidation of the clusters required the adoption of strategic industrial policy during the golden age of capitalism. This policy succeeded in encouraging a few hub firms to undertake mass production by using domestic parts. The strategic policy also favored these leading corporations transferring their technical, organizational, and distribution capabilities, which in turn amplified the advantages of the clusters. Local institutions did not make a significant contribution.

During the 1960s, Sarnia was the wealthiest city in Ontario and the one with the dirtiest air. Its economy was dominated by Chemical Valley, the city’s petrochemical industry. Chemical Valley firms and executives were civically active, donating to public causes, dominating the local chamber of commerce, and working closely with provincial and municipal officials to ensure a friendly business environment. They also maintained a monopoly on information about local air pollution levels and were not required by government to adhere to clean air regulations. However, like the rest of the chemical industry at the time, Chemical Valley was exposed to an onslaught of negative publicity, raising the threat of regulation and loss of their control over emissions data and production processes. This article illustrates how economic elites in Sarnia prevented the problematization and regulation of air pollution. In doing so, it describes the actors in the policy system and examines its recourse to suppress dissent when activists sought to raise the air pollution issue.

In 2007, Mother Nature saved Tampax. An advertising campaign, featuring nature personified as a middle-aged woman, played a decisive role in helping the tampon brand overcome a challenging period. Five years earlier, the owners, Procter & Gamble (P&G) had developed their own plastic, as opposed to cardboard, tampon applicator in the form of Tampax Pearl, and were promptly sued for patent infringement by the original plastic applicator inventor Playtex (Hanes Brands), a fight P&G lost. On other fronts, the menstrual product industry was battling against an aging population and menstruation-suppressing hormonal birth control, resulting in an annual 1 percent market share drop for the previously globally best-selling brand. A team of women at the Leo Burnett advertising agency came up with a new Tampax branding strategy in response, and as a result the international Mother Nature campaign ran in Europe and North America from 2007 till 2009. This article surveys the issues facing Tampax in the 2000s, and the campaign that stabilized it at the top of the sector by the 2010s.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, transatlantic trade and finance networks were complex webs of transactions often consisting of lengthy chains of connections linking distant firms to distant markets. As a number of scholars have shown, merchant bankers of the nineteenth century were at the center of many of these networks, acting as an interconnected and often impenetrable group that dictated the flow of capital and investment across many borders. Most recently, scholars such as Manuel Llorca-Jaña, Manuel López-Morell, and Juliette Levy (to name a few) have produced a number of especially significant publications on the role of financial intermediaries in Latin America. Llorca-Jaña’s and López-Morrell’s work has been essential for illuminating the role of London bankers Huth & Co. and Rothschilds (respectively) in creating a global network that included Latin American markets and trades, while Levy’s work has highlighted the role of special financial players in inland markets, namely in the Yucatan. This paper aims to build on this previous work through an analysis of crucial network actors in Anglo-American merchant bank networks in the first half of the nineteenth century. To conduct a varied and general analysis, this paper will draw on the correspondence records of the Baring Bros. and N. M. Rothschild, two of the most well-known and profitable London merchant banks of the period. Through this material, this study will present an analysis of British merchant bank connectivity and the role of intermediaries in connecting merchant banks to distant markets and clients, such as the mining districts of interior Mexico and the sugar merchants of Cuba.

This article explores the powerful ways in which black business owners supported the Civil Rights movement. Business owners such as Leah Chase, Gus Courts, A. G. Gaston, and Amzie Moore, among others, contributed resources and organizational skills to the fight for racial justice. But the relationship between business owners and activists within the movement was at times characterized by tension. Although business owners sometimes found the approach of activists to be too radical and activists sometimes found the business owners’ approach to be too conservative, they found ways to compromise in order to work cooperatively toward racial justice.

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.