Business History Review

Autumn 2016 [90:3]

Emily Pawley, Truth in Fruit: Naming, Nurserymen, and the Propagation of the Fruit Variety in the United States, 1800–1860

The forests and fields of the early American republic teemed with individually varying seedling fruit trees. American nurserymen stabilized both this chaotic landscape and their trade by promoting named fruit «varieties» gleaned from domestic orchards and from a global network of botanical gardens. Developing strategies to regulate the production of names and descriptions, they altered both texts and organisms, replacing a profusion of «wild» trees with a negotiated list of «named varieties.» Examining this process reveals intersections between commercial and scientific credibility and illuminates the alternative business forms built around living goods.

Casey Marina Lurtz, Developing the Mexican Countryside: The Department of Fomento's Social Project of Modernization

From the mid-nineteenth century onward, governments across Latin America founded departments of fomento, or development, to promote economic growth and modernization. This article looks at the evolution of this department in Mexico and the ways in which it integrated infrastructure, migration, land policy, science, and education into a rural economic and social project. For Department of Fomento leaders, agriculture became the connective tissue linking peace to prosperity. Though many failed, initiatives aimed at increasing the diversity of Mexico's rural production illustrate a concerted effort to avoid top-heavy monoculture and use scientific planning to stabilize and unify the nation.

Teresa da Silva Lopes, Building Brand Reputation through Third-Party Endorsement: Fair Trade in British Chocolate

This article looks at the evolution of the British chocolate industry from the 1860s to the 1960s, a period during which it was dominated by Quaker businesses: Cadbury, Rowntree, and their predecessor, Fry. It provides evidence of early forms of fair trade by these Quaker businesses, showing that, before the fair trade movement took off in the 1970s, they contributed to social change and to improvement in living standards and long-term sustainable economic growth in developing countries. This article argues that when the mechanisms for enforcing food standards were weak and certification bodies did not exist, the Religious Society of Friends acted as an indirect independent endorser, reinforcing the imagery and reputation of the Quaker-owned brands and associating them both with purity and quality and with honest and fair trading.

Ai Hisano, The Rise of Synthetic Colors in the American Food Industry, 1870–1940

This article examines how, starting in the 1870s, food manufacturers in the United States began to use standardized color, achieved by synthetic dyes, as part of their marketing strategies. The emergence of the synthetic dye industry paralleled the growth of mass production and mass marketing in the American food industry. It provided food manufacturers with an economical means to standardize their products and helped establish brand identities through consistent appearance. By 1938, food dyes had achieved such widespread use, and had raised such public concern, that the federal government amended the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act to implement more stringent measures to regulate the industry.

Sarah Milov, Promoting Agriculture: Farmers, the State, and Checkoff Marketing, 1935–2005

This article provides a historical overview of the development of U.S. government-mandated commodity promotion. This form of promotion, known colloquially as the «checkoff,» is responsible for such memorable slogans as «Beef: It's What's for Dinner,» as well as research intended to boost consumption of agricultural products. The article argues that checkoffs represent an associational form of governance in which private organizations achieve public aims. Though they have been frequently challenged in courts and have garnered scrutiny from public health activists, checkoffs have been a durable form of agricultural regulation because they hide the heavy hand of government with the rhetoric of markets and self-help.

Winter 2016 [90:4]

Judge Glock, The Rise and Fall of the First Government-Sponsored Enterprise: The Federal Land Banks, 1916–1932

While researchers have pointed to numerous methods of expanding state capacity in the Progressive Era, the literature has overlooked the creation of nominally private companies relying on implicit government guarantees, later known as government-sponsored enterprises. This article explains the novelty and structure of the nation's first such enterprises, the Federal Land Banks, and describes how their design embodied several fragilities that contributed to their collapse and bailout in 1932. The article then demonstrates why, despite these problems, the land banks became the model for subsequent enterprises and financial reforms.

Christy Ford Chapin, The Politics of Social Responsibility in American Health Care and Home Loans

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) became an important subject among business leaders during the post–World War II era. Business leaders often used the idea of CSR to explain actions they took to prevent additional government involvement in their industry. They argued that because they were behaving in a socially responsible manner, further federal programming was unnecessary. The cases of health insurance and home mortgages demonstrate how this political approach frequently required business leaders to alter their profitmaking strategies in order to substantiate their argument before the public. Thus, the history of corporate social responsibility is critical for understanding a hidden facet of American political development.

Rolv Petter Amdam, Executive Education and the Managerial Revolution: The Birth of Executive Education at Harvard Business School

The managerial revolution drove the rise of business schools in the United States and business schools contributed by graduating professional managers. Before World War II, however, the effect of an MBA degree was modest, causing great concern to leading business schools. Harvard Business School–in order to increase this impact–began in the mid-1920s to develop nondegree programs for potential top executives. In 1945, by drawing on the experiences of certain short-lived programs and the extraordinary situation during the war, Harvard Business School launched its Advanced Management Program, which became a global role model for executive education.

Pankaj Ghemawat, Evolving Ideas about Business Strategy

This paper updates an earlier article published in Business History Review that concluded that by the second half of the 1 990 s, there had been a profusion of new, purportedly practical ideas about strategy, many of which embodied some explicit dynamics. This update provides several indications of a drop-off since then in the rate of development of new ideas about strategy but also a continued focus, in the new ideas that are being developed, on dynamics. And since our stock of dynamic frameworks has, based on one enumeration, more than doubled in the last fifteen to twenty years, updating expands both the need and the empirical basis for some generalizations about the types of dynamic strategy frameworks–and strategy frameworks in general–that managers are likely to find helpful versus those that they are not.

Spring 2017 [91:1]

Tirthankar Roy, Transfer of Economic Power in Corporate Calcutta, 1950–1970

Between 1950 and 1970, the ownership of some of the largest business conglomerates in India changed from British to Indian hands. Almost without exception, the firms formerly under the management of British conglomerates saw bankruptcy, nationalization, relative decline in corporate ranking, and on rare occasions, reinvention of identity. In Indian business history scholarship, this episode is underresearched, even though hypotheses on the transfer-cum-decline exist. Combining a new source, legal documents, with conventional ones, this article revisits the episode and suggests revisions to current hypotheses.

Robert Fitzgerald, International Business and the Development of British Electrical Manufacturing, 1886–1929

British electrical manufacturing provides important insights into international business history and demonstrates the key role of cross-border networks and agreements in its emergence. This article analyzes the factors that shaped phases in the industry's development and international operations. In doing so, the article reappraises electrical manufacturing's early decades in Britain; it shows how a changing political landscape transformed the strategies and ownership of firms, and reevaluates the industry's restructuring during the war and its immediate aftermath. Further, the article questions accounts of British electrical manufacturing's failure in the 1920s and discusses the return to strategies of cross-border networks and agreements. Finally, the article considers the lessons of British electrical manufacturing's emergence and subsequent consolidation, weighing the influences of firm-level, national, and international factors.

Peter Scott and James T. Walker, «The Only Way Is Up»: Overoptimism and the Demise of the American Five-and-Dime Store, 1914–1941

We examine a classic «wheel of retailing» episode: the abandonment of the five-and-dime pricing formula by American variety chains. The variety chains switched from a conventional product lifecycle, focusing on cost reduction through standardization, to a reverse path up the «service cost–unit value» continuum. We show that, rather than reflecting deteriorating managerial acumen, this shift was a response to the continued imperative for growth following retail format saturation. Firm-specific (rather than format-specific) competitive advantages were too weak for any chain to be confident it could win a within-format price war, making interformat competition through raising price points more attractive.

Catherine Schenk, Rogue Trading at Lloyds Bank International, 1974: Operational Risk in Volatile Markets

Rogue trading has been a persistent feature of international financial markets over the past thirty years, but there is remarkably little historical treatment of this phenomenon. To begin to fill this gap, evidence from company and official archives is used to expose the anatomy of a rogue trading scandal at Lloyds Bank International in 1974. The rush to internationalize, the conflict between rules and norms, and the failure of internal and external checks all contributed to the largest single loss of any British bank to that time. The analysis highlights the dangers of inconsistent norms and rules even when personal financial gain is not the main motive for fraud, and shows the important links between operational and market risk. This scandal had an important role in alerting the Bank of England and U.K. Treasury to gaps in prudential supervision at the end of the Bretton Woods pegged exchange-rate system.

Laureen Kuo, Improving French Competitiveness through American Investment following World War II

Drawing on corporate materials from the Banque de France, this article reveals a fact that is rarely raised in the study of foreign investment in France: among American investment in France, there are many cases in which French companies took the initiative in seeking American investment. Not all French companies were hostile to U.S. enterprises, even during the upsurge of French anti-Americanism, and the French Fifth Republic's restrictive policies toward American investment were not as rigorous as they might have appeared. Their major objective was to increase French competitiveness.

Summer 2017 [91:2]

Timothy W. Guinnane, Ron Harris, and Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Contractual Freedom and Corporate Governance in Britain in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

British general incorporation law granted companies an extraordinary degree of contractual freedom. It provided companies with a default set of articles of association, but incorporators were free to reject any or all of the provisions and write their own rules instead. We study the uses to which incorporators put this flexibility by examining the articles of association filed by three random samples of companies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as by a sample of companies whose securities traded publicly. Contrary to the literature, we find that most companies, regardless of size or whether their securities traded on the market, wrote articles that shifted power from shareholders to directors. We find, moreover, that there was little pressure from the government, shareholders, or the market to adopt more shareholder-friendly governance rules.

Michael Mayer, Julia Hautz, Christian Stadler, and Richard Whittington, Diversification and Internationalization in the European Single Market: The British Exception

This article examines the long-run impact of the 1992 completion of the European Single Market on the diversification and internationalization of European business. It does so at a particular moment of crisis: the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union («Brexit»). The article finds that completion of the European Single Market is indeed associated with significant and widespread changes in the strategies of European businesses between 1993 and 2010. European business has converged on more focused diversification strategies and followed similar patterns of internationalization. The most significant exception is the consistently low level of British business's commitment to European markets. The distinctiveness of British internationalization is, in a sense, Brexit foretold.

Nicholas Alexander and Anne Marie Doherty, The Origins of American International Retailing: Tiffany of New York in London and Paris, 1837–1914

This article considers the international retailing activities of Tiffany of New York between 1837 and 1914. Using data from the company archive alongside other sources, the findings indicate that five factors were determinants of sustainable international retailing: a centralized organizational structure, a stable ownership structure, existing international engagement, a strong brand identity, and a relevant international retail format. Placing Tiffany's activities in its wider commercial and consumer context, the findings illustrate the organizational changes and asset combination required to support the development of early international retail operations. The article contributes to theoretical understanding of the dynamics of retail internationalization.

Stephen B. Adams, Arc of Empire: The Federal Telegraph Company, the U.S. Navy, and the Beginnings of Silicon Valley

The early history of Silicon Valley is incomplete unless it is framed within the context of American foreign policy. The Federal Telegraph Company, the region's first major high-tech firm, received its first contract from the U.S. Navy in 1913. Its subsequent success relied not only on navy contracts but also on State Department support and access to Bureau of Standards technology. The company's contributions to America's military-industrial complex began a pattern that would fuel the region's development and growth for more than a half century.