In this article, Professor Stabile examines the experimentation with Frederick Taylor's principles of scientific management by managers at the E. I. du Pont de Nemours Powder Company. Despite their initial interest in efficiency, those managers quickly recognized that there was a direct relationship between efficiency and safety, an issue Taylor had not considered. When it was alleged that the efficiency methods had been a factor in two explosions, the emphasis in the company shifted to a more systematic approach to promoting safety. As a consequence, the company was able to manage a full-scale expansion of its production during the First World War with little disruption resulting from safety problems.

Business historians and students of political economy quite often analyze the success of foreign investors in the periphery in terms of the entrepreneur's competitive advantage and of the host country's beneficial economic policies. One cannot explain the extraordinary success of British engineer Sir Weetman Pearson in Mexico's early oil history according to such criteria, however, for his American competitors had experience in the technologically advanced U.S. petroleum industry and should have prevailed. Sir Weetman succeeded because Mexican politicians, pursuing their own internal political interests, willed and nurtured his success.

In interwar Germany, the overall economic importance of big business rapidly increased, as concentration was seen as a suitable means of coping with Germany's post–First World War problems. Growing and integrating vertically and laterally, Germany's big combines had to adjust their organization to deal with these amalgamations. In the following article, Professor Feldenkirchen takes a close look at the measures employed at Vereinigte Stahlwerke, IG Farben, and Siemens, Germany's three largest combines during the interwar period.