First I describe my background in American historical scholarship. Thereafter, I assess the efforts of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama and their senior advisors to stabilize American financial institutions during the period 2008–2009. My fundamental contention is that state actors such as Bush and Obama structured financial industries and markets. Despite the ubiquitous presence of these state actors, however, American business and political leaders maintained the fiction that state and business were, and properly ought to remain, separate entities. In Part III, I return to my scholarly background and to a proposed scaffolding for historical scholarship focused on the political economy of U.S. financial institutions since 1970.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, a market in the personal debt of corporate and government employees was thriving in New York City and other major urban centers in the Northeastern andMidwestern United States. A set of shadowy entrepreneurs, colloquially known as “loan sharks,” offered short-term, high-rate advances that they called salary loans. Despite operating in violation of the law, primarily the prohibition against usury, the operations of these intermediaries had by 1912 reached an imposing scale. At least eighty-one such offices operated in Manhattan and Brooklyn alone, with millions of dollars in loans outstanding. Of these eighty-one offices, thirty-four belonged to interstate chains, the largest ofwhich stretched over sixtythree cities in the United States and Canada.

My dissertation is a study of standardization in four communications networks: AT&T's monopoly telephone network, the Internet, digital cellular telephone networks, and the World Wide Web. A history of these networks that highlights standardization shows how engineers in industry committees replaced managers in monopoly hierarchies as the stewards of standards for communication networks. By the end of the twentieth century, the new networks—and the new institutions devised to sustain the standardization process—formed the technological and ideological infrastructure of the Third Industrial Revolution.

Pharmaceutical Networks describes how American drug firms,biomedical researchers, physicians, and Congressional reformers shaped the research, regulatory, and policy environments for prescription drugs in the three decades after World War II. In these decades, pharmaceutical reformers in Congress sought to secure passage of legislation that would increase the government's control over drug development, distribution, and practice. They proposed these reforms as a way of curbing the high cost of prescription drugs and putting a break on the escalating health care costs. To defend itself against this reform movement, the American drug industry built alliances with research universities, medical schools, and professional medical societies by offering to the medical and academic communities solutions to their shared problems. These problems included a shortage of biomedical workers and the increasing authority of the government over medical practice.

The idea, and to a lesser extent the reality, of themodern home improvement store was born in the first quarter of the twentieth century. After 1905 the manufacturers of mail-order kit houses soon grew to threaten the local monopoly of retail building suppliers. Themost important of these suppliers were the lumber merchants who provided most of the materials and credit used by building contractors. At first dealers responded by mounting boycotts and by supporting trade-at-home campaigns, but these were successfully challenged in court. A survey of trade journals shows that after 1914 dealers began to act more constructively. Encouraged by the trade press, and helped by state and national associations, by the 1920s they were advertising more effectively and offering a widening range of goods and services to consumers, including house plans. Because many new customers were women, dealers had to hire more courteous staff, clean up their yards, mount better displays, build showrooms and, in time, relocate to more salubrious and heavily-trafficked parts of town. The emergence of the home improvement store is a significant chapter in the history of urban housing, and especially the marketing of housing services, in the twentieth century.

Historians, in general, and historians of the trans-Mississippi West, in particular, have paid scant attention to the Panic of 1893 except to summarize its highlights: the silver-mining industry collapsed; banks and businesses failed; unemployment increased; labor rebelled—sometimes violently; and the Populists gained political ground. Some historians of the American West have given the panic a miss entirely

The current literature on international joint ventures pays considerable attention to why joint ventures are established or why they are dissolved, but we lack studies that give insight into their dynamic development. The aim of this article is to investigate the evolution of an international joint venture over time. We confront some of the theoretical insights developed during the last decades with the dramatic history of the aluminum producer Det Norske Nitridaktieselskap (DNN). The company was established shortly beforeWorld War I and was finally disbanded over seventy years later. For most of this time, DNN was an international joint venture with shifting ownership configurations. This gives us the possibility not only to discuss the motivation for why the company was established or why it was dissolved, but also to study the mid-life of the company. What was DNN's role within the general corporate strategies of the owners? Did this role change over time?

The aim of this essay is to analyze the way management sciences and practices use history or at least the kind of research which they define as history. This reflection will lead to discussing the possibility and the opportunity that an historical approach might have in creating management knowledge, especially “workable” know-how. A quick look at present-day exchanges between the two communities could lead us to the conclusion that there were tensions in the past that have not entirely evaporated. Might they explain the relative modesty of the dialogue, at least in France?

This short essay elaborates on two points raised by Eric Godelier's article about resolving divisions between management science and business history in France. It outlines the segmentation of French higher education, especially in the area of business studies, and discusses some long-standing debates over legitimizing historical studies.

In 2008 Professor Eric Godelier published a provocative essay in which he concluded that a positive dialogue between business historians and both management scientists and business management practitioners was possible. While the divide between these camps was not trivial, he nevertheless wrote that current events and scholarship was bringing them together, at least as he could observe these trends in the context of emerging French scholarship. In this current review, my own conclusion is the opposite. Management scholarship, in fact, continues to move away from the “soft” approach of the historian and more towards the “rigorous” and quantitatively biased methodology of the management sciences. My essay reviews the background of this development in terms of American business practice and scholarship, as it seeks to demonstrate how the evolution of management training in the United States brought us to the current state of affairs where “hard” drives out soft in almost every encounter. However, while I conclude that this is indeed the current reality, I do not imply any endorsement of this outcome. Rather, I end with a hope that some forms of rapprochement might be possible-yet with an acknowledgement that we will have no definitive answers to this question anytime soon.

In response to Eric Godelier's call for a partnership between business history and the management sciences I argue for a vision of business history as history. Whilst acknowledging the institutional and intellectual pressures to which the discipline is subject I argue such a turn is important for the continued health of the field. Such a turn will, however, also require engaging with fundamental questions of epsitemology.

If my initial essay at a minimum had the objective of generating a debate and fruitful exchanges, it has succeeded. Of course, probably because of the inevitable ambiguities of translation, some of Chris Kobrak's, Andrew Popp's, and Paul Tiffany's comments suggest that a few further remarks are in order to clarify a set of ideas and allow further developments or discussions.