This article explores the first attempt by American physiologists to assist employers with the stubborn problem of tired workers. It examines the work of Frederic Lee and the Committee on Industrial Fatigue, which was set up to increase productivity in the face of the long hours deemed necessary for war readiness. Despite the biomedical investigators' strenuous efforts and their incisive critique of Taylorism, however, corporate management found few practical uses for their findings and remedial proposals. Instead, industrial physiology helped to pave the way for rival consultants from psychology.

This article examines the statistical work done by Leonard Porter Ayres for the Council of National Defense during the First World War. Director of statistics for the Russell Sage Foundation when war was declared, Ayres immediately volunteered his own and the foundation's statistical expertise. The article focuses on the first year of American intervention in the war and argues that Ayres's important statistical work evolved in three overlapping but distinct stages. The structure of the American state, however, confounded the wider ambitions of Ayres (just as it had those of his rival Edwin Gay) to centralize all government statistical data.

Russian is presently in a transition stage between the old centrally administered command economy and a market economy. The result is uncertainty and instability. In such a situation there is both little room and little concern for business ethics. The objective conditions for this include distortions in the systems of supply and exchange, political instability, and judicial ineffectiveness. The subjective conditions include the breakdown of morality under the communist system, and the wide acceptance of “wild” capitalism as a necessary stage in the development of a capitalist market system.

Although “fairness” and “social responsibilities” form part of the business ethics agenda of Japanese corporations, the meaning of these terms must be understood in the context of the distinctive Japanese approach to ethics. In Japan, ethics is inextricably bound up with religious dimension (two normative environments) and social dimension (framework of concentric circles). The normative environments, influenced by Confucianism, Buddhism, and other traditional and modern Japanese religions, emphasize that not only individuals but also groups have their own spirit (numen) which is connected to the ultimate reality. The framework of concentric circles lets moral agents apply different ethical rules to the respective circles. The dynamics of these religious and social dimensions lead to a different view of both individuals and corporations from that dominant in the West.

International business ethics, as the term implies, cannot be national in character, anymore than international law can be national in character. Yet the analogy to law is as misleading as it is enlightening. For although we can speak of American, German or Japanese law, it is odd to speak of American, German or Japanese ethics. The reason is that ethics is usually thought to be universal. Hence there is simply ethics, not national ethics. Despite this, there is a sense that can be given to American business ethics or German business ethics. American business ethics does not refer to American as opposed to German ethics, but rather to the approach taken by those who do business ethics in the United States. What characterizes the American approach is not that it uses a special ethics or a national ethics, but that it is concerned with certain problems that are embedded in the American socio-economic-political system and faced by American business. German or Japanese business ethics differs from American business ethics in the cases and topics it deals with, in the different set of background institutions it takes for granted or investigates, and in the different culture, history, and social setting in which business operates.

The same is true of what is often called international business ethics insofar as we can distinguish American, German, Japanese approaches to it. International business ethics might refer simply to the comparison of business practices and their ethical evaluation in different countries; it might investigate whether there are in fact ethical norms commonly recognized in all countries that should govern international business and economic transactions, and if there are variations in ethical norms, whether multinational firms are bound by the ethical norms of their mother country, by the ethical norms of their host countries, by either, by both, or by neither. International business ethics might involve broad issues about the economic inequality of nations, the justice of the present international economic order, the ethical status and justifiability of such organizations as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and of their structures and practices, as well as the ethical dimensions of international debt, and the claimed economic dependence of some countries on others, or such global issues as the role of industry in the depletion of the ozone level.

This paper views corruption as a form of contracting amenable to analysis from the viewpoint of transaction-cost economics. Concepts such as transaction, bounded rationality, opportunism, and asset specificity are shown to apply to cases of corruption. Both market and parochial corruption are hypothesized to vary in accordance with changes in the specificity of assets invested to support the corruption transaction. Evidence from a number of different studies tends to support the hypothesized relation. The implications of the transaction-cost perspective are developed for policy makers and directions for future research are suggested.

The measure proposed here, the ratio of the price reported in a given trade to the average world price for that commodity, is based on the average world price for a given commodity reported for all trades between the U.S. and all other countries for a given period. This new measure can be used to enable government agencies to identify trades between U.S. firms or individuals and their counterparts in other countries which are designed to further prohibited activities such as money laundering or tax avoidance. This measure would also enable the U.S. government to monitor trade flows more accurately, facilitating more analysis of trade imbalances between countries and tracking trade in strategic materials, for example, weapons. Use of this new measure could enable naive buyers and sellers of goods, for example, those situated in remote or underdeveloped markets, to know what their counterparts in more central and informed countries are paying or being paid for comparable goods, and hence to become more informed as trading partners.

Established to mobilize science during the Second World War, the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) and its director, Vannevar Bush, created new weapons as well as a new relationship between science and government that helped shape Cold War America. Yet much about the partnership that emerged disappointed Bush, especially its uncontrolled expansion and the failure of civilian oversight. The failure, ironically, as this article explains, can be traced to the very approach that allowed Bush to mobilize rapidly during wartime, especially to an “associationalism” and contractual strategy that centralized the management of R&D in Washington while leaving its performance to private contractors. Forged in more conservative decades, the strategy facilitated the rapid exploitation of private-sector resources at the cost of promoting the uncontrolled proliferation of public-private arrangements that undercut Bush's postwar hopes.