We provide an analytically structured history of Enron's involvement in the California energy crisis, exploring its emergence as a corrupt organization and its use of an interorganizational network to manipulate California's energy supply markets. We use this history to introduce the concept of network-enabled corruption, showing how corruption, even if primarily enacted by a single dominant organization, is often highly dependent on the support of other organizations. Specifically, we show how Enron combined resources from partner firms with its own capabilities, manipulating the energy market and capitalizing on the crisis. From a methodological point of view, our study emphasizes the growing importance of digital sources for historical research, drawing particularly on telephone and email records from the period to develop a rich, fly-on-the-wall understanding of a phenomenon that is otherwise hard to observe.

Business is commonly regarded as one of the powerful actors in the world today. However, this position is neither as straightforward as often believed nor particularly new. Nevertheless, business historians have not focused on the topic of business power to date, often leaving it as something lurking in the background of their analyses. There are signs that this may be beginning to change with the growth of studies on the history of capitalism, but this revised presidential address encourages business historians to engage more fully and explicitly with the concept of power and to recognize the different ways in which the concept can be used to enlighten the study of business history.

A previous meta-analysis of dimensional structure research published during the latter half of the 20th century revealed significant intercorrelation among structural dimensions inspired by Max Weber's bureaucratic ideal type, providing support for continued research on dimensional structures and for the bureaucratic structural model that served as its theoretical foundation. A new meta-analysis reported in this article, motivated by questions regarding the continued applicability of bureaucratic dimensional models in the later era of new organization forms, indicates that many of the interrelationships among five structural dimensions (formalization, standardization, specialization, vertical differentiation, and decentralization) have weakened since the time of the earlier meta-analysis. The results of this study, conducted using a sample of 346 correlations from a collection of 155 published articles, are interpreted as failing to provide consistent evidence supporting a central tenet of the bureaucratic structural model, therefore, as indicating that dimensional structural research now lacks a viable theoretical foundation.

The realms of banking and finance reveal a far more complex approach to early twentieth-century African American activism than the conventional protest vs. accommodation paradigm. Whites’ anxieties about Black economic and political autonomy melded into a peculiar alchemy of progressive zeal and white supremacy that professed the idealistic goal of protecting citizens from exploitative business practices but had the practical effect of destroying symbols of Black economic progress. The context that drove the opening of Black banks in Mississippi as “monuments of protest” also made Mississippi's new banking law a powerful tool with which state actors and even regular citizens could strike blows against African Americans’ growing economic, social, and political agency.

This article analyzes the so-called turn to the market in Sweden, with an emphasis on aspects that are typically absent from large-scale narratives. How did the changes known as neoliberalization and financialization enter everyday life and mundane financial practices? And which analytical tools can historians use to meaningfully connect the experience of changes on the micro level to those on the macro level? Zooming in on the the year 1979 and focusing on two empirical cases—the popularization of stock saving and the domestication of consumer credit—allows us to elaborate and apply a set of analytical entry points about (1) mundane micro-infrastructures, (2) financial knowledge as learning and unlearning, and (3) moral boundary work. This framework offers a way of exploring when and in what ways new financial practices were experienced and eventually embraced by those who had previously been skeptical or even hostile. It also reveals the role played by actors and institutions not typically seen as agents of marketization.

Although a carbon value has often been integrated in the frameworks established to guide public decision-making, benefit-cost analysis (BCA) has played no more than a minor role in the design of climate policies. It is urgently necessary to promote BCA in this area, and there is currently a unique opportunity for doing so. Major countries are designing new packages in order to meet their commitments, as illustrated by the European Green Deal, recent decisions on the part of the Biden Administration, and the creation of a Chinese national carbon market. These constructive processes must be based on BCA. BCA is absolutely necessary in order to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 at a reasonable cost. Indeed, abatement costs across and within sectors, and across and within countries, are extremely heterogeneous, and many of the policy instruments in use (subsidies, feed-in tariffs, technical standards, etc.) overlap inefficiently. The instrumental debate between carbon pricing and other instruments is sterile if it merely remains at the level of stating principles. BCA can help on this point too, by specifying comparisons between alternatives, identifying complementarities, and selecting the most relevant combinations of instruments. Its scope should therefore range from setting benchmarks for carbon pricing to assessing, e.g., green investments or measures to enhance carbon sinks. When applied to decarbonization policies, BCA requires firstly the selection of a carbon value, in order to monetize the climate benefits of investments and policies. However, the whole assessment framework must be updated, including the time horizon, the discount rate, the cobenefits of climate mitigation actions, and the pricing of climate risks. We show that such an updated framework leads to an upward revision in the assessment of the climate benefits of mitigation actions, and that combining the valuation of damages and cost-effectiveness approaches is necessary in order to meet the needs of policy assessment. Finally, there is a need to extend analysis beyond the efficiency criterion in order to deal with other dimensions of climate policies, particularly their distributive impacts. This requires specific analyses, which should be articulated with BCA and carried out at an early stage for a better implementation of climate policies than we have seen to date.

Despite repeated calls for retrospective regulatory review by every President since the 1970s, progress on implementing such reviews has been slow. We argue that part of the explanation for the slow progress to date stems from misalignment between the goals of regulatory review and the institutional framework used for the review. We define three distinct goals of regulatory review – the rule relevance goal, the rule improvement goal, and the regulatory learning goal. We then examine the text of the Presidential Executive Orders and major Congressional legislation addressing retrospective review, and document which goals were targeted and which institutions were used to conduct the reviews. We find that the U.S. federal government has almost always sought review of one rule at a time, conducted by the agency that issued or promulgated the rule and that these reviews tend to focus on rule relevance and costs. This institutional framework for retrospective review – one rule, assessed by the promulgating agency, focused on relevance and cost – is only well-suited to a narrow interpretation of the rule improvement goal. We then review alternative institutional structures that could better meet the rule improvement goal and the broader regulatory learning goal across multiple rules and agencies, and we offer recommendations for developing new guidance and institutions to promote multiagency regulatory learning.