Over the past two decades, the Japanese apparel industry has lost its competitiveness after experiencing a period of fast growth from the postwar years to the early 1990s. In international literature in social sciences, most scholars offer ethnic-based explanations of fashion in Japan, stressing some specificities such as street fashion or star designers in Paris. This article, however, argues that such views are biased and cannot explain the current lack of competitiveness of the Japanese apparel industry. Using the concept of the “fashion system” and following a business history-oriented approach, we offer a new interpretation of the emergence of Western clothing and fashion in Japan during the second part of the twentieth century. This interpretation demonstrates that the characteristics of the Japanese fashion system lie in a focus on the issues of production and technology, both of which led both to an extreme segmentation of the domestic market and to weaker brands.

This article analyzes the transfer of tacit knowledge between countries and continents, based on a case from the shipbuilding industry. The South Korean shipbuilder Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) was established in the early 1970s and had by the late 1980s become the world’s leading shipbuilder. Aided by foreign loan capital, HHI acquired technology through foreign licenses and imported equipment. However, shipbuilding is about more than hardware. This article presents and analyzes another important means of knowledge transfer: the acquisition of tacit knowledge in the form of shipbuilding skills, including shipyard processes and operations. This transfer was mainly accomplished through the “import” of foreign managers and the dispatch abroad of South Korean employees. One important element, which we investigate in detail, was the Korean personnel that HHI sent in 1972 to the Scott Lithgow shipyards in Scotland to observe and learn. Based on archival sources and interviews, we detail the manner in which tacit knowledge could be transferred across language and cultural barriers.

This study analyzes why and how department stores lost their dominant status in China’s apparel retail industry. It examines the history of the apparel distribution mechanism. The analysis finds that this loss is due to irrationalities in the distribution mechanism that developed to support apparel enterprises’ marketing efforts. Furthermore, the loss also resulted from the strategic changes among apparel enterprises and department stores to cope with these irrationalities. Apparel firms developed diversified channels and weakened the stores’ buying power by introducing multiple brands and getting involved in stores’ capital. Although department stores sought to change their disadvantaged status by reforming their purchasing patterns, they could not expand their scale to address their difficulties. Eventually, department stores ceased to be the main retail channel for apparel, and the value chain changed from being driven by department stores to being driven by apparel enterprises.

Amidst other major changes to the food system, America witnessed an extensive transformation of marketing within the postwar era. Specifically, the concept of convenience quickly became a favorite of corporations across the food chain. However, despite the favorable market conditions and an outwardly receptive customer base, companies quickly found that they needed to negotiate with public perceptions of food, cultural ideals, and social realities. Using primarily corporate sources, this paper explores the development and use of convenience by food marketers. It investigates how processors sought to exploit postwar tensions between labor and gender. The project also examines how companies grappled with customer expectations of product quality. Ultimately, companies that successfully leveraged their ability to offer quick, quality meals further embedded themselves into consumer choices and lifestyles. By cultivating and marketing a specific message, corporations used convenience to make themselves appear indispensable to living and eating well in the postwar era.

This article reinterprets Asian industrialization during the Cold War through the lens of a forgotten commodity: the South Korean wig. Wigs were critical to Asia’s “miraculous” economic growth—a US$1 billion industry in 1970, as well as the number two export in South Korea and number four in Hong Kong at the height of export-oriented industrialization. The article makes a methodological argument, suggesting that we see industrialization differently when we “follow” a commodity transnationally—from the heads of rural South Koreans to the hands of Seoul factory workers to the shoulder bags of Korean American peddlers to the heads of African American women—and when we integrate bottom-up and top-down views of the commodity’s “life.” Only by taking this global perspective can we see how U.S. imperialism shaped the ways people and things moved across borders and oceans and how Cold War commodities were haunted by the lives of the people who touched them.

By looking at the policy termination of state aid to shipbuilders in Amsterdam, this article illustrates how a major policy paradigm shift within recent history, and the change from Keynesian to neoliberal policies, can be explained. The article is informed by a multilevel governance approach to policy change analysis and is based on different types of sources. It presents an in-depth case study of the closing of the Amsterdam shipyards and analyzes the role of policy change at different governance levels (i.e., city government, national Parliament, national government, and the European Commission). In doing so, we are able to illustrate how new actors—in this case the European Commission and the Commissioner for Competition—were able to terminate long-existing policies of state aid to shipbuilders under the auspices of improving competition and the free market at the start of the 1980s.