The Italian Clothing Industry Association (AIIA) was the first employers’ association founded to protect the interests of the nascent Italian ready-to-wear industry. According to the literature on the subject, there were three factors that allowed business interest associations (BIAs) to operate effectively at a meso-organizational level: their internal organizational structure, the activities of bureaucratic support of companies and lobbying in defense of entrepreneurs’ interests, as well as the ability to adapt to the more general context in which they worked. Based on a detailed empirical analysis, this article examines what the AIIA accomplished in each of these three areas. There are two objectives: (1) analyzing the circumstances that led the AIIA to fail in its purposes of representing the Italian ready-to-wear industry, and (2) investigating, in a typical creative industry, the hidden costs in terms of competitiveness of BIAs’ planning efforts and their consequences for the creation of an efficient and internationally competitive fashion system.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, many U.S. business leaders resolved to go “beyond compliance” with environmental regulations. Manufacturers sought to become more eco-efficient by reducing how much waste they produced per unit of output. Some companies developed greener products. However, the new commitment to sustainability only went so far: Few executives fundamentally rethought their business models. What drove the rise of corporate concern about sustainability, and why did those drivers fall short? The incentives to become greener were partial. They affected some companies more than others, and they only rewarded efforts to reduce some environmental impacts. By analyzing the limits of corporate interest in sustainability in the late 1980s and early 1990s, this article offers fresh insight into the challenge of greening the economy.

While the first business organizations to reach large size in the late nineteenth century did so through the route of vertical integration—formal ownership of assets and direct employment of workers—mid-twentieth-century franchising firms pioneered a new path to bigness, relying on restrictive contracts rather than formal integration to control their business organizations. Franchised chains replaced formal ownership and employment with contractual mechanisms known as vertical restraints (contractual controls on separate firms, such as price and supplier restrictions) to achieve uniformity and control over their outlets, without directly owning them. While most existing accounts of franchising focus on efficiency reasons for the evolution of the business form, this paper identifies a policy and legal mechanism: the relaxing of antitrust prohibitions on vertical restraints. These policy and legal changes were heavily lobbied for by franchising firms themselves. Whatever the efficiency implications of franchising, the increasing legalization of vertical restraints also had the benefit for franchising firms of allowing them to pull in the legal boundaries of the firm, leaving workers and other stakeholders outside. At the same time that they pursued franchising as a kind of vertical integration by other means, franchisors lobbied to preserve the legal benefits of having franchisees considered separate firms under a variety of laws, such as access to Small Business Administration loans and exclusion of workers at franchised establishments from access to collective bargaining and other rights against them.

Arguing that it would serve scholars and practitioners better to view impression management (IM) from a coworker's perspective than from that of an actor's outcomes, this study demonstrates that IM by a coworker triggers a self-serving attributional process. The authors reason that denial of another's relative advantage leads the observing coworker to attribute this behavior to the actor's incompetence, consequently leading to counterproductive behavior toward them in efforts to reduce their own relative disadvantage. Data were collected at T1 and T2 from 142 service sector employees. Our results were consistent with our hypotheses. However, the moderated-mediation models for conditional effects of hostile attributional style were not supported. This study offers an integrated view of previously isolated domains of IM and attribution, suggesting future literature considers a similar perspective for more meaningful investigations.

This replication study was invited by the Editor in Chief of Management and Organization Review, Arie Y. Lewin. The original study by Judge, Fainshmidt, and Brown (2014) spanned the global financial crisis (2005–2010), and as such, this anomalous time period may not have been representative of most economies, or even the overall global economy. In this replication study we refine and extend Judge et al. (2014) which explored the provocative question – which form of capitalism works best in terms of ‘equitable wealth creation’? Similar to the earlier study, we find that there are multiple paths to macro-economic success. Notably, effective institutional configurations tend to combine high-quality regulatory institutions, effective skill development systems, and social cultures largely unaffected by corruption so there is some commonality amongst effective configurations. In contrast, ineffective institutional configurations tend to be relatively weak in one or several of these three critical sets of institutions. Importantly, we find some novel patterns emerging from the most recent data, including potentially new forms of capitalism associated with equitable wealth creation. In addition, we find that effective credit market institutions are more important, and collective bargaining institutions are less important than the original study suggested. We discuss implications for the comparative capitalism literature, policy makers, and the future of capitalism in the global economy.

During the 1960s, Sarnia was the wealthiest city in Ontario and the one with the dirtiest air. Its economy was dominated by Chemical Valley, the city’s petrochemical industry. Chemical Valley firms and executives were civically active, donating to public causes, dominating the local chamber of commerce, and working closely with provincial and municipal officials to ensure a friendly business environment. They also maintained a monopoly on information about local air pollution levels and were not required by government to adhere to clean air regulations. However, like the rest of the chemical industry at the time, Chemical Valley was exposed to an onslaught of negative publicity, raising the threat of regulation and loss of their control over emissions data and production processes. This article illustrates how economic elites in Sarnia prevented the problematization and regulation of air pollution. In doing so, it describes the actors in the policy system and examines its recourse to suppress dissent when activists sought to raise the air pollution issue.

This article traces the history of the first Chinese life insurance company: the China United Assurance Society. China United was founded in Shanghai in 1912 as a purely Chinese-owned enterprise and became the first Chinese life insurer to survive past its eighth year. By 1935, it boasted insurance in force of over 20 million yuan. In adapting life insurance to Republican China, China United had to contend with a number of extraordinary challenges. It had to train a corps of Chinese technical experts in a country without a single accredited actuary. It had to cultivate demand for a product that was poorly understood and often distrusted. At the same time, the Society was forced to find a way to manage a nationwide sales network that could market insurance products to a country that hitherto had little knowledge of life insurance. In doing so, it was threatened by interethnic strife sparked by racist practices of the foreign manager. Finally, China United had to overcome increasingly fierce competition, high lapse rates, and excess mortality that combined to drive underwriting profits negative. The Society was able to survive as a going concern only through its investing prowess in Chinese capital markets. Using previously unmined sources from the Shanghai Municipal Archives, this article charts China United’s turbulent process of indigenization, and explores its lasting legacies in the contemporary Chinese life insurance industry.

This article explores the formation and early history of the American Institute of the City of New-York, which in the 1830s became the leading lobby association of “friends of industry” in the United States. More specifically, the article considers how the institute’s officers sought to overcome obstacles of collective mobilization that had plagued earlier pro-industry associations. Pre–Civil War interest groups is an understudied area, and historians typically depict the years following in the Compromise of 1833 as a period essentially devoid of pro-industry agitation. However, it was in precisely in these years that friends of industry for the first time managed to obtain the resources necessary for sustained mobilization. Key to the American Institute’s success, this article argues, was the development of annual manufacturing fairs, events that provided steady revenue, strengthened internal cohesion, attracted new members, facilitated coordination with like-minded groups, and provided opportunities to engage in popular politics in an ordered manner.