Commodity grades seem like innocuous measures of quality and thereby escape scrutiny as to their origin, purpose, and effect. Drawing on the National Live Stock and Meat Board’s executive meeting minutes and US Food Administration (USFA) records, this essay contextualizes and politicizes government beef grading. The USFA played a key role in the lead-up to government beef grading and in the creation of the Meat Board. USFA messaging as well as a post war depression curtailed consumption of feedlot-derived beef. In response, industry leaders formed a trade association called the Meat Board that acted as a liaison between industry and public sector scientists and helped bring about government beef grading. Beef grading emerged in the broader context of a campaign launched by the USFA to modernize meat retailers. At the same time, breeders, feeders, and western ranchers pushed for government beef grading in response to low prices and as a panacea. The Meat Board also cooperated with agricultural scientists in coordinating research to boost feedlot-derived beef. Rather than industry cooptation of science, this essay shows an alignment of vision in a mutually beneficial relationship. These actors, furthermore, used government beef grading to protect the feedlot system of production.

This article examines how the ideological outlook of the British worker co-operative movement gradually assumed a neoliberal character. Drawing on methods from conceptual history, it traces the evolution of the movement’s key ideas and explores the changing language in which they were expressed. Central to this shift was the emergence of a social-enterprise discourse that reframed an earlier New Left commitment to pursuing worker control “in and against the market” as a conviction that such control could be achieved only “in and through” market participation. The study centres on the Industrial Common Ownership Movement (ICOM), a national federation of worker co-operatives active in Britain between 1971 and 2001. It uses items published by ICOM, material from numerous archives, and oral interviews conducted with some of those involved in the federation’s final years.

This article examines historical evidence to analyze how the standardization and globalization of bank credit cards transformed the competitive framework of European retail banking. This process was facilitated by the deployment of a new business model with significant implications for the profit-and-loss accounts of banking institutions. The change occurred in the context of growing synergies between technological and organizational developments in the United States and Europe in bank cards, which encouraged the progressive universalization of the system. This historical analysis explains how intense market competition, specific European market conditions, mass tourism, and consumer society acted as drivers of change, as exemplified by the transition from Eurocheque to plastic card. The globalization of cards reveals that competition in markets with a high technological base generated important network externalities, a phenomenon that has been pronounced in Europe and Japan, which have had a less fragmented payment model than in the United States. The shift toward service banking transformed the structure of retail financial markets. Ultimately, the transformation of the retail banking sector tells us about the narrative of globalization in financial markets.

Social media has become a strategic driver of sponsorship effectiveness in major sporting events. At the 2024 Paris Olympics, digital platforms transformed how sponsorship relationships are formed, sustained, and activated for audience engagement. Yet, the mechanisms through which social media management influences sponsorship outcomes remain underexplored. This study examines the mediating role between core sponsorship antecedents – sport involvement, event attachment, brand familiarity, and sponsor-event congruence – and engagement outcomes. A quantitative survey of 7,412 Greek spectators was analyzed using structural equation modeling to test the proposed framework integrating sponsorship management and digital strategy. Results confirm that social media substantially amplifies the impact of sponsorship factors, fostering stronger sponsor–spectator connections and enhancing sponsorship returns. This is the first empirical model to link social media usage as a mediating variable between sponsorship antecedents and engagement outcomes in the context of mega-events, with a focus on the Paris 2024 Olympics. The research contributes to theory by positioning social media as a critical mediator in sponsorship strategy and offers actionable insights for managers seeking to optimize sponsorship effectiveness across diverse cultural and event contexts.

By the early 1990s, the private European Currency Unit (ECU) became the third largest currency in the bond market, after the dollar and the yen. This article explores the rise of the ECU private market in the 1980s. It argues that the ECU’s political links with the European Economic Community (EEC) were central to its successful development, but also that business actors, by devising a marketable ECU, played a role in advancing the project of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), whether voluntarily or not. The article draws on archival evidence from the records of banks and companies, business associations, as well as European institutions, national governments, and central banks. It sheds new light on the role of business influence in public affairs in the late twentieth century, the history of monetary integration and the making of the EMU, and the history of money and private currencies. It thereby shows how the ECU served as a rehearsal for the EMU.

Recent corporate scandals and excessively egotistical behavior on the part of organizational leaders underscore the need for industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology and human resource (HR) scholars and practitioners to critically examine how organizational systems and practices can stimulate leader narcissism. Whereas most organizational scholarship considers leader narcissism to be a stable input that influences important organizational outcomes, we challenge organizational scholars and practitioners to further inspect how organizational practices may either stimulate or suppress leader narcissism. We focus on HR practices as one specific set of organizational practices within the area of expertise of I-O psychologists and HR professionals. Drawing on self-categorization theory, we argue that highly personalizing HR practices (e.g., hypercompetitive leader selection, high-potential programs, elevated leader pay) can encourage leaders to define themselves in terms of a “special” personal identity in ways that set them apart from the broader collective within organizations and in turn facilitate leader narcissism. In contrast, we argue that depersonalizing HR practices (e.g., rotational leader selection, inclusive developmental programs, interdependent rewards) can encourage leaders to act in group-oriented ways that benefit the interests of others in an organization—and beyond. We call on organizational scholars and practitioners to consider more carefully how HR practices—often designed with the goal of cultivating leadership potential—may unintentionally reinforce leader narcissism. With this analysis, we hope to stimulate research in this area and offer insights to shape HR policies and practices in ways that discourage destructive forms of leader narcissism.

This article examines how lightning fires shaped anti-monopoly sentiment among Pennsylvanian oilmen in the late nineteenth century. Drawing on 138 lightning-fire incidents coded from local periodicals, the study investigates the environmental impacts of Standard Oil’s expansion in the Pennsylvania oil fields—particularly how its oil storage infrastructure attracted lightning and thus increased the risk of oil fires. Leveraging its monopsonistic position, Standard Oil sought to financialize this environmental risk and shift it onto independent producers, inventing a quasi-fire-insurance system called the “general average assessment.” Viewing this practice as a major threat to their business, oilmen developed bottom-up antagonism toward Standard Oil. Ultimately, this study offers a new framework for integrating environmental and business history by showing that the financialization of environmental risk acts as a central arena where corporate power is consolidated, contested, and politically reconfigured.

Welcome to Volume 26, No. 4 of Enterprise and Society. By tradition, this issue carries the Presidential Address delivered at the annual meeting of the Business History Conference, alongside summaries of those dissertations shortlisted for the Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History. The 2025 Presidential Address was delivered by Stephen Mihm at the annual meeting in Athens, Georgia (USA). Stephen’s topic was “The Business of Labor.” Unfortunately, unforeseen circumstances have as yet prevented Stephen from finalizing his address for publication. We look forward to publishing the address as soon as possible. Three dissertations were shortlisted for the Krooss Prize: Joshua Lappen on “Electrification, Politics, and Visibility in Greater Los Angeles”; Pablo Pryluka on “Developing Consumers: A History of Wants and Needs in Postwar South America”; and Mattie Webb on “Diplomacy at Work: The South African Worker, U.S. Multinationals, and Transnational Racial Solidarity (1972-1987).” We congratulate all three finalists, and especially Dr. Pryluka, who was the 2025 prize recipient. All three summaries are presented in this issue.