The literature on inventors has traditionally focused on entrepreneurs who exploited their ideas in their own businesses and on researchers who worked in large firms' R&D laboratories. For most of US history, however, it was as common for inventors to profit from their ideas by selling off or licensing the patent rights. This article traces the different ways in which inventors resolved the information problems involved in marketing their patents. We focus in particular on the patent attorneys who emerged during the last third of the nineteenth century to help inventors find buyers for their intellectual property.

This article focuses on chemical retailers Jack and Charles Colbert to, first, show the externalization processes linked to the greening of U.S. industry through stricter consumer and environmental protection regulations and, second, illustrate the limitations of nationally framed environmentalism targeting businesses in a global market. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Colberts traded chemicals that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had banned for use in the United States. They exported them legally to countries where the material was still a permitted commodity—primarily in the global South. Rare interview material illustrates how the exporters justified their unequal business deals by misappropriating the meaning of recycling.

From the late 1890s through the 1920s, a new set of nonprofit, business-funded organizations spearheaded an American campaign against commercial duplicity. These new organizations shaped the legal terrain of fraud, built massive public-education campaigns, and created a private law-enforcement capacity to rival that of the federal government. Largely born out of a desire among business elites to fend off proposals for extensive regulatory oversight of commercial speech, the antifraud crusade grew into a social movement that was influenced by prevailing ideas about social hygiene and emerging techniques of private governance. This initiative highlighted some enduring strengths of business self-regulation, such as agility in responding to regulatory problems; it also revealed a key weakness, which was the tendency to overlook deceptive marketing when practiced by firms that were members of the business establishment.

This article examines the 1968 decision by the French mineral water company Vittel to use PVC packaging for its main product. This was the first time this type of packaging had been used for a mainstream consumer product. By examining the causes, manifestations, and consequences of this business decision, it aims to show how this model has spread and contributed to the creation of an environmentally damaging waste regime by abandoning deposit systems. The article also seeks to show, through this case, the importance of identifying social and institutional contexts to understand the trajectory of consumer products.

The system of personal finance that developed in the United States was more fragmented than comparative arrangements in most industrializing countries, where savings banks had become large, diversified financial institutions. The federalist political structure of the U.S., combined with lobbying by existing intermediaries, inhibited the establishment of a centralized public provider of financial services for households such as emerged elsewhere. Moreover, the United States did not develop strong, diversified savings institutions at the local level, due in part to regulations that stifled innovation by savings banks and in part to the risk-averse organizational culture of the banks themselves. These factors enabled the proliferation of specialized intermediaries that aggressively marketed new financial services to households and facilitated the growth of new patterns of financial behavior among ordinary Americans.

In this study of lending in the emergence of a modern steel industry in the United States, I analyze the evolving interaction between borrowers and lenders in historical context. I show how “relationship lending” (that is, credit allocation in which personal contacts play a major role) can go wrong, despite good intentions at the outset, and that institutional conditions exert an important influence on how lenders and borrowers negotiate conflicts. Particularly important in the case of Moses Taylor and Joliet Iron & Steel Company were the uncertain jurisdictions and political maneuvering that stemmed from structural peculiarities of the U.S. legal system, peculiarities that belie claims of its efficacy for protecting creditor interests. Although this failure of relationship lending might seem to imply negative consequences for economic development, I show that, at least in this case, the opposite interpretation is more compelling.

Over the course of the twentieth century, entrepreneurs developed a number of successful global brands in consumer-goods industries. However, few independent brands survived the merger waves of the 1980s. To address the question of why so few independent brands survived, this paper examines successful brands in industries that rely principally on advertising for competitive success. Successful consumer-goods brands in several industries and countries are compared in order to highlight innovative strategies pursued by brand managers. The analyzed brands are mainly owned by Europeans, although a few examples of American and Japanese brands are covered as well.

How does economic organization affect economic performance? This analysis of the historical transformation of the U.S. economy from the business model of the “old economy” to that of the “new economy” demonstrates that the Japanese challenge of the 1980s was an important catalyst for the shift. Anchored by the “Chandlerian” corporation, the old model delivered economic growth that was much more equitable and stable than the new one. Furthermore, the business model that underpinned the Japanese challenge represented a superior version of the old U.S. prototype. The fi nancialization of corporate decision-making under the new paradigm has been the prime source of inequity and instability in U.S. economic performance over the past three decades. As manifested in outsized executive pay and massive stock buybacks, the fi nancialization of the U.S. corporation threatens long-term economic growth.

This article argues that a cultural and narrative perspective can enrich the business history field, encourage new and different questions and answers, and provide new ways of thinking about methods and empirical material. It discusses what culture is and how it relates to narratives. Taking a cultural and narrative approach may affect questions, sources, and methodologies, as well as the status of our results. Finally, a narrative approach may contribute to our historical understanding of entrepreneurship and globalization.

This article examines the emergence of the American stove industry, detailing the complex interactions among changes in the product, the organization of production, and the methods of selling cast-iron heating and cooking equipment to consumers nationwide, particularly in the antebellum years. This highly competitive industry, composed of hundreds of proprietary firms, became a site of considerable innovation in marketing. Manufacturers integrated forward, controlling the sale and distribution of their goods through networks of small retailers nationwide. The article explains how and why.