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The years surrounding the origins of the term “Manifest Destiny” were a transitional period in the history of industrialization. Historians have done much to analyze the impact of major technological shifts on business structure and management, and to connect eastern markets and westward expansion. They have paid less attention, however, to the relationship among continental geopolitics, industrial development, and frontier warfare. This article uses War Department papers, congressional reports, and manufacturers’ records to examine how the arms industry developed in response to military conflict on the frontier. As public and private manufacturers altered production methods, product features, and their relationships to one another, they contributed to the industrial developments of the mid-nineteenth century.
After assuming sole ownership of the Ford Motor Company in 1919, Henry Ford transformed his business into a mission-driven organization that prioritized improvements in production and engineering over investment returns. At the same time, the company programmatically rejected bureaucratic management in favor of informal procedures and ingrained collective protocols, both in administration and on the shop floor. This article references Max Weber's view of “charismatic” authority to explain the company’s organizational structure, its culture, its ambivalence toward Henry Ford’s worst tendencies and prejudices, and its resilience during the decline of his leadership in the 1930s and 1940s.
Decarbonization has been identified as necessary to preventing catastrophic climate change, creating a dilemma for the global oil industry. This article examines the industry's reaction to this dilemma and focuses on its historical response to market and governmental regulatory pressure. The article argues that differing national climate policies provoked some oil companies to develop proactive decarbonization strategies. However, the continued growth of fossil fuel demand, the industry's vested interests, and the voluntary nature of climate governance have resulted in the industry taking very little meaningful action to achieve decarbonization.
IBM has been the subject of considerable study by historians, economists, business management professors, and journalists. This essay surveys the various writings on the company, placing their contributions in a roughly chronological account of the company's history, from its early days in tabulating through to its dominance of global markets in computing. The essay includes well-known studies of IBM in addition to more obscure accounts. It emphasizes the need to consider the company's culture along with its technological and managerial changes in order to grasp the reasons for its longevity.
Unwilling to wait decades for the political decline of New Deal liberalism, the core industries of post–World War II America repurposed collective bargaining as a means to reduce the costs of organized labor. New industrial relation strategies known as “wage-price policies” linked labor compensation with productivity in order to stabilize unit labor costs and prices. After reviewing the emergence and diffusion of wage-price policy within the managerial community, the article analyzes its implementation during the tumultuous 1959 bargaining round between the steel industry and the United Steelworkers. The union claimed that the industry's goals centered on management's antipathy to work rules, but industry records reveal that work rules were only part of its broader efforts to contain the inflationary consequences of the New Deal.
We analyze how Hollywood films from 1928 to 2016 represented business within a broad historical and business context. We argue that the films actively contributed to audiences’ sensemaking processes and to how different groups perceived the role of business in society. We advance the idea that films provided cultural blueprints to be used by viewers for their own understanding, identification, and practices in relation to business in its historical context, particularly during periods of uncertainty, crisis, and instability when many films addressed deeper societal concerns about the role of business.
This article explores the long-term effects of foreign direct investment on the human capital development of host economies, based on the historical analysis of the Spanish operations of four leading American firms: ITT, J. Walter Thompson, Merck Sharp & Dohme, and John Deere. Our research shows that the training and working practices of these companies had a positive impact on the Spanish subsidiaries in terms of technological upgrading and managerial development. However, the local context was also relevant, through mandatory agreements that empowered local partners from the start and the availability of locally educated professionals eager to absorb new knowledge.
General Motors (GM) became the world's dominant automaker in the 1920s and 1930s thanks in part to a dynamic, centralized public relations operation. The intended audience of this marketing included GM's own overseas employees. As the company opened new plants in foreign countries, it used media such as General Motors World, an employee newspaper, to communicate that it understood the needs of different foreign consumers and to advocate against protectionist economic policies that hindered its ability to sell cars. The messages of General Motors World shaped global perceptions of GM's corporate structure and brand, and were a core element of the automaker's overseas activity.
Tumbling barriers once heralded globalization's ascent. The abolition of capital controls propelled the integration of financial markets from the mid-1970s, and the free movement of capital, goods, services, and labor soon became foundational commitments for the European Union. Multilateral trade reforms, orchestrated after 1995 by the new World Trade Organization, lowered barriers to commerce, while telecommunications and transportation technologies slashed the costs of long-distance transactions. In a stunning development, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 showcased the incapacity of even totalitarian regimes to contain the desires of ordinary citizens for freedom, openness, and global engagement. Recalling that halcyon moment, when a bifurcated Cold War subsided and a new era of globalization and openness took tangible form, the journalist Edward Luce invokes Wordsworth: “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive.”
Since 1917, tax filers in the United States who itemize tax deductions have been able to subtract gifts to eligible charities from their taxable income. The deduction is especially valuable to successful entrepreneurs who donate corporate stock. Such philanthropy was seen as a close substitute for government spending until after the mid-twentieth century. In the 1950s and 1960s, high tax rates catalyzed the formation of large foundations from industrial fortunes and precipitated a national debate about the legitimacy of such giving. The midcentury debate preceded increased oversight of charities and foundations and a shift in the way U.S. lawmakers regarded the contribution deduction—from a subsidy by philanthropists of public goods government would otherwise provide to an implicit public cost.