In this article Dong-Woon Kim continues his investigation of the multinational activities of the British thread-making company, J. & P. Coats. Dr. Kim previously published “J. & P. Coats in Tsarist Russia, 1889-1917” in the winter 1995 edition of this journal (pp. 465-493). Here he explores the experiences of J. & P. Coats in the United States. Coats began selling its thread in the U.S. soon after the company's founding in 1830. From a modest start, it established a system of agencies to sell its own “Coats” brand and, in 1869, began local manufacture of thread in Rhode Island. Through a careful series of direct investments and the development of a flexible managerial structure, Coats eventually came to dominate the American cotton thread market.

The 1916 Tariff Commission, created to provide expert analyses of tariffs, is an example of Progressive-Era reliance on technical analysis. However, the Commission was motivated not only by a desire to improve technical understanding of tariffs, but also by distinctly political goals. President Woodrow Wilson and Treasury Secretary McAdoo adopted this Republican invention in response to pressure to prevent potential foreign “dumping” after the First World War. Congressional Democrats supported the Tariff Commission for this and an additional reason: they hoped Commission analyses of the consumer welfare costs of protectionism would undermine future electoral support for Republican high-tariff candidates.

Merchants formed an important component of British foreign direct investment before 1945. Locating in parts of Asia, Latin America and other developing economies, they often diversified into non-trading activities, including the ownership of plantations. This article examines three such British firms active initially in Asia, though with operations also in North America, Europe, and Africa. Often regarded as handicapped by managerial failings, especially from the early twentieth century, the authors cast these firms as more entrepreneurial and possessing greater managerial competencies than has been suggested. The article argues that their business strategies continued to evolve in the interwar years and that, when viewed as business groups, their organizational forms were robust, though considerable diversity in the performance of the three British firms can be observed. This evidence is shown to have implications for wider debates about the competencies of British management as a whole.

In the recent debate over minority contract set-asides, many policy-makers have forgotten this program's origins. Richard Nixon, moved by philosophical, practical, and political considerations, made minority business enterprise a theme of his 1968 presidential campaign and his first administration. By using set-asides, the Nixon administration overcame its meager funding of the Office of Minority Business Enterprise (OMBE) and encouraged minority entrepreneurship. Nixon's actions influenced federal policy toward minority owned businesses for two decades.

This article assesses John H. Patterson's influence on the development of sales management and modern understandings of salesmanship. From 1884, when Patterson started the National Cash Register Company, to his death in 1922, the firm dominated its industry. At the heart of the company's success was its sales force. Patterson created an intricate system of management to monitor and train company salesmen. He gave them scripts to memorize and assigned them territory to cover. He held conventions and thematic sales contests, and pressured salesmen to rid their regions of competition. Patterson sought to create a method of sales management that encompassed all aspects of selling, from the calculation of quotas and commission rates to the motivation of discouraged salesmen. While much attention has been paid to efforts to improve the efficiency of production processes, especially those advocated by Frederick W. Taylor, Pattersons work at N.C.R. reveals a contemporary effort to reform methods of distribution.

Readers who perused a 1904 issue of the Atlantic Monthly encountered an article with the intriguing title of “The Small Business as a School of Manhood.” Largely a diatribe against the growing dominance of large corporations, it lamented the presumably inevitable passing of smaller concerns. Curiously, its author, Henry A. Stimson, placed relatively little emphasis on the economic or even the political consequences of this development. Rather, he worried that the new order, which reduced would-be entrepreneurs to the status of corporate employees, represented “the loss of something fine in manhood.” Men who inhabited the newly-created ranks of middle and upper management might lead prosperous lives but faced the loss of their selfrespect, their dignity, their “intellectual stamina.” As Stimson saw it, they had been emasculated by the rise of the corporation.

This article presents a new list of France's 100 largest publicly-held manufacturing firms in 1913 and compares them to the 100 largest American, British, and German firms identified by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., in Scale and Scope. The largest French firms clustered in the same industries as the largest firms in the other countries. They were much smaller than their American counterparts, but in some industries they compared favorably with their German counterparts in size. More importantly, many of the largest French firms were behaving like the leading industrial firms elsewhere, developing cutting-edge technology, investing in state-of-theart production facilities, and putting professional managers in charge of operations. In contrast to the notion that France was a follower in the Second Industrial Revolution and eschewed the trend toward managerial enterprise in the early twentieth century, this article presents a picture of considerable dynamism, with France's leading industrial firms laying the organizational foundations from 1900 to 1930 for the managerial capitalism that would flourish in France in the post-Second World War era.

Throughout the nineteenth century, merchants and manufacturers involved in interstate commerce sought federal bankruptcy legislation to overcome diverse and discriminatory state laws that raised the cost of credit and impeded interstate trade. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, they formed a national organization to lobby for bankruptcy legislation. While many scholars have seen the passage of federal bankruptcy legislation as a response to the economic depression of the 1890s, this article shows that it was the formation of this national organization, rather than the economic crisis, that was the primary force behind the Bankruptcy Act of 1898.

The steel industry has been criticized for unnecessarily provoking the lengthy 1959 strike that allowed steel imports to penetrate the United States market. The industry demanded from the union the revision of a collective bargaining clause that protected local working practices. Historians have viewed the clause as inconsequential and the industry's demand for revision unnecessary. This article explores the US Steel Corporation's history of cost reductions and modernization during the 1950s in relation to this contract clause. It argues that the corporation's 1959 bargaining stance, although tactically flawed, made strategic sense given US Steel's decision to cut costs through crew reductions and incremental technological changes at its older mills.

In 1935 Fortune magazine published a series of articles on “Women in Business” whose true subject was the absence of women in business. Published anonymously but written by Archibald MacLeish, the articles distinguished between the relatively few women in “general business” or “business proper” and the greater number “engaged in the business exploitation of femininity.” MacLeish asserted that this was “not merely an arbitrary” distinction, for businesses dominated by men were “vital industries.” Vital is a significant adjective from a man known to choose his words carefully, with its connotations of fundamental, indispensable, robust, animate, and, not least, virile. Unlike men's efforts in business, said MacLeish, “feminine success in the exploitation of women proves nothing but the fact that women are by nature feminine.” That is, women's ventures in cosmetology, fashion and styling, department store buying, advertising to women, and the women's press resulted from a state of being, not a will to action. As MacLeish put it, “Elizabeth Arden is not a potential Henry Ford. She is Elizabeth Arden. It is a career in itself but it is not a career in industry.”

The First World War presented the newly formed Federal Reserve System with issues that were crucial in defining its future institutional character and operational strategies and priorities. From 1914 to 1917 disputes over the relationship between the U.S. and belligerent European nations divided competing groups of New York bankers who had helped to create the Federal Reserve System and who otherwise shared many of the same objectives for its future purpose and functions. These divisions grew particularly acrimonious over policies concerning acceptances, a new financial instrument that could substantially affect the Allied powers' ability to obtain war funding in the United States. Despite these wartime splits, the rival financial groups, led by Benjamin Strong and Paul M. Warburg, generally concurred in assigning a higher priority to the international implications of Federal Reserve policies than to domestic consequences. Likewise, after the war both united in using the Federal Reserve System to facilitate Europe's economic recovery.

Business history is not a field whose problematic I know, although these papers and one I read by Angel Kwolek-Folland, which was given here last spring, provide a helpful introduction. Instead, I come from exactly those fields, as the papers point out, that have been the traditional ones for thinking about women and gender: women's history and labor history. The challenge is to extend insights from those fields to business history.

During the twentieth century, the pharmaceutical industry experienced a series of dramatic changes as developments in science and technology generated new opportunities for innovation. Each of these transitions forced existing firms to develop new capabilities. The authors examine the most recent such transition, the shift to molecular genetics and recombinant DNA technology (1970 to the present), and explain how and why this transformation differed from the previous ones in pharmaceuticals. Small biotech startups played an important role in this transition, and the large pharmaceutical firms that began to enter the field had to develop new strategies for innovation. Two major strategies were adopted by the early movers, all of which created various kinds of alliances with the small biotech businesses. By the mid-1990s, the leading pharmaceutical manufacturers had established significant capabilities in the new field, but they were continuing to work with specialized biotechs in order to innovate across a broad range of therapeutic categories.