This article examines the rise of craft brewing in Canada as a window onto a broader transformation in the cultural logic of post-Fordist capitalism. It argues that craft did not reject markets but reorganized the criteria by which markets conferred worth. In an industry marked by intense postwar consolidation, sensory standardization, and national branding, value had long been anchored in scale, efficiency, and managerial coordination. Craft brewers disrupted this settlement by reattaching moral and aesthetic significance to locality, visible labor, and artisanal care, transforming authenticity into a competitive resource.

Drawing on corporate memoranda, advertising debates, liquor-board files, and acquisition records, the article treats legitimacy as a historically recoverable form of symbolic capital—produced through processes of authentication and convertible into market power. It traces a sequence of conversions: consolidation generated efficiency but justificatory fragility; craft entrepreneurs reorganized evaluation around proximity and provenance; incumbents responded through mimicry, acquisition, and portfolio governance. As authenticity became legible and economically valuable, it became portable and vulnerable to “inauthenticity discounts” when ownership disrupted recognition.

The Canadian case demonstrates how markets metabolize critique by converting dissent into governable value, and it invites business historians to treat legitimacy not as reputational residue but as infrastructure within modern enterprise strategy.

This essay examines the Peasants Land Bank, a state-run financial institution established in 1882 to accelerate the transfer of land to peasants in the Russian Empire. Initially designed as a credit provider, the Bank gained new powers in the 1890s, when the government granted it unprecedented authority to assemble its own land fund. This shift transformed the institution into a key instrument of imperial governance. By controlling access to land and credit, it privileged the idealized “all-Russian” Orthodox peasantry and systematically excluded groups outside this category, including indigenous groups (such as the Bashkirs), non-Orthodox subjects, individuals of foreign origin as well as women and urban dwellers who technically belonged to the peasant estate. The Bank’s practices of exclusion enable us to examine how a state financial institution, rather than a neutral intermediary, can perpetuate multiple hierarchies through its routine credit decisions.

This paper explores the historical development of management thought around the cost of public infrastructure. We argue that swings between ex post pricing and ex ante discounting as temporal frameworks within which the public, managers, politicians, and the media appraised major transport infrastructure projects constitute a dominant but unrecognized narrative. We use London in the twentieth century as a case study, identifying major changes in the 1920s and again in the 1960s which decisively rebalanced how projects were evaluated. We conclude that the current cost-benefit and ex ante discounting framework arose out of the adoption of American concepts and processes from the early 1960s onward. We think that this approach fostered rent-seeking activity and principal-agent problems, but that the empirical costs and timeframes for completing transport infrastructure have changed much less than is commonly believed in over a century.

The setting up of “second registries” by European governments in the 1980s was a formative moment in contemporary maritime history. Developed in an effort to counteract the growing use of offshore flags of convenience, these registries provided European shipping companies with spaces of exception from normal regulation, lifting national manning requirements and allowing for foreign labor to be hired on local wages. This article investigates the emergence of the Nordic variants, called “international ship registries” (ISRs). Employing a global perspective which focuses on the interplay between business actors, narratives, and national politics, it argues that the influence of offshore actors in shaping the Nordic developments was more pronounced than previous research suggests. The ISR policy was originally proposed to Norwegian policymakers by an offshore shipowner living in Bermuda. From there, it transferred to Denmark and Sweden, shaping their policy debates in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Hudson Bay Company (HBC) fundamentally changed food strategies in North America. Rather than go where food was, company servants stationed along Hudson Bay traded with Indigenous hunters for the flesh of wild animals. HBC officials expected this food to be cheap, a strategy that defines our understandings of commodity frontiers. Yet a focus on price requires greater attention to how firms account for costs. This article argues that the HBC’s post-1774 expansion inland exacerbated tensions related to control over the trade in country provisions between the company and Maškēkowak hunters. Recurrent food crises related to one animal—partridge—at the HBC’s principal post, York Fort, in the 1780s and 1790s prompted defences of what food was worth beyond its exchange value, in evaluations recorded outside the company’s ledgers. Not only did experiences hunting and eating partridges shape the HBC’s later search for other cheap foods. It also suggests ways to rethink the politics of prices within commercial enterprises.

Applying the New Entrepreneurial History framework, this paper examines how ArcBest Corporation, an integrated logistics firm based in Fort Smith, Arkansas, became the last legacy less-than-load (LTL) carrier operating in the United States. It argues that the firm’s enduring viability is partially the product of an internal distributed agency among executives over a century that involved continual entrepreneurial processes: Envisioning and valuing opportunities informed by the multiplicative form of values, strategically reallocating and reconfiguring resources, and legitimizing novelty to stakeholders in response to profound market and regulatory shifts. These entrepreneurial processes, paired with the company’s commitments to a unionized labor force, informed executives’ strategic decisions that transformed the carrier from a regional hauler into a national, technologically sophisticated, integrated logistics provider. In applying the new entrepreneurial history to ArcBest, it considers how entrepreneurial opportunities are enacted within the context of a single firm over time.

Money and Edinburgh go back a long way. The Bank of Scotland was founded in 1695, just a year after the Bank of England. Three centuries later, the first edition of the Global Financial Centres Index (in 2007) confirmed what everyone had always assumed: second only to London in the UK, sixth in Europe. But how? This small city, its population only topping 500,000 in the twenty-first century, was far from the centers of power and finance, with only a modest trading and manufacturing base of its own. This paper marries fresh oral history from the city’s mid-twentieth century financial elite—that is, an Edinburgh before the Global Financial Crash—with Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus in the relatively new paradigm of Historical Organisation Studies, treating the industry as a single unit across banking, life assurance, and investment management. This reveals their personal characteristics and demonstrates the “symbolic violence” which socialized them into absorbing and embracing both the values and practices of the organizations where they worked and the external structures, including professional bodies and, not least, the Church of Scotland, which helped maintain some of those values.

During World War II, condom consumption increased in both belligerent and non-belligerent countries, including Sweden. Yet the relationship between state-led initiatives and commercial marketing in driving this trend has received little scholarly attention. The main sources in this article consist of wartime public health campaigns and condom advertisements. Applying the concepts of social and consumer engineering, the article examines how government interventions, specifically through public health measures, influenced condom marketing practices. The findings show that wartime campaigns sought to engineer citizens’ sexual behavior and that businesses strategically aligned their messaging with government propaganda. This convergence was instrumental in positioning condoms as essential tools for public health and facilitated a more permissive attitude toward condoms as prophylactics, bridging state-led public health efforts with commercial objectives. By examining this dynamic, the article contributes to understanding how wartime policies shaped consumer behavior and forged enduring connections between public health and market strategies.

This article examines American “capitalist feminism” as a type of “business feminism” through the lens of biography. To demonstrate crucial linkages between business culture and historical social developments, the article foregrounds an account of the first woman president of a major commercial bank, Mary G. Roebling. Roebling sought women’s collective uplift primarily through economic empowerment, forwarding her message through accommodationist tactics, such as presenting a “feminine” image, embracing capitalism, and espousing moderate politics. This essay briefly explores additional biographies to suggest that other professionally successful, elite white women held similar “capitalist feminist” views. The article also employs biographical and associational examples to illustrate how capitalist feminism is a distinct category of business feminism.

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.

“Diplomacy at Work: The South African Worker, U.S. Multinationals, and Transnational Racial Solidarity” examines the history of corporate reform and anti-apartheid activism through the lens of South African labor and global worker movements. It argues that Black workers in apartheid South Africa repurposed U.S. corporate codes—especially the Sullivan Principles—as instruments of resistance. The labor movement transformed reformist rhetoric into tools for collective action and transnational worker solidarity. Drawing on oral histories, trade union archives, corporate reports, and government records in both the United States and South Africa, the dissertation reveals how workers used weak corporate reforms to pressure multinational companies, connect with U.S. labor allies, and challenge the violence of apartheid from the shop-floor. In doing so, it bridges business, labor, and diplomatic history to show that workers helped shape global debates over corporate ethics and U.S. foreign policy in the late Cold War era. Diplomacy at Work thus recasts South African labor as a central force in the transnational struggle against apartheid.

Developing Consumers: A History of Wants and Needs in Postwar South America offers a comparative social and economic history of South America’s developmental decades, from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. In the aftermath of World War II, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile implemented state-led strategies to secure economic sovereignty, raise living standards, and expand domestic markets. These policies made durable goods such as refrigerators, automobiles, and televisions increasingly available, yet access remained uneven across class, gender, and racial lines. By the 1960s, these commodities had become powerful symbols of modern well-being.

The dissertation examines how people experienced this transformation and how new forms of consumption reshaped ideas of welfare, citizenship, and inequality. By the decade’s end, it was clear that the developmental state could not deliver social mobility or universal access to modern comforts, leading to widespread frustration. Policy makers, marketing experts, and intellectuals debated how to “rationalize” consumption—deciding which needs should be guaranteed for all and which reflected elite privilege.

“Cultures of Power” tells the story of the electrification of greater Los Angeles from the first introduction of electric light in 1882 through 1969. Whereas scholars have previously examined how electrification has either preceded urbanization or amended pre-existing urban forms, in Southern California these two processes took place simultaneously, with each indelibly shaping the other. The result was not only a new model of American urbanism, but also a transformative approach to electric system development that shaped that industry’s growth worldwide. Greater Los Angeles and its electric systems, I argue, emerged from a decades-long process of co-creation fueled by differing perceptions of local landscapes, regional political conflict, and an emerging local mass culture fixated on electric symbols and products. I use this decades-long arc to illustrate how electricity’s social prominence shifted in response not merely to the passage of time and the growing familiarity of electric technologies, but rather as a consequence of choices made by Angeleno institutions and individuals.

During the 1920s, the newly formed American Legion used its unique placement as a nonprofit lobbying for veterans’ causes in a novel way—to enter movie distribution with the creation of its Film Service. The era was famously marked by the consolidation of Hollywood studios into conglomerates and the establishment of their powerful trade association, which moguls used to exert significant control over the emerging medium. Yet while big business was important in structuring the rise of motion pictures, small enterprises—including nonprofits like the Legion Film Service—still found ways to contribute to the sector’s growth by innovating and adapting complex operational strategies, becoming a surprising resource to their well-financed peers in the process. By taking these steps, Legionnaires’ civically minded playbills shaped the development of an industry that projected American cultural and economic influence for the rest of the century.

It is widely recognized that the hostile takeover is a key element of the UK’s shareholder value system of corporate governance. This article draws on archival evidence to offer a detailed account of the emergence of the hostile takeover and its acceptance within the media and government between 1952 and 1954. The existing literature claims that the takeover was not normalized until 1959, and that finance was restricted until then. This article shows that takeovers were accepted within government five years earlier, and that the Bank of England and Treasury knew that insurance companies were financing them, but did nothing about it.

The article begins with the legal and accounting changes introduced in Companies Act 1948, as well as the precarious financial position of shareholders. Together, they created an opening for hostile takeovers to emerge, which were driven by the desire of bidders to gain control of, and sell off, real property that was undervalued on corporate balance sheets. First emerging in 1952, the hostile takeover took the corporate and financial community, as well as the Government (the Bank of England, Board of Trade and Treasury) by surprise. The media led the way in cheerleading for the hostile takeover, while companies such as the Savoy Hotel Group and the Daily Mirror sought to defend themselves against unwelcome approaches. The Government ultimately settled for condemning “speculative” bids in public, but behind the scenes accepted the hostile takeover as legitimate. By 1954, it was recognized that: companies were under pressure to raise dividends and sell off assets in order to deter takeover bidders; that they only had limited options to defend themselves; and that there was little that could be done by Government. Managerialism had begun to give way to shareholder value.

This article analyzes the Wallenberg family’s central role within Sweden’s neutrality-industrial complex (NIC) during the Cold War, highlighting their secret collaboration with the military intelligence service. Drawing on archival evidence from the Swedish War Archives and the family bank SEB, the study shows how the family’s uniquely dominant position in industry, banking, and national defense made them a close partner to the intelligence community. By applying the Resource Mobilization Model from the literature on military-industrial complexes, the article further argues that Sweden’s NIC mainly developed as a corporatist response to perceived Soviet threats, requiring close coordination between state, military, and business elites. The Wallenbergs’ cooperation with the military and economic intelligence services—specifically through their control of SEB and large Swedish exporting firms—had both business and nonbusiness-related reasons, including nationalism and elite consensus on total defense. This study adds to the sparse literature in business history on the relationship between the business and intelligence communities and demonstrates how elite business families can use access to senior decision makers and classified information in the service of both national security and to advance their own strategic positioning.

How has caste influenced entrepreneurship in India in the past and how does it do so in the present? Using the Industrial Census of 1911, this paper provides the first detailed caste-level mapping of firms in Indian business history and links it to the present by an analysis of the Economic Census of 2013–2014. It finds that while trading castes were dominant, there were significant regional variations and nontrading castes were far more important than usually posited in the literature. Over the course of a century, the social base of entrepreneurship has widened slowly but significant barriers remain. The paper argues that “caste embeddedness” through the nature of wealth distribution, social capital, and ritual purity affects entrepreneurial choices and presents a typology of “caste,” “caste-advantage,” “caste-restricted,” and “noncaste” businesses that characterize the economic life of India.

This paper examines how automated multiphasic health testing and services (AMHTS), which were originally developed in the United States but never widely adopted there, gained traction in Japan despite being excluded from the country’s public health insurance system. Drawing on Fitzgerald et al.’s theory of interlocking interactions, we show how Japanese physicians and other stakeholders reframed AMHTS as a streamlined and affordable alternative to Ningen Dokku, Japan’s high-cost, elite medical checkup service. This creative reinterpretation helped spur efforts by actors such as the National Federation of Health Insurance Societies (Kenporen) to provide health screening subsidies outside the formal insurance framework, which supported the widespread adoption of the AMHTS by middle-class consumers. We introduce the concept of the “democratization of premium health services” to explain how care originally designed for elite users was redefined as both accessible and trustworthy. By highlighting how symbolic framing can promote innovation diffusion even beyond formal institutional boundaries, this study contributes to the business history of health care.