Few contemporary American issues are more controversial than the powerful role of corporations (both business and municipal) in society, politics, and the economy. Yet strikingly, few scholars have investigated the deepest historical roots of American corporate power. Most historians who have considered this issue have focused their research on the Gilded Age and beyond because of the post-Civil War rise of industrial capitalism, the increased prominence of corporations on the national scene, and the dramatic growth of city governments in the context of late nineteenth-century large-scale immigration and the provision of citywide service and transportation infrastructure. Consequently, they have minimized the origins of American corporate power in the first decades of the republic, a crucial issue in the development of American business, American cities, and the nation.

This article examines the “state of the art” and the current debates on the subject of women entrepreneurs, presenting some preliminary observations and hypotheses regarding the role of business-women in Italian economic development. Reasons for the new historiographic interest in female entrepreneurship are identified, and the primary methodological difficulties encountered in its historical study—starting with establishing the definition and the statistical parameters of the woman entrepreneur and discussing her social and juridical “invisibility”—are summarized. Finally, suggestions are made about possible directions for research on key historical trends important in shaping female entrepreneurial abilities in the Italian context.

In this article I present a comparative analysis of two government-funded research and development consortia, Japan's Very Large Scale Integration Research Project (VLSI) and the American consortium Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology (SEMATECH), designed with the VLSI project as a model. An examination of the semiconductor industries in Japan and the United States reveals some important factors influencing the interaction of the consortia's member companies. Three main elements affected interfirm cooperation within the two organizations: first, past government policies influenced industry structure, firm capabilities, and firm behavior; second, the way firms competed had a material impact on how well they were able to cooperate; and third, the social structure and traditions of the semiconductor industries in the two countries mediated the transition from cooperation to competition.