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.

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.”

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.

In the years following World War II, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) regained the political effectiveness it had lost during the New Deal. This article analyzes NAM's resurgence within the context of the rising popularity and political strength of organized business in the postwar period. It argues that NAM's success is only partly explained by external factors, such as the policies of Truman administration and divisions among labor organizations. NAM's renewed ability to shape national affairs resulted from an internal transformation that vastly improved its administrative capacity, and from a change in its public relations and labor policies. These efforts came to fruition when NAM proved able to dominate the proceedings of the 1945 Labor-Management Conference.