In this suggestive essay, Professor Galambos surveys the large number of books and articles, published since 1970, that together point toward a new “organizational synthesis” in American history. Expanding upon an earlier, more tentative essay on the same subject published in the Autumn 1970 issue of the Business History Review, he contrasts the widely disparate postures adopted in recent years by historians studying organizational behavior. His survey reveals a rich diversity of opinion, less reliant than was previous scholarship upon abstractions drawn from the social sciences. This diversity of opinion, Galambos concludes, provides the organizational synthesis with much of its continued vitality, and makes possible “the kind of moral judgments that have always characterized the best historical scholarship.”

Business history has been a thriving academic industry in Britain for the last three decades. Following some pioneering case studies of Industrial Revolution entrepreneurs by the early giants of the discipline of economic history, the postwar generation has produced a series of high quality company histories. The first of these, published in 1954, was Charles Wilson's history of the Anglo-Dutch multinational Unilever, formed by a merger of Lever Brothers and Margarine Unie in 1929. Wilson's book set the pattern for a high standard of scholarship, resting on complete freedom of access to company archives, and for publication based on scholarly independence rather than the public relations needs of the commissioning organization. If some of its terms of reference now seem dated, and its framework of analysis somewhat unscientific, then that is an indication of the incentive Wilson provided for others to do better, particularly in the use of economic theory and of comparative analysis setting firms in their industrial or international context.

Nineteenth century America witnessed the expansion of business enterprise as well as the extension of a system of higher education. Business philanthropy played a substantial role in higher education by filling the gap between the church-supported colleges of the colonial period and the state colleges and universities of later years. The philanthropy of American business leaders provided for scientific and polytechnical schools, opened colleges for women, extended new opportunities for black “freedmen,” and created the first undergraduate and graduate schools of business. Although nineteenth century law prohibited corporate philanthropy and offered no tax incentives, business leaders gave because they thought that they were stewards of wealth, they saw a need for practical education, they wished to create memorials for loved ones, and they desired to meet the needs of special groups of individuals.

The foundries and forges of Decazeville were among the most important in France during the July Monarchy. Extensive company correspondence reveals that the nature of relations between the board of directors and the local managers, and between the firm and its clients, were important factors in shaping the tenor of labor relations at Decazeville. The interference of the board and clients limited the manager's authority over his subordinates. Once freed from this, the manager reformed the administration of labor at Decazeville. He tested the allegiance of his foremen to the company and emphasized to them the importance, when paying by piece-rate, of going beyond inspection of the completed products to supervision of the work as it was being done.

Diplomatic historians have frequently cast American foreign policy from 1890 to 1915 as handmaiden to the expansion of American enterprise in foreign markets, but the relationship between government and business was neither one-sided nor simple. Government officials had their own agenda of objectives for which they wanted business support, sometimes even trying to use specific firms as their agent. Business itself did not speak with a single voice — policies which one firm might find beneficial, another found detrimental. Moreover, business was only one among various interest groups competing for attention and influence in the policymaking process. This case study of International Harvester's efforts to gain government assistance for the development of a Russian branch factory uncovers these intertwined threads of intersecting and conflicting objectives and interest groups, revealing the tangled complexity of business-government relations in this turbulent era.

In this study of Philadelphia merchants in the latter half of the eighteenth century, Thomas M. Doerflinger subjects to critical scrutiny some heretofore accepted interpretations of the transition from general merchant to specialist. Specifically, he finds a surprisingly large degree of specialization in the period under study. In the course of this investigation, Dr. Doerflinger develops important ideas concerning the forces encouraging and inhibiting this transition.

During the six decades that extended from 1790 to 1850, British pin manufacturers were often slow to adopt new technology. Unfavorable economic conditions, particulary those spawned by the Napoleonic wars, were partly responsible for the lag between the invention and utilization of new techniques, but at other times, the shortcomings of inventors as salesmen of their inventions also contributed to the slow introduction of new technology. In this article Professors Dutton and Jones illustrate that the diffusion of new technology was (and is) anything but a costless and frictionless process, and they ultimately conclude that “this arcadian world of neo-classical simplicity would seem to be far removed from historical reality.”

Fisheries are paradigmatic of renewable resources because of their ecological delicacy, their vulnerability to the indirect effects of economic activity, and, above all, their nonexclusive or “common-property” nature. In this article, Professor McEvoy shows how the California fishing industry, drawing upon some of the most fertile renewable resources in the world, underwent massive, thoroughgoing modernization in the first quarter of this century, triggered by the mechanization of fishing and the coincident opening of worldwide markets to local fish processors. Public agencies charged with the oversight of the industry and the conservation of fishery resources made valiant efforts to keep pace with new problems thrust upon them by the sudden industrialization of fishing. Their failure to do so effectively illustrates in stark relief the nature of twentieth-century problems in the management of wildlife, air, water, and other shared resources in a competitive economy.

The development of a national market was one of the key features of the nineteenth-century economy. In this process, innumerable institutions played a role, some large and well-known, others neither so large, nor quite so well-known, at least to the public at large. One such organization was the New York Cotton Exchange. It evolved in the aftermath of the Civil War, and over the years grew from an informal, even ad hoc organization into a formalized institution that served both public and private functions. This article by Mr. Lipartito explores the development of the Exchange and its place in the shifting national market for cotton.

By the 1920s the production of men's clothing was clearly divided into two sectors. The first consisted of a relative handful of large firms, technologically and organizationally sophisticated and engaged in the manufacture of better-quality garments. The “secondary sector” included a great many small and technically more primitive enterprises producing mainly lower-priced and lower-quality clothing. In this article, Dr. Fraser examines the development of the industry from the period following the Civil War through the post-World War I era in order to explain why this dualistic industrial structure emerged. In so doing, he draws on a thesis developed by Michael Piore and Alfred Chandler regarding the relationship between industrial organization and the structure of the market. Fraser argues that the expansion of the mass market does not necessarily lead to the concentration of production. It may, on the contrary, and especially in those cases where demand is particularly unstable, encourage the growth of a “secondary sector” whose minimal fixed investment makes it well-suited to handle the more variable component of demand.

As Secretary of the Interior and Petroleum Administrator for War, Harold Ickes played a significant, albeit hitherto largely overlooked, role in the formulation of United States foreign petroleum policy planning during World War II. As Petroleum Administrator for War, Ickes worked closely with oil company personnel who shared his commitment to planning and government-industry cooperation. In addition, as a firm believer in the need for a coherent national petroleum policy, Ickes played a major role in broadening the mandate of the ill-fated Petroleum Reserves Corporation. While business groups generally opposed this broadened mandate, business opposition was by no means monolithic and was, in fact, reinforced by considerable opposition from within the government itself.

In this important study Professor Lazonick provides an astute reappraisal of why Britain's once dominant economy has failed to meet the challenges of international competition in the twentieth century. The vehicle for his discussion is cotton manufacture, the industry which, through the technological and commercial innovations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, made Britain the leading industrial power. Among Dr. Lazonick's questions are why did Britain's preeminance in this industry come to an end? Why did technological innovation yield to stagnation? Why did inefficient modes of economic organization persist in the face of manifest inadequacy? And what does the history of this industry have to teach us about recent economic theory?

Recent years have seen the so-called New Left school of historiography cut a wide swath through the study of American diplomacy. Reacting at least in part to the exigencies of the Vietnam War, as well as to older schools of diplomatic history, its adherents have molded a point of view that has emphasized economic factors as the driving force in American foreign policy. In this essay. Dr. Braeman focuses on the 1920s, a crucial decade in New Left thinking. After probing the intellectual origins of this school of thought, he brings historical statistics to bear in his analysis of American investment abroad, the conduct of American policymakers, and the contending interpretations of American foreign policy.

Professor Boswell here discusses how informal social control was exercised over business conduct in the six decades from 1880 to World War II. He seeks to explain why some firms were more responsive to the public than others.

From its inception in the 1940s the Advertising Council was part of a broad, loosely coordinated campaign by American business leaders to contain the anticorporate liberalism of the 1930s and to refashion the character of the New Deal State. In this campaign the Council generally aligned itself with the more liberal wing of the business community, usually identified with the newly organized Committee for Economic Development (CED), rather than with the older and more conservative National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). Like the CED, the Advertising Council often espoused a “corporatist” ideology which emphasized cooperation between business and government; and like the Business Advisory Council, the National Petroleum Council, and other quasi-public corporatist bodies, it sought to establish close, reciprocal relationships with the executive branch. The Council enthusiastically supported the new foreign and national security policies of the Truman Administration, but strongly opposed its domestic programs. By contrast, the Council supported both the foreign and domestic policies of the Eisenhower Administration, and helped promote the administration's economic programs in a series of major advertising campaigns. Through its millions of “public service” advertisements, the Council sought to promote an image of advertising as a responsible and civic-spirited industry, of the U.S. economy as a uniquely productive system of free enterprise, and of America as a dynamic, classless, and benignly consensual society.

The late nineteenth century was a critical epoch in the history of French industry. During this period, many French industrialists adopted, for the first time, entrepreneurial attitudes towards business. At the same time, however, traditional skilled trades continued to play an important role in the national economy. In this article, Professor Weissbach explores the attitudes and practices of nineteenth-century entrepreneurs in the French luxury trade. By focusing specifically on the Patronage industriel des enfants de l'ébénisterie—an organization established to assist, educate, and moralize children apprentices in the French furniture industry—Weissbach reveals that traditional and entrepreneurial attitudes and practices coexisted throughout the nineteenth century.

Though often controversial, British investment has long played an important role in American economic development. But one sector where British capital has found a home is agriculture, where such investment has taken many forms in many places. In this essay Professor McFarlane looks at various land investments that Britons made in the North Central states, particularly Nebraska, during the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century, a time when there was a general agricultural boom in the cornhusker state, albeit one sandwiched around various business contractions. In his remarks McFarlane not only examines British strategies of investment but also quantifies its extent and its longterm return. To a degree his conclusions dispel some of the concerns and controversies that attended the flow of British capital into western lands.