The clothing trade in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provides examples across the spectrum of industrial organization, and it thus offers an opportunity to compare activities and to account for the adoption of different systems. This article, based on extensive archival research in the records of corset-making companies, shows clearly the relationship between the corset industry's ability to standardize production and the adoption of operations on a larger scale than was possible in other sectors of the women's garment industry.

In this wide-ranging essay, a banking historian surveys the major debates in the historiography of U.S. commercial banking. Touching on various controversies in the field—old, new, and brewing, from financing the Revolution to the savings and loan crisis—the article serves as a guide to the parameters of debate and provides an introductory bibliography to acquaint interested readers with banking literature from colonial times to the present.

This article examines the negotiating process between the Brazilian state and transnational auto companies. It argues against dichotomous frameworks that emphasize either economic or political variables in shaping foreign direct investment and in favor of a more complicated bargaining framework that takes into account the strategic objectives of state policy as well as the form and timing of firm investment. Using archival evidence and interviews, the article documents the implantation of the industry; it concludes that the process of firm entry into Brazil must be understood in light of the policies and institutions that made the threat of market closure and the deadlines credible and made it costly for firms not to participate on schedule.

The following article examines the creation and development of a unique American business institution, the dime store chain. The essay focuses on the store managers—their ethnic, social, and educational background, the rules under which they worked, and the promotion ladder they climbed. It attempts to assess the advantages and disadvantages to the chains of relying on a system of “organization men.”