This study of the Swedish-based mining company Boliden examines the proactive strategies it adopted to deal with the potential for severe environmental problems associated with the establishment of its large copper smelter in the 1920s. The article demonstrates how international networks, personal experience, and knowledge transfer from the U.S. copper industry help to explain the importance given to environmental issues by the Swedish industrialists. It is suggested that the main explanation for the proactive stance of the Swedish managers is that they perceived excessive pollution as working against creating a profitable and sustainable business. This case provides compelling evidence that firms pursuing an agenda focused on earning profits can still deliver environmental innovation and value to the local community, compatible with the concept of creating shared value.

The forests and fields of the early American republic teemed with individually varying seedling fruit trees. American nurserymen stabilized both this chaotic landscape and their trade by promoting named fruit “varieties” gleaned from domestic orchards and from a global network of botanical gardens. Developing strategies to regulate the production of names and descriptions, they altered both texts and organisms, replacing a profusion of “wild” trees with a negotiated list of “named varieties.” Examining this process reveals intersections between commercial and scientific credibility and illuminates the alternative business forms built around living goods.

While researchers have pointed to numerous methods of expanding state capacity in the Progressive Era, the literature has overlooked the creation of nominally private companies relying on implicit government guarantees, later known as government-sponsored enterprises. This article explains the novelty and structure of the nation's first such enterprises, the Federal Land Banks, and describes how their design embodied several fragilities that contributed to their collapse and bailout in 1932. The article then demonstrates why, despite these problems, the land banks became the model for subsequent enterprises and financial reforms.

In the decades before World War II, U.S. antitrust law was anything but settled. Considerable pressure for antitrust revision came from the states. A perhaps unlikely leader, Edna Gleason, organized California's retail pharmacists and coordinated trade networks to monitor and enforce Resale Price Maintenance (RPM) contracts, a system of price-fixing, then known as “fair trade.” Progressive jurists, including Louis Brandeis and institutional economist E. R. A. Seligman, supported RPM as a protection to independent proprietors. The breakdown of legal and economic consensus regarding what constituted “unfair competition” allowed businesspeople to act as intermediaries between heterodox economic thought and contested antitrust law, ultimately tailoring federal policy to accommodate state regulations.

Spain approved the first law of Sociedad de Responsabilidad Limitada (SRL)—a legal form similar to the German GmbH—in 1953. However, the SRL had already been used, albeit without its own legislation, since the 1920s. How was this possible in a country whose legal system was based on civil law? Its 1885 Commercial Code lacked the numerus clausus principle for enterprise forms, a feature that gave entrepreneurs unusual freedom in organizing their firms, and in adopting new business forms not defined in the code. It also invites us to rethink the notion of rigidity in civil law.

From the mid-nineteenth century onward, governments across Latin America founded departments of fomento, or development, to promote economic growth and modernization. This article looks at the evolution of this department in Mexico and the ways in which it integrated infrastructure, migration, land policy, science, and education into a rural economic and social project. For Department of Fomento leaders, agriculture became the connective tissue linking peace to prosperity. Though many failed, initiatives aimed at increasing the diversity of Mexico's rural production illustrate a concerted effort to avoid top-heavy monoculture and use scientific planning to stabilize and unify the nation.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) became an important subject among business leaders during the post–World War II era. Business leaders often used the idea of CSR to explain actions they took to prevent additional government involvement in their industry. They argued that because they were behaving in a socially responsible manner, further federal programming was unnecessary. The cases of health insurance and home mortgages demonstrate how this political approach frequently required business leaders to alter their profitmaking strategies in order to substantiate their argument before the public. Thus, the history of corporate social responsibility is critical for understanding a hidden facet of American political development.

The managerial revolution drove the rise of business schools in the United States and business schools contributed by graduating professional managers. Before World War II, however, the effect of an MBA degree was modest, causing great concern to leading business schools. Harvard Business School—in order to increase this impact—began in the mid-1920s to develop nondegree programs for potential top executives. In 1945, by drawing on the experiences of certain short-lived programs and the extraordinary situation during the war, Harvard Business School launched its Advanced Management Program, which became a global role model for executive education.

This article looks at the evolution of the British chocolate industry from the 1860s to the 1960s, a period during which it was dominated by Quaker businesses: Cadbury, Rowntree, and their predecessor, Fry. It provides evidence of early forms of fair trade by these Quaker businesses, showing that, before the fair trade movement took off in the 1970s, they contributed to social change and to improvement in living standards and long-term sustainable economic growth in developing countries. This article argues that when the mechanisms for enforcing food standards were weak and certification bodies did not exist, the Religious Society of Friends acted as an indirect independent endorser, reinforcing the imagery and reputation of the Quaker-owned brands and associating them both with purity and quality and with honest and fair trading.

We examine the early marketing and distribution of entertainment radio sets. Manufacturers used distribution networks to both maximize profits and create barriers to entry. Lacking the market power of auto manufacturers, they developed cooperative strategies with authorized distributors and dealers. Dealers often complained about the costly activities manufacturers required of them. However, these underpinned the dominant quality and branding competition model of the 1920s, while the Depression-era switch to a simpler radio format, sold on price, proved catastrophic for the specialist retailer.

Within the postwar financial regulatory system, state-level regulations—particularly interest rate limits—constrained the profitability of bank credit card plans. But differences in law among the states allowed motivated institutions to circumvent local laws using these mobile financial instruments. Eventually, banks themselves became mobile, placing irresistible pressure on states to eliminate local restrictions on consumer finance. The critical moment came when Citibank relocated its credit card business to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 1981. By examining this move in its longer context, this essay provides a new perspective on the rise of consumer finance in the late twentieth century, one that emphasizes strategic manipulation of local law by firms pursuing a national customer base.

This article examines how, starting in the 1870s, food manufacturers in the United States began to use standardized color, achieved by synthetic dyes, as part of their marketing strategies. The emergence of the synthetic dye industry paralleled the growth of mass production and mass marketing in the American food industry. It provided food manufacturers with an economical means to standardize their products and helped establish brand identities through consistent appearance. By 1938, food dyes had achieved such widespread use, and had raised such public concern, that the federal government amended the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act to implement more stringent measures to regulate the industry.

Following some general remarks on the impact of financialization on nonfinancial sectors of the economy, this article identifies common misconceptions about the German and American varieties of capitalism. It then outlines the post-1960 U.S. experience with financialization, including the reasons for the rise of financialization and its main consequences. The article will then look at Germany, a country with a very different entry point into the world of financialization, and ask when and to what degree the concept was adopted. Finally, a detailed case study of Siemens—one of Germany's largest industrial concerns—will explore how this icon of Germany Inc. adapted to the demands of financialization and coped with the external changes caused by globalization, deregulation, and digitalization.

This article explains how the Bell System succeeded during the presidency of Theodore N. Vail (1907–1919) in reversing a declining business trend by laying the foundations for sustained technological achievement through the development of an operating model that satisfied corporate imperatives related to finance, regulation, and research. By exploiting the potentials of rate-base regulation, Bell was able to create strong scientific capabilities that supported the growth of what became arguably the world's premier telecommunications system. The legacy of these efforts includes the winning of seven Nobel Prizes by Bell scientists, an achievement unequaled by any other industrial laboratory.