This article examines in detail how John Maynard Keynes approached investing in the U.S. stock market on behalf of his Cambridge College after the 1929 Wall Street Crash. We exploit the considerable archival material documenting his portfolio holdings, his correspondence with investment advisors, and his two visits to the United States in the 1930s. While he displayed an enthusiasm for investing in common stocks, he was equally attracted to preferred stocks. His U.S. stock picks reflected his detailed analysis of company fundamentals and a pronounced value approach. Already in this period, therefore, it is possible to see the origins of some of the investment techniques adopted by professional investors in the latter half of the twentieth century.

This article provides a historical overview of the development of U.S. government-mandated commodity promotion. This form of promotion, known colloquially as the “checkoff,” is responsible for such memorable slogans as “Beef: It's What's for Dinner,” as well as research intended to boost consumption of agricultural products. The article argues that checkoffs represent an associational form of governance in which private organizations achieve public aims. Though they have been frequently challenged in courts and have garnered scrutiny from public health activists, checkoffs have been a durable form of agricultural regulation because they hide the heavy hand of government with the rhetoric of markets and self-help.

Are reference works still needed in this age of digital reproduction, when there are more than five million English language entries in Wikipedia? Their function has changed, surely. With so much information available online, printed reference books need higher justifications, not merely the collection and collocation of information, but presenting it in new and imaginative ways that give its users insights, as well as a pleasurable reading experience. In other words, reference works need to become reference books.

The best work in the new “history of capitalism” field borrows from the tool kits of social and cultural historians and rests on the assumption that states, societies, and markets cannot be treated separately from one another. That central observation feeds the contemporary impulse to reconnect subfields, such as business, labor, and politics, which had drifted apart since the 1970s. Already this methodology has returned scholarship on the nineteenth-century United States to the topics of slavery's relationship to capitalism and the realization of selfhood either through manumission, the labor market, or finance.

The title of this edited volume is slightly misleading, as its various contributions explore the potential for more historical analysis in organization studies rather than addressing issues associated with time and organizing. Hopefully this will not distract from the important achievement of this volume—important especially for business historians—in further expanding and integrating business history into management and organization studies. The various contributions, elegantly tied together by R. Daniel Wadhwani and Marcelo Bucheli in their substantial introduction (which, by the way, presents a significant contribution in its own right), opens up new sets of questions, especially in terms of future methodological and theoretical developments in the field. This book also reflects the changing institutional location of business historians, who increasingly make their careers in business schools rather than history departments, especially in Europe, reopening old questions of history as a social science. There have been several calls to teach more history in business education, such as the Carnegie Foundation report (2011) that found undergraduate business education too narrow in focus and highlighted the need to integrate more liberal arts teaching into the curriculum. However, in the contemporary research-driven environment of business and management schools, historical understanding is unlikely to permeate the curriculum if historical analysis cannot first deliver significant theoretical contributions. This is the central theme around which this edited volume revolves, and it marks a milestone in this ongoing debate. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I should add that even though I did not contribute to this volume, I have coauthored with several of its contributors and view this book as central to my current research practice.)

Nearly sixty years have passed since the publication of A Concept of Agribusiness by John H. Davis and Ray A. Goldberg. The book, which circulated widely among agricultural policymakers, business leaders, and academic economists, cemented the neologism “agribusiness” in the English lexicon. By opening up a new discourse for understanding the political economy of agriculture, Davis and Goldberg introduced a potentially revolutionary strategy for exploring the workings of a food and fiber economy anchored by large corporations. After briefly exploring how the book was received (and often misunderstood) in its own time, this essay will consider whether recent historical work has effectively revived the crucial insights Davis and Goldberg offered more than half a century ago.

This paper updates an earlier article published in Business History Review that concluded that by the second half of the 1990s, there had been a profusion of new, purportedly practical ideas about strategy, many of which embodied some explicit dynamics. This update provides several indications of a drop-off since then in the rate of development of new ideas about strategy but also a continued focus, in the new ideas that are being developed, on dynamics. And since our stock of dynamic frameworks has, based on one enumeration, more than doubled in the last fifteen to twenty years, updating expands both the need and the empirical basis for some generalizations about the types of dynamic strategy frameworks—and strategy frameworks in general—that managers are likely to find helpful versus those that they are not.