The role of business enterprise in integrating economies is one of the central historical themes of the last two centuries. Although globalization—both in its current iteration and in its nineteenth-century form—has been widely studied, the role of the firm, as opposed to macroeconomic forces, has yet to receive sufficient attention. Many research questions remain, including the role of the United States as a host country, the place of multinationals based in emerging markets, and the importance of understudied sectors such as retailing. Business historians should shift the focus of queries from “why” to “how” and go beyond the discipline's traditional organization along national lines to study the behavior of firms worldwide.

Through a study of the history of department stores and shopping centers in the Philadelphia metropolitan region between 1920 and 1980, I explore the historical role of retailing in the evolution of the "sprawl" landscape that came to dominate urban form in the United States by the end of the twentieth century. Philadelphia is an important case study for this topic because of its long history of urbanization, during which it developed from a colonial port city to a nine-teenth-century industrial metropolis to a model of twentieth-century deindustrialization. Through all the phases of its growth, Philadelphia remained an important consumer marketplace serving the regional hinterland of the Delaware Valley. I sought to understand the forces that led to the city's twentieth-century decline as the primary site of consumption for the Delaware Valley, when major sites for distributing consumer goods developed in the hinterland itself.

The rise of professional real estate brokerage is an ideal window into the internal dynamics of the cultural transformation of the American middle class in the twentieth century. Emerging as a full-time occupation in the late nineteenth century, real estate brokerage embodied a variety of early twentieth-century cultural, social, business, and economic trends, including the drive to professionalize business, the rapid expansion of white-collar labor and its feminization, the rise of independent contracting as a prominent form of labor relations, and the enormous growth of the home-building and -selling industries. As many scholars have noted, the home became a crucial site of both consumption and middle-class identification in the early twentieth century.

The management of innovative work in high-technology fields has been a “hot” topic in recent years. In fields such as innovation management, product development, organization design, corporate strategy, economic sociology, organizational economics, engineering management, and knowledge management, scholars have examined subjects ranging from the sociology of creativity to the boundaries of firms in networked industries. They have remarked on the implications of contingent work, outsourcing, globalization, and the demise of the one-company career in studies concerned with issues from regional and national competitiveness to the evolution of labor markets and the social contract. Authors of articles and books published by the popular business press have trumpeted “nimble” and “virtual” organizational forms required by unprecedented conditions, and authors of scholarly essays have addressed the management of relentless change, the option-based valuation of interfirm networks, and knowledge in relation to organizational boundaries.

Few contemporary American issues are more controversial than the powerful role of corporations (both business and municipal) in society, politics, and the economy. Yet strikingly, few scholars have investigated the deepest historical roots of American corporate power. Most historians who have considered this issue have focused their research on the Gilded Age and beyond because of the post-Civil War rise of industrial capitalism, the increased prominence of corporations on the national scene, and the dramatic growth of city governments in the context of late nineteenth-century large-scale immigration and the provision of citywide service and transportation infrastructure. Consequently, they have minimized the origins of American corporate power in the first decades of the republic, a crucial issue in the development of American business, American cities, and the nation.

This article examines the “state of the art” and the current debates on the subject of women entrepreneurs, presenting some preliminary observations and hypotheses regarding the role of business-women in Italian economic development. Reasons for the new historiographic interest in female entrepreneurship are identified, and the primary methodological difficulties encountered in its historical study—starting with establishing the definition and the statistical parameters of the woman entrepreneur and discussing her social and juridical “invisibility”—are summarized. Finally, suggestions are made about possible directions for research on key historical trends important in shaping female entrepreneurial abilities in the Italian context.

In this article I present a comparative analysis of two government-funded research and development consortia, Japan's Very Large Scale Integration Research Project (VLSI) and the American consortium Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology (SEMATECH), designed with the VLSI project as a model. An examination of the semiconductor industries in Japan and the United States reveals some important factors influencing the interaction of the consortia's member companies. Three main elements affected interfirm cooperation within the two organizations: first, past government policies influenced industry structure, firm capabilities, and firm behavior; second, the way firms competed had a material impact on how well they were able to cooperate; and third, the social structure and traditions of the semiconductor industries in the two countries mediated the transition from cooperation to competition.