The electromechanical vibrator originated in the late nineteenth century as a device for medical therapy. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, however, marketing of vibrators as consumer appliances became pervasive. Ads appeared in the pages of The New York Times and Scientific American and plastered street cars. Companies marketed vibrators to grandparents, mothers, infants, and young adults. Vibrators are widely sold today, however, as instruments for masturbation, a use that was rarely mentioned but well known before World War II. How was vibrator advertising able to become so ubiquitous during the early twentieth century, despite draconian antiobscenity laws and antimasturbation rhetoric? This article argues that companies achieved this result by shaping the meaning of vibrators through strategic marketing. This marketing overtly portrayed vibrators as nonsexual while covertly conveying their sexual uses through imagery and the sale of phallic, dildo-like attachments.

Companies positioned vibrators within two major consumer product categories in the early 1900s: labor-saving household appliances and electrotherapeutic devices. By advertising the vibrator as both a labor-saving household appliance and a sexualized health panacea, companies could slip vibrator ads past the censors, while supplying user manuals that clued consumers into specific sexual uses. In household appliance ads, companies drew on traditional gender roles to present vibrators as emblems of domesticity and motherhood, whereas in electrotherapeutic ads they presented vibrators as symbols of progressive gender roles, the sexualized new woman and the body-conscious “self-made man.”

Since the Keynesian revolution in economics, a standard part of the profession’s analytical framework, and an argument for government support for investment, has been the multiplier concept. This classical multiplier works through consumption in an equilibrium model. Our contention is that there is also an entrepreneurial multiplier that works directly through investment by incentivizing or forcing investments in innovation in a dynamic, disequilibrium model. These investments have been analyzed as “spill-overs,” or responses to “bottlenecks,” or Schumpeterian examples of emulation. We suggest that the surges of innovation in capitalism were even broader than Schumpeter did, and that they can best be explored using a multiplier paradigm. We start that exploration by briefly examining selected patterns of entrepreneurship in the first, second, and third industrial revolutions. Our emphasis is on the sequences of innovations; the manner in which they are multiplied; and their economic, cultural, and political consequences. We delve into the first Industrial Revolution in New England and in Lombardy, Italy; the second Industrial Revolution in the United States and France, and the third Industrial Revolution in America and Europe. In all three of these dramatic capitalist transitions, there is evidence of the entrepreneurial multiplier at work, broadening, deepening, and extending the impact of the major innovations.

This article analyzes the emergence of public relations among corporations in interwar Britain. It adopts a discursive approach and applies the philosophy of Michel Foucault. It argues that public relations was a result of state propaganda during World War I, the emergence of a mass-media society, and criticism from a range of groups toward corporations during the period. It acted as an emergent institutional text, which taught corporations how to create corporate identities so as to garner public good will and institutional legitimacy. This was achieved by a range of strategies, including social programs and the creation of corporate narratives.

During the 1920s, the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) greatly expanded the kinds of activities it undertook, leading to a sense that the agency was ubiquitous. Some of the agency’s new activities were quasi-regulatory: they sought to shape markets and make products safer. The bureau was a part of the Department of Commerce, and its expansion of market-shaping activities took place when Herbert Hoover was Commerce Secretary. In Ellis Hawley’s influential, oft-repeated interpretation of the bureau’s actions during this period, Hoover pioneered an “associational” mode of governance that emphasized industry self-regulation and rational coordination via conferences, trade associations, and other gatherings. In this essay I show how the NBS under Hoover went well beyond fostering industry self-regulation, thus suggesting the need to revise Hawley’s interpretation. This essay is divided into two main sections: the first section examines the thinking of George K. Burgess, who rose to head the NBS in the early 1920s and who put forth an ambitious vision for the bureau’s role in society, particularly around its potential to improve products on the market. The second section then examines one case of the agency’s proliferation of new organizational routines, namely those around the automobile. A close consideration of Burgess and the NBS’s new routines indicates that the NBS extended its reach far beyond its traditional bounds. Most of these novel efforts were aimed at increasing the market’s virtues.

Why did premiums like turkeys, bottles of whiskey, or travel vouchers play an important role in the United States but not in West Germany? Looking for an answer, this article takes a detailed look at how television sets were traded along the distribution chain in both countries. The use of material incentives was an important competitive strategy of U.S. manufacturers and distributors during the 1950s. At the same time, it held price competitive behavior in check. Premiums were at the center of a “turkey economy” that paid tribute to the demands of traditional radio and television stores. In West Germany, the same objective was achieved by a “television cartel.” The article reconstructs the reasons for emergence and decline of the two systems and provides a detailed account of historical change highlighting the importance of retailing structures, the life cycle of products, and the time-specific culture of markets.

This article investigates a structural ownership model that is used to protect firms from unwelcome capital market intrusion: a multiple-share arrangement. It details the evolution of one of the United Kingdom’s most successful former family firms, Whitbread, in the post-World War II era. In investigating the formation and operation of the so-called Whitbread Umbrella, the study poses the question of whether it was a positive factor in long-term strategic decision making at Whitbread. The emerging popularity of multiple-share ownership structures in the United States, as well as their endurance in other jurisdictions, positions this historic analysis in wider debates on structure, ownership, and corporate governance in the finance, economics, and general management literature.

At the present time, the Norwegian state owns a large number of business enterprises. The state controls around 35 percent of the total values on the Oslo Stock Exchange, and five of the seven largest listed companies are partially owned by the state, ranging from 34 to 64 percent. This article traces the background of state ownership from the formative phase of state involvement in the modern economy, and it demonstrates how this ownership provided growth in state enterprises after 1945. The broad support for large state enterprises is explained by ongoing national, political, social, and economic contexts. There is a high level of trust in the state, which is perceived as a protector of common interests. Broad support is also based on the fact that there is a lack of private investors and a strong inclination to restrict foreign influence in the domestic economy.