This article discusses the relational and rhetorical foundations of more than 300 first letters sent in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by merchant or banking houses based in Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Americas to two prominent French firms: Roux Brothers and Greffulhe Montz & Cie. We used a quantitative analysis of qualitative aspects of first letters to go beyond the standard opposition between premodern personal exchanges and modern impersonal transactions. The expansion of commercial networks during the period under analysis is often believed to have relied on families and ethnic networks and on explicit recommendations worded in the formulas prescribed in merchant manuals. However, most first letters did not use such resources. In many cases, commercial operations began thanks to a mutual acquaintance but without a formal recommendation. This was in fact the norm in the eighteenth century—and an underestimated foundation of the expansion of European commercial networks. In the early nineteenth century, this norm became less prevalent: it was replaced by diverse relational and rhetorical strategies, from recommendations to prospective letters dispensing with any mention of relationships. Whether before or after 1800, the relational and rhetorical resources displayed in letters did not systematically influence the sender’s chances of becoming a correspondent; instead, they depended on the receiving firm’s commercial strategy.

This paper uses a data set of freehold land and property transactions from medieval England to highlight the growing commercialization of the economy during that time. By drawing on the legal records, we are able to demonstrate that the medieval real estate market provided the opportunity for investors to profit. Careful analysis of the data provides evidence of group purchases, multiple transactions, and investors buying outside their own localities. The identification of these “investors” and their buying behaviors, set within the context of the English medieval economy, contributes to the early commercialization debate.

Explanations of why firms exist and evolve and how intellectual property—including trademarks—contributes to their growth, survival, and impact on globalization and deglobalization have been widely studied in business history and in other fields. Drawing on the study of firms with multinational activity, this article argues that ownership of strong brands can have multiple impacts on the nature of the firm, on the dynamics of industries, on processes of globalization and deglobalization, and on shifts of power and wealth. In the process of doing so, this paper also argues that business history has great potential to have an impact beyond the field, serving as a “hub” for dialogue between disciplines. To achieve that, business historians need to remain truthful to their core competences, which include conducting well-grounded archival-based research, taking into account the uniqueness of the firm and the complexity of the environment, and conducting research that is comparative and international. This article is based my presidential address presented at the Business History Conference on March 16, 2019, in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia.

In 1968, facing a tumultuous banking environment, commercial bankers framed bank lobbying as the act of translating the complex U.S. financial and economic systems for legislators and regulators. Inspired by Science and Technology Studies research, this article demonstrates that the translations of the U.S. financial system offered by bank lobbyists were not merely descriptions of the complex banking system. Instead, their translations reflected a process that sought to create networks of congressional and public support and enroll other actors as spokespersons for these translations. The article details how the acceptance for these translations proved to be a long process of reformulations, reconfigurations, and failures. There were three primary lobbying strategies used by large U.S. commercial banks: maintaining close relationships with high-ranking decision makers, making public statements to gain public support for their translations of the economy, and advocating for long and expert studies with heavy bank consultation. The article also highlights the techniques used by bank lobbyists during this period to alter the banking environment: legislation drafting, editorial writing, letter writing, report writing, private consultations, meetings with reporters, and public statements. These lobbying techniques and strategies were instrumental in establishing the Hunt Commission and translating and actualizing the blueprint for financial “deregulation.”

This article analyses the evolving relationship between mainstream oral history and business oral history, and explores the ways in which the latter has been deployed and discussed in business history journals. Business historians have, until relatively recently, tended to utilize oral history as a means to fill gaps in the archive. Interviews thus made important contributions to business history studies, but much of their potential remained untapped. Recent critical engagement with issues of methodology and interpretation has seen a discernible shift in the ways that oral history is being understood by business historians. This article outlines this evolution and the possibilities that it raises for both business and oral history.

This article highlights the benefits that rigorous use of oral history can offer to research on the contemporary business history of emerging markets. Oral history can help fill some of the major information voids arising from the absence of a strong tradition of creating and making accessible corporate archives in most countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It also permits a level of nuance that is hard to obtain even if written archives are accessible. Oral histories provide insights into why events did not occur, and why companies have chosen certain industries over others. Oral history can also shed light on hyper-sensitive topics, such corruption, which are rarely formally documented.

This is a case study of the U.S. pharmaceutical producer, Merck & Co. By 1940 this was one of the leading pharmaceutical producers in the United States, and the company went on to become one of the global industry leaders after World War II. It was founded in 1891 as the U.S. subsidiary of a much larger German pharmaceutical company, E. Merck of Darmstadt. The existing understanding of Merck & Co.’s history emphasizes how it was reacquired by the American branch of the Merck family after wartime sequestration, and from then onward it pursued a path of development separate from its former parent. This article revisits that history of the company and shows how the two Mercks began to cooperate and share technology and manufacturing know-how during the 1930s, something that was particularly to the advantage of Merck & Co.

This article on cotton sales in India considers the market information that was gathered mid-nineteenth century by commission agents in Bombay and by personal observations of Glasgow Turkey red entrepreneur John Matheson. The article includes an account of the rise and demise of Turkey red cotton printing in Scotland; and explores the variety of piece sizes, patterns, colors, and packaging that was necessary for sales in India. It also reveals seasonal changes in demand and an appetite for novelty patterns. What did Matheson, his contemporaries, and his agents understand about their Indian markets and consider their limited ability to shape consumer taste? The article concludes that despite the existence of much relevant information conveyed from India, there was a blindness to the realities of India’s complex textile industry and dress cultures, which had implications for product development in Britain.

Founded in 1956, the Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI) was established with the objective of professionalizing management in post-colonial India through training, research, and consultancy. It was modeled on the Administrative Staff College at Henley-on-Thames (Henley), in the United Kingdom. Like Henley, ASCI used syndicates for its management training programs. Between 1958 and 1973, ASCI received more than $1.26 million from the Ford Foundation, part of which was used to finance the development and use of the case method in ASCI’s training programs, and later more widely in its research and consultancy. This article traces the ways by which the Ford Foundation––as a dominating institution––stigmatized Henley and ASCI, their institutional practices, and the wider Indian society; and legitimized the case method pioneered at the Harvard Business School. Imbricated in the Cold War’s geo-politics, Ford Foundation’s interventions in Hyderabad should be understood as part of the emergence of the United States as the dominant neo-colonial power, which required the displacement of Britain, its institutions, and their practices as the template for India’s post-colonial management institutions.

Queues are part of everyday routine and experienced by most shoppers, yet little attention has been given to providing historical accounts of queuing as a consumer task or as a shopper experience. This paper examines grocery shop queues and the changing experience of shoppers in historical perspective, specifically focusing upon the shift from counter-service to self-service grocery formats in Britain from 1945 to 1975. The paper draws upon a wide range of material using evidence from oral histories and witness groups, which is supported by contemporary sources from the Mass Observation Archive, newspapers, shopper surveys, and trade publications and reports. The conceptual framework developed in the paper explores the public and private dimensions of queues to consider the experiences and perceptions of shoppers during a period of rapid change in the retail grocery system. More generally, the paper contributes to our understanding of how management innovations are connected to untraded public values.

This article explores the ways that oral history can help business historians to better understand how employees experience and make sense of their life at the company in relation to a company’s identity. The research is based on two case studies. The first concentrates on Heineken. Specifically, it focuses on the closing of the Heineken brewery in Amsterdam in 1988. The second case was a commissioned project to write a book for the eightieth anniversary of the Amsterdam-based consultancy firm Van de Bunt Adviseurs. This project was concluded in 2016 with a publication that, like the research itself, was inspired by a cultural history approach and thus paid attention to founder narratives, sensemaking, and corporate identity construction. The article shows that oral history can broaden knowledge, especially of how employees experienced life at the company and how they made sense of it while referring to the (changing) company’s identity. Through the oral history method, employees were given a voice that showed how the same events were (differently) experienced. Moreover, the oral histories made the personal impact of abstract developments more concrete, notably issues such as internationalization, mergers and acquisitions, changing workings conditions, scaling up or down, or closure. Stories about the founders and the ample use of the family metaphor, which stood out in both cases, expressed employees’ feelings of being part of a company with a specific identity, as well as a longing for it. The article concludes with several suggestions that should be taken into account when conducting oral history research.

This article reflects on the contribution that oral history can make to business historians by examining the Australian advertising professionals’ experiences of working in Southeast Asia from the 1960s to the 1980s. Interviews with these advertising professionals examined the processes by which they entered the region as well as their experiences of working there. In addition to documenting information and insights that are altogether absent from official records, the interviews offer an opportunity to reflect on broader social, cultural, and economic contexts and the degree to which they impacted on interviewees’ actions. By illustrating the transmission of business cultures through advertising agency networks as well as their impact on global business, this article also demonstrates oral history’s capacity to connect personal experience with business history.

New perspective is provided on a critical period in the development of the Canadian automotive industry. In the 1980s, five foreign manufacturers built new vehicle assembly operations in Canada, effectively transforming that country’s automotive industry. Drawing from a combination of interviews with key actors and a review of archives, this case study makes several contributions. First, gaps are closed in the economic history of one of Canada’s most important industries. Second, the case demonstrates the capacity of using historical perspective to extend an existing theory to a new area of inquiry. In this case, Multiple Streams Theory is employed to explain the process of inward FDI attraction. This includes a description of the role of policy entrepreneurs and their capacity to create and exploit opportunities. Third, the case demonstrates the continuing relevance of integrating historical perspective to contemporary issues in business, management, and public policy.

This article analyzes how the public relations of multinational companies was affected by the double impact of decolonization and spread of television during the 1960s. It contributes to recent theoretical conceptualizations of corporate social responsibility by adding the dimension of home country stakeholders and the border-crossing character of corporate responsibility. The analysis deals with the changing media representations in Sweden of Swedish-owned firms in Liberia and South Africa before, during, and after what has been called the “postcolonial moment” (1960–1963). In its wake, Swedish industrialists faced a new policy problem: firms in overseas markets were no longer expected to do only what was legal in the host country but also what was considered right in their home country. The analysis follows the debates concerning this issue of corporate international responsibility throughout the 1960s, and how national business organizations and executives in firms such as the Liberian-American-Swedish Mining Company publicly sought to defend the role of Swedish foreign direct investment in Africa. The business community developed various public relations strategies to engage with its critics, professionalized their media relations, and organized international study tours for unions and politicians.