Today, we are all aware of the importance of technology to modern business, including process technologies as well as consumer and industrial products incorporating technology. The significant role of technology in business (and vice versa) is not, of course, new. Although the history of technology and business history have different professional organizations and often focus on different theoretical and empirical phenomena, the large number of historians who work at the intersection of the two today reflects the importance of each to the other over a much longer time period. Yet historians of both types still too often give short shrift to the role of business enterprises as technology users as well as to the actual business use of technology.

This article traces the migration of the slogan “better living” from its inception in 1935 as an attempt to clean up the corporate image of Du Pont, through its dissemination into the building trades and architecture during and after World War II, and finally into urban planning in the postwar decades. These fields borrowed the phrase back and forth in their promotional literature in order to serve their own, often clashing agendas—one strand of the larger contest between the forces of free enterprise and those of centralized planning and reform. The essay aims to bring together aspects of business, architecture, and planning in order to explore the fertile cultural milieu these different fields shared in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

This article examines the Polaroid Corporation’s “experiment” in South Africa during the 1970s, which began after African American workers pressured the company to pull its operations out of South Africa in protest of the white minority government’s apartheid policies. It argues that Polaroid’s initiatives, little studied until now, led other American companies to question their presence in South Africa and inspired both student divestment movements at Harvard and other colleges and universities and the efforts of Leon Sullivan, whose 1977 “Sullivan Principles” urged American companies to treat their workers in South Africa as they would treat their counterparts in the United States in an effort to battle racism and apartheid. Despite Polaroid’s efforts, engagement with South Africa and apartheid proved futile, which initiated a larger movement to completely disengage from South Africa.

The Zaanstreek—northwest of Amsterdam, The Netherlands—has been a highly industrialized region for nearly four hundred years. For most of this period, it showed a strong sense of community and a high degree of cooperation between firms, which is usually considered to be typical for an “industrial district.” However, between about 1840 and the First World War the character of this industrial district was dramatically transformed. In response to the rapidly growing integration of markets in the national and international economies since the 1840s, the Zaanstreek went through a radical change in energy base, as well as a fundamental shift in industrial structure. This essay addresses the questions of what happened to interfirm cooperation in the Zaanstreek when this fundamental transition in energy base and shift in industrial structure came about and how and to what extent entrepreneurs in the Zaan district between 1840 and 1920 managed to preserve the sense of community and interfirm cooperation that were the hallmarks of this region since the seventeenth century. It shows that the principle of mutuality eventually proved no longer strong enough to keep the actors in these institutions together. Ties between firms within the industrial district were in several respects replaced by, or subordinated to, ties between firms outside the industrial district. What kept interfirm cooperation in the district nevertheless intact for much of the period after 1920 were ties of regional family networks. The essay concludes with a few observations about the relevance to the study of industrial districts in general.