This article traces the emergence of the General Motors Corporation as a multinational enterprise under the leadership of James D. Mooney from 1922 to the outbreak of World War II. Mooney's unpublished paper “The Science of Industrial Organization” (1929) portrays GM's multidivisional organization's use of the line-staff concept in organizing overseas assembly plants. Here I compare General Motors with Ford Motor Company, which had first-mover advantages overseas, and examine how each company organized and managed their international operations. “Linking pins,” a social-science concept, illustrates how GM's organizational hierarchy achieved vertical coordination of effort. Economic depression and the prelude to World War II followed the expansionary 1920s, requiring GM and Ford to adjust to a changing environment. The article also covers Mooney's naïve attempts to use business for diplomacy in the years leading up to the war.

Japan experienced a transformational phase of technological development during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We argue that an important, but so far neglected, factor was a developing market for innovation and a patent-attorney system that was conducive to rapid technical change. We support our hypothesis using patent data and we also present a detailed case study on Tomogorō Ono, a key developer of salt-production technology who used attorneys in connection with his patenting work at a time when Japan was still in the process of formally institutionalizing its patent-attorney system. In accordance with Lamoreaux and Sokoloff's 1999 influential study of trade in invention in the United States, our quantitative and qualitative evidence highlights how inventors and intermediaries in Japan interacted to create a market for new ideas.

The 1920s were important for the development of banking in the United States because new lending practices strongly favored credit expansion. Those innovations pertained to the measurement of credit risk and to new sales methods for banks. In particular, I describe the development of scientific credit analysis and so-called credit barometrics. Credit barometrics indicated credit worthiness based on statistical analysis and replaced old rules of thumb. These indicators were flawed and induced an erroneous belief in a future with rational and safe credit management. By studying the course of major New York banks as well as aggregate data, I show how the innovations in banking methods contributed to the credit boom that ended with the crash in 1929.

Focusing on the private investment bank of J. P. Morgan & Co., this article examines the unique perspective that the history of private investment banking offers the study of reputation with regard to the role of social ties. Drawing from a larger study that looks at intersecting social and economic networks of New York private bankers before the Second World War, the article studies the ways in which the Morgan partners' social networks worked to maintain their reputation by creating an institutional structure for firm cohesion, establishing access to information and resources outside the firm, and fostering a culture of exclusivity that signaled the firm's standing and its ties relative to their competitors or other elite bankers.

The literature on multinational corporations argues that a foreign firm can legitimize its activities, improve its reputation in a host country, and reduce the risk of hostile actions by the host government (including expropriation) by approaching and incorporating influential members of the domestic elite in its business. By using the concept of obsolescing political legitimacy, we argue that this legitimating strategy can lead to a loss of reputation and eventual illegitimacy when the host country undergoes significant social and institutional changes. When these changes take place, the domestic society can perceive that the multinational benefited from a previous social and institutional order increasingly considered as illegitimate. Under these circumstances, the new order will question the legitimacy of the multinational's operations, increasing the risk of expropriation. We illustrate our hypothesis with the case of the political strategies of the International Telephone and Telegraph Company (ITT) in Chile in the twentieth century.

Historical narratives have enriched, and can even do more to enhance, the concept of corporate reputation by deepening our understanding of how reputation changes over time and among different stakeholders. This literature review highlights this theme of reputation for two audiences—business historians and corporate reputation theorists. By showing how different social and political contexts shape expectations for business behavior, historical study can add new dimensions to the study of corporate reputation.