This essay examines the implications of rapid technological and economic change, or what economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” for the urban environment. Taking the Chicago River Harbor as a case study, it argues that industrial capitalism was marked by fundamental spatial and environmental contradictions that resulted in the frequent destruction and reinvention of urban landscapes. The essay shows how transformations in the Great Lakes shipping industry and the rise of the steel industry rendered Chicago River Harbor infrastructure obsolete. That obsolescence, in turn, sparked a public debate over whether the port should be retrofitted or if the river should be harnessed for different uses. So many stakeholders—streetcar companies, commuters, City Beautiful advocates, and sanitary engineers—had conflicting ideas about the use of the river that it was practically impossible to retrofit the port. The resulting decline of industrial freight traffic on the Chicago River enabled urban planner Daniel Burnham to reinvent the riverfront as a site of leisure and consumption.

In December 1890, when Samuel Iseman stopped in Sumter, South Carolina, he hoped to turn his luck around. The traveling grocery salesman's trip so far had not gone well. Rain had delayed his train by two hours. When Iseman finally arrived, he had time to “drum” up business with only one retailer before drying off and retiring for the evening. The next day was no better; his expense money was dangerously low. He dunned two area merchants for payment on their accounts, eager to refill his coffers, but received only the runaround for his efforts. He checked in on groceryman (and postmaster) Moses W. Harrell in nearby Timmonsville, who made good his account, with one exception. The grocer took issue with a recent delivery of hams that had come from Iseman's Charleston wholesale fi rm, 120 miles south. Harrell complained to Iseman that the hams were of poor quality and that he had sold only two or three. Harrell asked for a refund. The traveling man felt badly that the grocer had taken the meat because Iseman had talked them up. When the hams failed to satisfy, both the salesman's word and the confidence he had earned from Harrell were on the line.

On the basis of articles in contemporary periodicals, literature, and company archives, this article explores the views of entrepreneurs and society about what constitutes the responsibility of entrepreneurs. From the mid-nineteenth century, we can trace discussions about how entrepreneurs should behave in their own company and toward society, but these ideas were far from constant over time. The changing views on the social responsibilities of entrepreneurs give us therefore important information about changes in the national business system. Though focused on the Dutch entrepreneurs in their relationship to Dutch society, the article includes the influence of ideas from abroad. International management literature abounded in the Netherlands, and multinational companies often picked up ideas from other countries. How companies and entrepreneurs defined their responsibilities depended to a large extent on the criticisms launched by the outside world. Entrepreneurs and company managers responded to concerns in the society of which they formed part, and the progressive ones among them, the true leaders, searched for ways of reconciling the requirements of their business with the demands of the society.

In this article, the process leading to decriminalization of pornography in Sweden in 1971 is analyzed. The interplay between the structural institutional level and company behavior is stressed, with an emphasis on business strategies. The article shows that the division between hard-core and soft-core pornographic magazines in Sweden was quite different than the development in the United Kingdom and the United States. It also shows how the business strategies used by hard-core pornographers challenged the obscenity legislation and regulation of national distribution, making them obsolete. Even though there was fierce competition between the pornography companies, producers formed joint alternative distribution channels crucial to the survival of the industry.

This article analyzes the structure of the Italian corporate network in the decade that followed the end of the “Golden Age” (1972–83), when the transition from the technological trajectory of the second to that of the third industrial revolution began. The article is based on a large dataset, Imita.db, which contains data on more than thirty-eight thousand Italian joint-stock companies and about three hundred thousand directors, and uses both network analysis and a prosopographic approach. The main result is that the interval considered was marked by a sharp decrease in the degree of cohesion of the Italian corporate network. In 1972, the system was very cohesive and state-owned enterprises were well represented within the most central firms. In 1983, the cohesion of the system had sharply diminished; state-owned enterprises had disappeared from the center and a new private center, hinged on Mediobanca, the only merchant bank operating in the country, had emerged.