This essay is a business and cultural history of Wrigley marketing in North America from the 1890s until the early 1930s. Wrigley relied on wholesalers at a time when consumer goods makers were expanding their sales forces. A prolific advertiser, Wrigley provided favorable terms to retailers carrying chewing gum, countering the view that advertising, by enabling direct communication between manufacturer and consumer, diminished retailer clout in the chain of distribution. Wrigley advertising constructed meanings on multiple levels, discussed here with the theoretical tools of liminality and semiotics. The text of Wrigley ads championed relief for two modern conditions: indigestion and stress. The imagery, mainly that of the liminal “Spearman,” evoked notions of unworldly escape and infantile nostalgia. The ads were richly polysemic. Accordingly, Wrigley's widespread popularity and market dominance by 1930 should be assessed in terms of both marketing function and representational process.

Is it really useful to focus the interest of business historians on major companies that failed in recent years, like Parmalat in Italy or Enron in the United States? What can we learn from studying cases like that of the French company Schneider, a first mover in metallurgy, armaments, and nuclear energy, which for almost 150 years dominated the company town Le Creusot, where the Business History Conference held its fiftieth anniversary meeting in 2004, but which has now disappeared?

In 1977, when Alfred D. Chandler's pathbreaking book The Visible Hand appeared, the large, vertically integrated, “Chandlerian” corporation had dominated the organizational landscape for nearly a century. In some interpretations, possibly including Chandler's own, The Visible Hand and subsequent works constitute a triumphalist account of the rise of that organizational form: the large, vertically integrated firm arose and prospered because of its inherent superiority, in all times and places, to more decentralized, market-oriented production arrangements. A quarter century later, however, the Chandlerian firm no longer dominates the landscape. It is under siege from a panoply of decentralized and market-like forms that often resemble some of the “inferior” nineteenth-century structures that the managerial enterprise had replaced.

This article examines the trust-producing mechanisms investors and financiers used in São Paulo, Brazil, to determine where to invest their money in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The coffee boom that began in the 1880s spurred bursts of new domestic business development that transformed São Paulo into Brazil's industrial leader. Using shareholder and director data from an array of business sectors, this article demonstrates that early development (1856–1905) of the institutions that provided business finance was accompanied by highly personal relationships between financier and entrepreneur. By the early twentieth century (1906–1920), rapid economic growth and business diversification rendered these personal connections inadequate and hence less important to business finance. Investors and directors concentrated their energies and their money, abandoning the practice of forming broad connections in general—and connections to a bank in particular—and turned to the stock market instead. By providing an alternative to personal forms of trust production, the rise of impersonal intermediation promoted the significantly broadened market for corporate business formation that underwrote São Paulo's economic transformation.

Foreign markets largely shaped the business strategy of Les Films Albatros, a medium-sized, internationally networked specialty producer of films in interwar France. Depending more on foreign revenues than did the Hollywood studios, Albatros also realized higher gross returns. Because films were capital goods providing a perishable product (seats at a specific time), their price depended on both expected performance and the threshold ticket-selling capacity necessary to recoup cinema fixed costs; some films could not be sold at any price. Given the small potential market for its films, Albatros had to find an intricate balance between producing at low cost and delivering films with at least threshold ticket-selling capacity. It did so by differentiating its films, entering film distribution in France, coproducing internationally, and cooperating with Pathé and Gaumont, the two largest French film companies. While its larger European rivals were obsessed with operational effectiveness vis-à-vis Hollywood, Albatros, by adopting a distinct strategic position, hardly had to pay attention to operational effectiveness at all. It was making a differentiated product for needs unserved by Hollywood.

By the end of the twentieth century, it had become clear that the grand synthesis laid out by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., in The Visible Hand, Scale and Scope, and other writings was badly in need of revision. It was in need of revision because the type of enterprise that Chandler took to be the acme of capitalist economic organization–the large, vertically integrated, horizontally diversified, managerially directed corporation–was clearly in retreat. This development cast into doubt not only the substantive content of Chandler’s interpretation but also its methodological underpinnings.

The Brazilian economy before the First World War has been generally characterized as an economy specializing in the production of primary goods for the international market—chiefly coffee for export. The emergence of the first industrial factories has been seen as closely connected to the performance of the export sector. The first cotton mills established in one province of Brazil, Minas Gerais, were not connected to the export sector, however. Minas Gerais was different in key respects from other regions. This article describes the peculiarities of the Mineiro economy during the 1870s and investigates the establishment of the first cotton mills there. It considers the location, size, and financing of the mills, as well as the structure of ownership and relations between partners. The results show that the emergence of the textile industry in Minas Gerais was independent from the performance of the foreign sector of the Brazilian economy.

In a series of recent essays, including their contributions to this symposium, Richard N. Langlois and Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Daniel M. G. Raff, and Peter Temin (hereafter LRT) present interesting but contradictory views of the decentralized or vertically disintegrated post-Chandlerian economy from whose vantage point they seek to reconceptualize business history. Starting from an orientation that uneasily combines Adam Smith’s ideas about the division of labor with organizational learning, Langlois sees the current situation as dominated by the modularization of production. This modularization and the arm’s-length transactions it facilitates create a world reminiscent of the antebellum United States, although today’s highthroughput differentiated exchanges are underpinned by a set of market-supporting institutions, notably standard interfaces or design rules. Starting from an orientation toward Oliver Williamson and the minimization of coordination costs, LRT in contrast see a world of collaborators joined by long-term, largely informal relations of a distinct type reducible neither to markets nor hierarchies.

Most business histories of the nineteenth-century southern upcountry focus on the shift from a protocapitalist, yeoman-oriented antebellum period to the rapid commercialization and industrialization of the New South era. These studies generally argue for a sharp break in the economic leadership of the region either through the rise of a new business elite, or the reorientation of an agrarian regime. Through a study of Spartanburg, South Carolina, my work challenges this notion of a sharp break and instead finds a vibrant, town-based entrepreneurial elite in both the antebellum and postbellum periods. The revolution that occurred was in the nature of South Carolina's political economy. Spartanburg's entrepreneurs, who struggled to achieve their goals in the antebellum era, found new opportunities as a result of post-war political realignments and the racial politics of Reconstruction. This business history at the community level adds an important chapter to our understanding of the political economy of the Old and New Souths.

This article looks at the corporate history of J. Walter Thompson to examine the nature of U.S.-Mexican relations in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II. It contends that local conditions, along with a cadre of “progressive” Good Neighbor Policy diplomats, forced American companies to adopt the role of “commercial diplomats,” altering the nature of what, up to 1940, had been a tense and bitter binational relationship. The article shows how Thompson's role as a commercial diplomat changed its previous “capitalist missionary” approach and how it complemented American diplomacy, including national security measures to displace German commercial influence in Mexico during Word War II.

For over a century in Egypt, the Suez Canal Company reflected the role of the concession in European economic expansion overseas. Concession was a European business practice widespread in Egypt; it was an institution inherited from a system of privileges for Europeans since the Middle Ages. It promised a way for Egypt to adopt modern infrastructures and receive needed European help for digging the canal. The results of the Suez Company are indisputable: the desert of the Suez Isthmus became a lively economic region with active ports, growing cities, and an expanding labor force. And the region was linked to the rest of the country by a new road network. At the same time, however, the concession system denied Egypt full benefit of this infrastructure. The canal served the financial and strategic interests of the company, not the interests of the local economy. This outcome embodied all the contradictions of the concession system: on the one hand, concessions were a necessity for modern infrastructure development in Egypt; on the other, they were a hindrance to further national economic development.

The Mexican Revolution (1910) brought important changes to the social, political and economic spheres of Mexico. New legislation was passed to protect workers and redistribute land. The state acquired rights to petroleum, water, and subsoil minerals. For entrepreneurs this was an abrupt change from the previous regime. They had to adapt to the new policies and administrative state structure. Business lawyers aided companies in a country where the government had circumscribed the private sector's participation in the economy. Lawyers offered their clients important services, such as lobbying and aid in corporate restructuring. This article explores how in the midst of these new revolutionary regimes an important investment group used the services of business lawyer Manuel Gómez Morin to create Mexico's first holding company and to issue the first mortgage bonds in the country.

During the 1990s, U.S. managerial capitalism underwent a profound transformation from a technocratic to a “proprietary” form. In the technocratic era, managers had functioned as teams to sustain the firm and to promote social welfare by satisfying the demands of competing stakeholders. In the new proprietary era, corporate bureaucratic teams broke up into tournaments in which managers competed for advancement toward the CEO prize. The reward system of the new era depended heavily on stock options that were accompanied by downside risk protection. The tournaments turned managers into a special class of shareholders who sought to maximize their individual utility functions even if deviating from the firm's best interest. Once this new regime became established, managers discarded their technocratic, stakeholder creed and adopted a property rights ideology, originally elaborated in academia by financial agency theorists. Managers hardly noticed (or cared) they were capturing a disproportionate share of the new wealth being generated in the U.S. economy. When critics brought this fact to light, managers replied like well-schooled economists: markets worked efficiently. Whether they worked fairly was a question they did not address.