This article explores the entangling of management and masculinity in Australia’s mid-century corporations. Presenting a new approach to the study of men in business history, it uses Connell’s hegemonic masculinity and Brannon’s blueprint of masculinity to understand the social construction of gender in mid-century corporate management. The article finds that Australian executive management was gendered not only by employing men, but also by reproducing a contextually-situated exemplar of corporate masculinity. Executive men were rewarded for, and evoked a desire to be, a big wheel , mastering the public sphere through hard work, and using their success to control others. They were sturdy oaks , using their brilliance and strength for the benefit of their company and to protect Australian society. They were also stoic and humble, preferring to get on with the job rather than engage in competition and flamboyance. This form of masculinity was shaped by the requirements of their occupation and the social and economic context of postwar reconstruction. By illuminating the integration of executive work and masculinity, this article provides insight into the barriers that women and other minorities face in corporate leadership today, and in doing so can help reshape them with a focus on equality for all.
This article explores how Chilean business elites remember the Unidad Popular (UP) government (1970-1973) and how these memories shape their current political culture. Drawing on interviews, it distinguishes between two generational groups: those who experienced the UP as adults and those who lived through it as children or adolescents or did not live it firsthand. The study examines how memories of political confrontations and commodity shortages form a conservative collective narrative that resists systemic reform. These recollections often legitimize the 1973 military coup and the subsequent neoliberal transformations. The research shows that personal experiences, as well as narratives passed down through generations, contribute to the construction of a political culture among economic elites that privileges stability over change. By analyzing these memory dynamics, the article underscores the importance of elite historical consciousness in shaping their vision of Chile's political present and its possible future.
This paper examines the management of spiritual services in late medieval and early modern Europe through the case of the Monastery and Shrine of Guadalupe, one of the most prominent Marian pilgrimage destinations of the fifteenth century. After the Hieronymite Order assumed control in 1389, the monastery expanded into a diversified enterprise that encompassed agriculture, livestock, crafts, as well as charitable and spiritual services. We argue that this expansion resulted from three interrelated factors: the human capital accumulated within monastic management, the development of a recognizable spiritual brand centered on the icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and its endorsement by the Order’s founding values and by the principal legal authorities of the time—the Church and, more decisively, the Spanish Monarchy. The paper thus contributes to scholarship by identifying early forms of branding and endorsement, and highlighting the role of spiritual services in the consolidation of monastic economies.
This article examines efforts to remake the European economy in the late twentieth century through innovations in organized business and industrial policy. By narrating the development of the “Big 12 Roundtable” and the European Strategic Program on Research in Information Technology (ESPRIT) in the 1970s and 1980s, we show how the executive institution of the European Commission responded to global competitive pressures by creating “business forums”—groups of business elites organized by policymakers to serve as policy consultants—and by developing extensive technology and research programs to support the development of European technology firms. We then trace how the Big 12 Roundtable laid the foundation for other business forums, including the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), and how ESPRIT paved the way for the framework programs that have been hallmarks of European industrial policy and investment in research and development for half a century. Consequently, this article expands the business historical genealogy of organized business in Europe and contributes a new history of European industrial policy.
This article examines how merchants in early modern Japan (1600-1868) created large-scale enterprises that contained multiple stores across several jurisdictions and employed hundreds of staff in the absence of formal legal institutions designed to facilitate the formation of complex businesses. It argues that early modern merchants made use of the household (ie) to construct fictive entities that looked, wrote, and acted like individual merchants on paper, but could be controlled by different people, divided into shares, and used to shield assets from claims by local creditors and rulers. Through the clever deployment of these fictive entities, merchants constructed expansive business empires. The article uses the archive of the Nakai Genzaemon, one of the period's wealthiest merchants, to show how these entities worked, then compares the Nakai's organization with other premodern businesses inside and outside of Japan. Based on this analysis, the conclusion offers a critique of institutional approaches to the study of economic and business history as well as suggestions toward a new understanding of the relationship between business, state, and society in early modern Japan.
The uncertain aspects of early modern merchants’ future business activities are often emphasized. However, historians have not yet examined how merchants themselves discursively expressed the future. This paper examines the letters of eighteenth-century French merchants active in long-distance trade to explore how they wrote about future events with their business correspondents. The systematic analysis of merchants’ expressions about the future shows that, while the business context is often described as uncertain, this uncertainty was not prominent in their own writings. The article contributes to our understanding of the early modern future and the role of business correspondence.
This paper examines peak national co-operative associations. It initially explores the business and co-operative history literature relating to these peak bodies highlighting the concept of Business Industry Associations. It then briefly explores the history of long-standing peak national co-operative associations in the US and the UK. By contrast the Australian experience has been one of limited progress until the formation of the Business Council of Co-operatives and Mutuals in 2013. There are a number of factors that explain the Australian experience including ideological conflicts, state-based co-operative legislation, the autonomy of state based federations, separate peak national bodies for financial co-operatives, and Neoliberalism. The Business Council of Co-operatives and Mutuals does not follow the theorized pattern of formation for Business Industry Associations and its brief history highlights the dependence of Business Industry Associations on recognition by the State for their survival.
This paper examines the micropolitics of corporate domicile relocation through the case of Tanganyika Concessions, a British company that shifted its headquarters from the United Kingdom to Southern Rhodesia between 1946 and 1952. Drawing on archival sources like the Rio Tinto Collection, the British National Archives, and the Union Mini & egrave;re du Haut-Katanga (UMHK) archives, it reconstructs how internal and external actors shaped the relocation process. A central influence came from an informal network of U.S.-based investors-dubbed the "American Group," whose capital was actively courted and whose conditions reshaped corporate strategy. The analysis reveals the power dynamics among major shareholders, including Anglo American, Rio Tinto, UMHK, and the Bank of England, showing how competing interests required continual negotiation. The study demonstrates that corporate relocations are politically charged processes embedded in imperial decline and the reconfiguration of postwar global capital.
On January 4, 1966, a major accident occurred at an oil refinery at Feyzin in South-East France. Although this event has been recognized as a watershed in the history of French industrial hazards regulation, little has been studied about the oil industry’s response. The period following the disaster saw an initiation into public relations for the leading figures of the young French oil industry, concurrent with the energy transition that was happening in Western Europe. Most of these leaders continued to hold executive roles in the same companies during the following decades and capitalized on these experiences to communicate on environmental issues. While many oil historians have focused on either a global or a national scale, this contribution proposes a multi-scalar approach to scrutinize how oil companies crafted their communications in the chosen territories for refining and petrochemical activities. Focusing on these areas enables us to emphasize that levers of consent to industrial activities are phenomena that are constructed in lived spaces where frontline communities have to cope with petroleum-based industry’s ordinary risks.
In 1963 Columbia Records, Roulette Records, and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) joined forces to produce and release a jazz record titled A Jazz Salute to Freedom, and in doing so they allied with CORE and their fight for racial equality. The sales revenue generated helped CORE maintain a positive cash flow and exposed legions of jazz fans in the United States and abroad to CORE's concerns with racial discrimination. The record's marketing collateral engaged fans in dialogue about the fight for racial equality. By offering CORE access to resources and professional expertise, Roulette and Columbia became collaborators in civil rights activism. The relationship between CORE, Roulette, and Columbia Records represents a unique historical example of corporate allyship within the struggle for civil rights, an example that adds nuance and complexity to our historical understanding of the movement's relationship with private enterprise.
The Hudson Bay Company (HBC) fundamentally changed food strategies in North America. Rather than go where food was, company servants stationed along Hudson Bay traded with Indigenous hunters for the flesh of wild animals. HBC officials expected this food to be cheap, a strategy that defines our understandings of commodity frontiers. Yet a focus on price requires greater attention to how firms account for costs. This article argues that the HBC's post-1774 expansion inland exacerbated tensions related to control over the trade in country provisions between the company and Ma & scaron;k & emacr;kowak hunters. Recurrent food crises related to one animal-partridge-at the HBC's principal post, York Fort, in the 1780s and 1790s prompted defences of what food was worth beyond its exchange value, in evaluations recorded outside the company's ledgers. Not only did experiences hunting and eating partridges shape the HBC's later search for other cheap foods. It also suggests ways to rethink the politics of prices within commercial enterprises.
The setting up of "second registries" by European governments in the 1980s was a formative moment in contemporary maritime history. Developed in an effort to counteract the growing use of offshore flags of convenience, these registries provided European shipping companies with spaces of exception from normal regulation, lifting national manning requirements and allowing for foreign labor to be hired on local wages. This article investigates the emergence of the Nordic variants, called "international ship registries" (ISRs). Employing a global perspective which focuses on the interplay between business actors, narratives, and national politics, it argues that the influence of offshore actors in shaping the Nordic developments was more pronounced than previous research suggests. The ISR policy was originally proposed to Norwegian policymakers by an offshore shipowner living in Bermuda. From there, it transferred to Denmark and Sweden, shaping their policy debates in the 1980s and 1990s.
This essay examines the Peasants Land Bank, a state-run financial institution established in 1882 to accelerate the transfer of land to peasants in the Russian Empire. Initially designed as a credit provider, the Bank gained new powers in the 1890s, when the government granted it unprecedented authority to assemble its own land fund. This shift transformed the institution into a key instrument of imperial governance. By controlling access to land and credit, it privileged the idealized "all-Russian" Orthodox peasantry and systematically excluded groups outside this category, including indigenous groups (such as the Bashkirs), non-Orthodox subjects, individuals of foreign origin as well as women and urban dwellers who technically belonged to the peasant estate. The Bank's practices of exclusion enable us to examine how a state financial institution, rather than a neutral intermediary, can perpetuate multiple hierarchies through its routine credit decisions.
This article examines the rise of craft brewing in Canada as a window onto a broader transformation in the cultural logic of post-Fordist capitalism. It argues that craft did not reject markets but reorganized the criteria by which markets conferred worth. In an industry marked by intense postwar consolidation, sensory standardization, and national branding, value had long been anchored in scale, efficiency, and managerial coordination. Craft brewers disrupted this settlement by reattaching moral and aesthetic significance to locality, visible labor, and artisanal care, transforming authenticity into a competitive resource.Drawing on corporate memoranda, advertising debates, liquor-board files, and acquisition records, the article treats legitimacy as a historically recoverable form of symbolic capital-produced through processes of authentication and convertible into market power. It traces a sequence of conversions: consolidation generated efficiency but justificatory fragility; craft entrepreneurs reorganized evaluation around proximity and provenance; incumbents responded through mimicry, acquisition, and portfolio governance. As authenticity became legible and economically valuable, it became portable and vulnerable to "inauthenticity discounts" when ownership disrupted recognition.The Canadian case demonstrates how markets metabolize critique by converting dissent into governable value, and it invites business historians to treat legitimacy not as reputational residue but as infrastructure within modern enterprise strategy.
In the early twentieth century, the Malayan pineapple was the cheapest but most consumed canned fruit in Britain, most of which was produced by local Chinese enterprises in British Malaya. Current historiography of the Malayan pineapple industry has highlighted its lack of automation and branding that made the canned pineapples low quality and therefore cheap; a consequence of colonial commodity production framework that prioritized rubber exports. A key assumption is that Britain's high demand for Malayan pineapples was mainly driven by the harsh economic conditions during the Depression years. However, using previously unexamined colonial newspaper reports and archival sources on the Empire Marketing Board, this study sheds light on how two representatives of the pineapple industry-Tan Kah Kee and Lee Kong Chian-actively leveraged colonial ties and production cheapness to corner imperial markets. This study's contribution is two-fold. First, it expands the Malayan pineapple industry's current historiography by situating it within the broader debates on imperial marketing, commodity chains, and local entrepreneurship. By focusing on the marketing strategies which Chinese entrepreneurs devised within a colonial framework, it adds nuance to the literature on local entrepreneurship and the trajectories of a secondary commodity sector in British colonies. Second, it challenges the predominantly ethnically essentialist readings of Chinese business strategies under colonialism of Southeast Asia, by demonstrating how intra-ethnic cooperation was not always effective in business modernization. In this case, leveraging colonial and imperial ties to navigate colonial logic in commodity trade and production was more useful, even though its success was transient.
This paper explores the historical development of management thought around the cost of public infrastructure. We argue that swings between ex post pricing and ex ante discounting as temporal frameworks within which the public, managers, politicians, and the media appraised major transport infrastructure projects constitute a dominant but unrecognized narrative. We use London in the twentieth century as a case study, identifying major changes in the 1920s and again in the 1960s which decisively rebalanced how projects were evaluated. We conclude that the current cost-benefit and ex ante discounting framework arose out of the adoption of American concepts and processes from the early 1960s onward. We think that this approach fostered rent-seeking activity and principal-agent problems, but that the empirical costs and timeframes for completing transport infrastructure have changed much less than is commonly believed in over a century.
This article examines the postwar Franco-Italian struggle over Sudameris (Banque Fran & ccedil;aise et Italienne pour l'Am & eacute;rique du Sud), a multinational bank operating across South America. After 1945, Paribas sought to transform Sudameris into a French institution, backed by government pressure and asset sequestration. Italy's Banca Commerciale Italiana (BCI) resisted, regaining majority control in 1948 through strategic share acquisitions. The ensuing conflict (1948-1955) centered on executive power. Paribas relied on French corporate law to maintain managerial dominance, while the BCI finally succeeded in appointing an Italian managing director in 1955. Under Italian leadership, Sudameris shifted from transactional to relationship banking in South America, reversing stagnation and achieving renewed growth by 1960. Sudameris's early postwar history reveals how postwar European economic rivalries extended into South America and how multinational banks adapted to nationalist environments amid the contradictory forces of regional integration and global competition.
Applying the New Entrepreneurial History framework, this paper examines how ArcBest Corporation, an integrated logistics firm based in Fort Smith, Arkansas, became the last legacy less-than-load (LTL) carrier operating in the United States. It argues that the firm's enduring viability is partially the product of an internal distributed agency among executives over a century that involved continual entrepreneurial processes: Envisioning and valuing opportunities informed by the multiplicative form of values, strategically reallocating and reconfiguring resources, and legitimizing novelty to stakeholders in response to profound market and regulatory shifts. These entrepreneurial processes, paired with the company's commitments to a unionized labor force, informed executives' strategic decisions that transformed the carrier from a regional hauler into a national, technologically sophisticated, integrated logistics provider. In applying the new entrepreneurial history to ArcBest, it considers how entrepreneurial opportunities are enacted within the context of a single firm over time.
