Henry S. Rowen, Marguerite Gong Hancock, and William F. Miller, editors. Making IT: The Rise of Asia in High Tech

General Electric is an international high-tech icon that beganwith Thomas Edison and the first electrical revolution, andthrived through every one since. Like many global giants, ithas firm American roots. Yet on June 1, 2007, the New York Timescould publish a headline in the business section entitled "ChiefSays G.E. Aims to Match the Growth Pace Set by India." In     

Peter H. Spitz, ed. The Chemical Industry at the Millennium: Maturity, Restructuring, and Globalization. Philadelphia, Pa.: Chemical Heritage Foundation, 2003. x + 387 pp. ISBN 0-941901-34-3, $45.00 (cloth).

Peter Spitz’s new book is a continuation of his earlierwork, Petrochemicals: The Rise of an Industry (1988), whichdetailed the development of the modern chemical industry beginningin the 1930s. The Chemical Industry at the Millennium picksup the story at the end of the 1970s and examines the momentouschanges that have taken place in the last twenty-five years.Subtitled Maturity, Restructuring, and Globalization, this isan excellent collection of essays by industry     

John Brewer and Frank Trentmann, eds. Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges

This collection of eleven essays examines consumer culturesfrom different eras and different countries in transnationalcontexts. The essayists cover a broad chronological swath, startingwith the porcelain trade in Britain and China during the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries and concluding with a case study ofglobal water welfarism in present-day South Africa and New Zealand.Consuming Cultures also offers a rich sampling of disciplinaryapproaches, featuring work by historians, anthropologists, sociologists,geographers, and media scholars. Despite such diversity, theessays generally     

Hermann-J. Rupieper, Friederike Sattler and Georg Wagner-Kyora, eds. Die mitteldeutsche Chemieindustrie und ihre Arbeiter im 20. Jahrhundert

This collection of fifteen articles is based on the proceedingsof a November 2003 conference held by the Martin-Luther Universitätin Mitteldeutschland, or Central Germany. Most people tend toforget that the area of Mitteldeutschland in the former easternGermany (German Democratic Republic or GDR), that is the areaaround Halle, Dessau, Leipzig, and Jena, was traditionally oneof the centers of German intellectual and economic life. MartinLuther posted his 95 Theses at a Wittenberg church. It was hometo such firms as the original     

Leslie Berlin. The Man behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. xi + 402 pp. ISBN 0-19-516343-5, $30.00.

The last few years have seen a number of books on the rise ofSilicon Valley. Martin Kenney’s Understanding SiliconValley (2000), Ross Bassett’s To the Digital Age (2002),Frederick Terman at Stanford by C. Stewart Gillmor (2004), andmy own book on Making Silicon Valley (2006) are notable examples.Another addition to this literature is The Man behind the Microchip:Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley by     

Renato Giannetti and Michelangelo Vasta. L'impresa italiana nel Novecento. Bologna, Italy: Societa Editrice il Mulino, 2003. 486 pp. ISBN 88-15-09496-2, {euro}30.00.

Italian business history is not well known abroad. This is quiteobvious. Even though Italy has been industrialized since the1920s, it is a small country, with little international influence.Its historical patterns of evolution privileged the internalmarket, and although its domestic corporations have traditionallynot been very active abroad, foreign firms have also manifestedopenly their reluctance to invest in a promising but too turbulentenvironment. As a result, Italian business history has fromthe beginning been a domestic story, scarcely appealing forforeign scholars. The Italian historiographic climate was partiallyresponsible for this situation. Business history as a disciplinehas only recently been "legitimized" in Italy (still there areno chairs in the field). For a long time, the     

Culture,Attitudes, and Media Patterns in China,Taiwan, and the U.S.: Balancing Standardization and Localization Decisions

ABSTRACT

A study was undertaken to examine cultural orientations, attitudes toward advertising, and media use patterns across China, Taiwan, and the United States. China and Taiwan share similar cultural backgrounds, yet their economies and advertising industries have evolved quite differently due to different social and political settings. The United States was included to provide a point of comparison. Understanding media patterns, cultural orientations, and attitudes can help better ascertain the potential for using standardized strategies by international advertisers across different markets. Industry and consumer trends in evolving markets can also be monitored. Consumers in China and Taiwan were found to be more similar than different. For example, consumers in both markets were less individualistic and more collectivistic than their counterparts in the U.S. They also exhibited more favorable attitudes toward advertising than American consumers. Furthermore, Chinese and Taiwanese respondents spent significantly more time with print media than American respondents. Implications of the findings for balancing standardization and localization decisions are discussed.     

Tuija Mikkonen. Corporate Architecture in Finland in the 1940s and 1950s: Factory Building as Architecture, Investment and Image. Helsinki, Finland: Bookstore Tiedekirja, 2005. 269 pp. ISBN 951-41-0982-1, {euro}30.00.

As Alfred Chandler has shown in his writings, particularly thethree monographs Strategy and Structure (1962), The VisibleHand (1977), and Scale and Scope (1990), the development oflarge industrial corporations has been an important featureof society from the nineteenth century onwards. These organizationsbecame not only significant employers but also important providersof goods to consumers and to other industrial firms. Furthermore,their development has had considerable consequences for thelandscape in     

Jeffrey M. Hornstein. A Nation of Realtors(R): A Cultural History of the Twentieth-Century American Middle Class. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. xi + 252 pp. ISBN 0-8223-3528-X, $79.95 (cloth); 0-8223-3540-9, $22.95 (paper).

For many people who study the culture of American business,a mention of real estate will conjure up Sinclair Lewis’sfictional creation George F. Babbitt, the title character ofthe 1922 novel Babbitt. I was reminded, when reading JeffreyHornstein’s A Nation of Realtors^®, that Lewis at onepoint used a different working title: "Population 300,000."Between these two titles lay the relationship between the characterof the Realtor and the community that the Realtor, and his peers,     

Geoffrey Jones. Multinationals and Global Capitalism: From the Nineteenth Century to the Twenty-First Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. xi + 340 pp. ISBN 0-19-927209-3, $144.50 (cloth); ISBN 0-19-927210-7, $44.50 (paper).

Geoffrey Jones introduces Multinationals and Global Capitalismin the preface as a radically revised edition of his The Evolutionof International Business: An Introduction (Routledge, 1996),which has hitherto remained the only history of the developmentand impact of multinationals worldwide. He indicates, quiterightly, that in the meantime globalization has been recognizedas a controversial and widely debated phenomenon. Indeed, itis indicative of the sweeping changes that have reshaped ourperceptions of the world economy that, at its publication lessthan a decade ago, Evolution was innocent of the very term ‘globalization’;     

The Role of Trust in Understanding the Impact of Social Media Marketing on Brand Equity and Brand Loyalty

Abstract

In this era, social media platform is integrated into the marketing strategy. This new technology sets out new mechanisms and communication tools that companies can rely on to interact and engage with actual and potential customers. This study aimed at exploring the impact of social media marketing activities (SMM) on brand loyalty via brand trust and brand equity. Based on an online survey of 287 users who follow telecommunications companies on social media located in Egypt, data was collected and analyzed using structural equation modeling. The results revealed that SMM activities comprise only three dimensions; trendiness, customization and word-of-mouth. These attributes of social media marketing directly influence brand loyalty and indirectly influence brand equity mediated by brand trust. The study emphasis the role of trust and provide guidance toward measuring the effectiveness of social media marketing.     

Michael Augspurger. An Economy of Abundant Beauty: Fortune Magazine and Depression America. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004. viii + 292 pp. ISBN 0-8014-4204-4, $34.95 (cloth).

A curious blend of business and intellectual history, with anemphasis on the latter, Michael Augspurger’s An Economyof Abundant Beauty offers a reading of Fortune magazine fromits founding in 1930 through the election of Dwight D. Eisenhowerin 1952. Distancing himself from other observers of the publicationwho have interpreted Fortune’s heavy coverage of highculture and aesthetics during the 1930s alongside more prosaicbusiness news as the result of a distinct split between a progressivestaff of writers, including James Agee and Archibald MacLeish,and more conservative editors and publisher Henry Luce, Augspurgerclaims to discern a     

Fred Turner. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism

The Whole Earth Catalog provided the commune-dwellers of the1960s with a forum in which to discuss tools and systems forbuilding alternative life styles. From Counterculture to Cybercultureexplains why and how the Catalog's perspective on tools andsystems became a dominant paradigm for information networksand the technology industry. Using archival material and hisown interviews with many key figures, Fred Turner has writtenan engrossing and in-depth account of the role the Catalog andits founder, Stewart Brand, played     

Roger Horowitz. Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. xiii + 170 pp. ISBN 0-8018-8240-0, $35.00 (cloth); ISBN 0-8018-8241-9, $19.00 (paper).

Roger Horowitz opens Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste,Technology, Transformation with the observation that Americais a meat-eating nation. Throughout his narrative, he examinesthe forces that allow so much meat—six to eight ouncesper person per day—to satiate Americans’ appetite.The central questions driving Horowitz’s analysis are(a) what is the relationship between producing and consuminga product and (b) how does the nature of the good affect thisrelationship? In     

John Storey, ed. The Management of Innovation. 2 vols. Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2004. xxxi + 734 pp. (vol. 1); ix + 570 pp. (vol. 2). ISBN 1-84376-429-6, $495.00 (cloth).

Edited by John Storey of Open University Business School inthe United Kingdom, The Management of Innovation (MoI) consistsof fifty-three of the most important social science works onorganizational and technological innovation. Predominantly journalarticles with some book chapters, the contents of the twin volumesare organized into nine sections that, as Storey says in hisintroduction, shift from overviews and general issues to morenarrowly focused topics. In the former category are three sections:Theoretical Perspectives and Overviews; National Systems, Diffusionand Historic Trajectories; and Business Strategy, Entrepreneurshipand Innovation. In the latter category are the remaining sixsections: Technology Strategy and New Product Development; Barriersand Enablers; Managing Innovation through     

James W. Cortada. The Digital Hand, Volume 2: How Computers Changed the Work of American Financial, Telecommunications, Media, and Entertainment Industries. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. xv + 629 pp. ISBN 0-19-516587-X, $59.50.

This large and extensive volume is the second in an ambitiousprojected three-volume series that examines nothing less thanhow the information revolution of the second half of the twentiethcentury impacted every aspect of the U.S. economy. The firstvolume, weighing in at a mere 500 pages or so, was The DigitalHand: How Computers Changed the Work of American Manufacturing,Transportation, and Retail Industries (Oxford University     

John Patrick Diggins. Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and Making of History

More words have been written about Ronald Reagan than most otherpresidents combined, but few of these volumes are serious historicaltreatments—the history has been too fresh and the archivalmaterial too difficult to access. As a result, while the literatureon Reagan is vast, the scholarship has been scanty. But, overthe past few years several books on Reagan have appeared (includingRichard Reeves' President Reagan and Gil Troy's Morning     

John Landers. The Field and the Forge: Population, Production, and Power in the Pre-industrial West. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2003. xiii + 440 pp. ISBN 0-19-924916-4, {pound}60.00 (cloth); 0-19-927957-8, {pound}22.50 (paper).

This book recalls literature that emanated from the Annalesschool of historians, for, like the annalistes, Landers is fascinatedby the longues durées of history. His subject is preindustrialEurope from roughly the second century (with occasional forays back to the Iron and Bronze Ages) to the nineteenthcentury . He takes his thesis from E. A. Wrigley: preindustrial Europe relied overwhelmingly on organicsources for food, heat, energy, crafts, manufactures, commerce,and the means     

Asymmetric competition and collection rates differentials: determinants of prices in international telephone service markets

The paper investigates determinants of pricing in international telephone service markets. The analysis—focused on 24 worldwide national markets—shows the impact of several telecommunications-specific and macroeconomic variables on collection rate differentials and traffic imbalance between countries. An econometric model is aimed at performing quantitative analysis and providing support to future telecommunications policies.