Susannah Walker. Style and Status: Selling Beauty to African American Women, 1920-1975

Susannah Walker's well-researched and well-written examinationof the African American beauty industry, from approximately1920–1975, makes an important contribution to the growingfield of African American business history. Style and Statusprovides a detailed account of the triumphs and travails ofAfrican American entrepreneurs who satisfied the hair care needsof black women. One of the major issues faced by historic and contemporary AfricanAmerican purveyors of "beauty" to black women is the questionof what (or whose) "standard"     

Michael Redclift. Chewing Gum: The Fortunes of Taste

Chewing gum was foremost an American invention, Michael Redclifttells us in Chewing Gum: The Fortunes of Taste, a brief yetserious and engaging book that details how chewing gum cameto occupy a distinct place in the rise of American consumerism.Perhaps nothing signified the triviality of consumerism as chewinggum. It possessed what Redclift calls an "ephemeral quality,"it was an easily replicable mass product, and provided instantgratification. This ephemerality was complicated by     

Alan Lawson. A Commonwealth of Hope: The New Deal Response to Crisis

The title of Alan Lawson's new book, A Commonwealth of Hope:The New Deal Response to Crisis, arises from his view that thetremendous intellectual and social ferment of the late nineteenthand early twentieth centuries had a far more formative influenceon the architects of the 1930s New Deal than has been acknowledged.During the earlier era the term "commonwealth" was used to describe"the ideal American society by those with a hopeful vision ofAmerica's governing prospects" (xi). The bounty produced by     

Sarah Elvins. Sales and Celebrations: Retailing and Regional Identity in Western New York State, 1920-1940. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2004. 222 pp. ISBN 0-8214-1549-2, $42.95 (cloth).

Elvins’s book is part of a growing body of historicalscholarship that interrogates the lived experience of consumersociety in the twentieth-century United States. Beginning whereWilliam Leach’s Land of Desire (1993) left off, Elvinsseeks to complicate "top-down" narratives of the homogenizationof American consumer culture into a national mass market. Takingher cue from Lizabeth Cohen’s early work on consumptionin Chicago, Elvins examines consumption on the local level in     

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     

Robin Pearson. Insuring the Industrial Revolution: Fire Insurance in Great Britain, 1700-1850. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2004. xiii + 434 pp. ISBN 0-7546-336302, $99.95 (cloth).

Robin Pearson’s Insuring the Industrial Revolution providesa richly detailed account of the British fire insurance industrythrough the mid-nineteenth century. Whereas most previous accountshave focused on single companies, Pearson’s study encompassesthe entire industry of London and provincial firms and seeksto place the industry within the larger context of British economichistory. British economic historians have long overlooked the contributionof insurance, and service industries in general, to the nation’seconomic     

Charles F. McGovern. Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890 1945

Charles McGovern's Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship,1890–1945, explains how Americans came to see consumerismas central to their national identity. More specifically, itexamines how two key interest groups—advertisers and consumeractivists—battled over and ultimately helped define thepolitical meaning of consumerism. According to McGovern, in the early twentieth-century, advertisersassumed consumers were "childlike, irrational, ungovernable,and unpredictable" (p.60), and hoped to sway this malleablemass by convincing them of the deeper value of consumerism.To     

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,     

Karen Olson. Wives of Steel: Voices of Women from the Sparrows Point Steelmaking Communities. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. x + 216 pp. ISBN 0-271-02685-5, $40.00.

In her introduction to Wives of Steel, Karen Olson warns thatthe book is "not a business or labor history of the SparrowsPoint steel complex," stressing that it is instead a genderedanalysis of an industrial community (p. 13). Yet historiansof business and labor should find much of interest in this book.By placing women at the center of her history of Sparrows Point,Maryland, and the neighboring communities of Dundalk and TurnerStation, Olson highlights the     

JoAnne Yates. Structuring the Information Age: Life Insurance and Technology in the Twentieth Century. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 2005. x + 351 pp. ISBN 0-8018-8086-6, $49.95.

Structuring the Information Age delineates the incorporationof the computer into the life insurance bureaucracy and howlife insurance affected the rise of computers. The life insuranceindustry is an excellent choice for a study of how informationtechnology ‘revolutions’ actually are incrementallyappropriated by enterprises and society. Insurance as a financialintermediary depends on information for its existence. Changesin information manipulation fundamentally affect managementpractice. Moreover, it was a large market for producers of businessmachines. The industry     

Richard Abel. Americanizing the Movies and "Movie-Mad" Audiences, 1910-1914

Richard Abel argues that in the period from 1910, when the motionpicture "revolution" succeeded and the American film marketwas emancipated from French domination, to 1914, when foreignfilms were nearly eliminated from the U.S. market, the Americanfilm industry was characterized by widespread experimentationand innovation, especially in the areas of promotion practices,distribution strategies, content refinement, and audience development.Six chapters of Abel's Americanizing the Movies bring to theforeground the battle of     

Arthur McIvor and Ronald Johnston. Miners' Lung: A History of Dust Disease in British Coal Mining

Over the course of the past two decades, historians have begunto pay serious and sustained attention to the history of occupationalhealth, much of it analyzing the role of social, economic, andpolitical factors in the medical recognition of industrial disease.Although much has been published about the British coal industry,this is the first book to address the issue of health and safetyin this critically important sector of the British economy.Miners’ Lung, building on the work done by Jo     

Gesundheitsfonds — effizientere Steuerung des Gesundheitssystems?

In 2009 the German central health fund was implemented. It was the result of a political compromise. One political party intended to equalise the risk structure among 130 different health care funds, and the other wanted to intensify competition and to improve efficiency among the different health insurances. The fund is flanked by a health-based risk adjustment and is aimed at sustainably ensuring the funding of the statutory health insurance system. It also constitutes the basis for competition among statutory health care funds, securing quality and efficiency in health care provision. To cover additional expenditures, health insurers had to charge flatrate premiums. A new law, which will come into effect in January 2015, will oblige health insurers to charge income related contributions. It is not clear how this will change competition among insurers. The federal government will not need to finance subsidies to low income individuals anymore. Income redistribution will only take place within the public health insurance system, exempting the privately insured and public servants from supporting low income individuals. The authors claim that the health care fund will not succeed in its aim of securing a sustainable financial basis for the statutory health insurance system. Most of the authors argue that there is no evidence of greater efficiency thus far, and they offer proposals on how to achieve improved performance.     

Price V. Fishback et al. Government and the American Economy: A New History

In Government and the American Economy: A New History, a distinguishedpanel of economic historians chronicles and evaluates how governmenthas shaped U.S. economic development and growth from the colonialperiod to the present. The volume is dedicated to Robert Higgs,whose seminal thesis on the growth of government—thatit is a crisis-induced and persistent process—is one ofthe volume's underlying themes (and the subject of Higgs’chapter titled, "The World Wars"). The other is that government     

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     

Growth patterns of the European venture capital industry

Although the European venture capital industry has become nearly as important as its American counterpart, little research has been done to describe its nature and importance. This study gives in the first place an overview of the importance of the venture capital industry in the major European countries. Thereafter, we look for funding and investment patterns in the different European countries. We hypothesize that there is a difference between countries in which the venture capital industry is just emerging, and those where the venture capital industry is since long established.The data are mainly, but not solely, taken from the yearly statistics of the European Venture Capital Association (EVCA) and cover the period 1984–1989. The characteristics we look at are: (1) the sources of the funds flowing into the industry, broken down with respect to investor type and geographical location of the investor; and (2) the investments, broken down with respect to investment stage (using the EVCA definitions of the different stages), geographical location, degree of syndication, and industrial sector of the investee companies. In Europe as a whole, the most important group of investors are the banks (28%), the pension funds (17%), and the insurance companies (12%). Banks dominate the Swiss industry (48%); corporate investors dominate the German, Swedish, and Portuguese industries, whereas these are nearly completely absent in Denmark (2%), Ireland (4%), and the United Kingdom (5%). Eighty percent of all venture capital funds are raised domestically, 7% in another European country, and the remaining 13% in a non-European country.Almost half of the European investments (44%) are made in the expansion stage; management buy-outs (MBOs) account for another 36%. Only 14% is invested in seed or start-up companies, much less than the 30% in the U.S. Half of the venture capital investments in the United Kingdom are buy-outs. The highest start-up investment activity takes place in Austria and Spain. On average, more than half (54%) of the invested amount in Europe is syndicated, but only 6% internationally, while 10% is invested internationally.We also search for similarities and dissimilarities in the characteristics of the sources of funds and of the investments. The hypothesis is that a growth pattern can be distinguished, determining the maturity of the venture capital industry in a particular country. The characteristics that we think would discriminate most among the different industry stages are the importance of government agencies, pension funds, and insurance companies (sources of funds); of start-up, later stages, or MBO investments; and the percentage of international and syndicated investments. Cluster analyses show that there is a growth pattern, but it is less clear than expected. Characteristics of mature industries are a bigger size, relative to the gross national product of the country, the presence of pension funds and insurance companies as investors in the industry, the syndication of the deals, and the absence of the government as an investor, in the 1980s, investments in management buy-outs are mainly done by the mature industries. No pattern can be distinguished for the investments in early or later stages.The major implication from this study is the fact that the European venture capital industry cannot be approached as a single, undifferentiated industry. Each country has its own structures, institutions, and policies, which make the venture capital industries in the different countries have unique characteristics. Moreover, the European venture capital industry has different characteristics than the American industry; this has to be taken into account when comparing both industries.     

Steven Deyle. Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life

Steven Deyle’s Carry Me Back demolishes the myths of thedomestic slave trade, replacing images of scheming manstealerswith a comprehensive, yet lucid, account of the human traffic.It does even more than this, however. Its subtitle promisesto discuss the role of the domestic slave trade "in Americanlife," and on this the book fully delivers. The first three chapters of Carry Me Back offer a broad narrativeof the rise and demise of the domestic trade. Deyle argues thatthe trade arose in the years following the American     

Paul Mason Fotsch. Watching the Traffic Go By: Transportation and Isolation in Urban America

In this well-meaning but deeply flawed book, Paul Mason Fotschexamines what he calls "narratives that promote a reliance onthe automobile."(2) Fotsch's Watching the Traffic Go By examinesa series of different events, times, and ideas that he claimshave had a hegemonic power in American popular culture. Thisbook draws on the disciplines of cultural studies and history,and closely reads various books, movies, and events. It movesbetween exploring transport systems (particularly the     

我国城镇基本养老保险个人账户定位剖析

我国基本养老保险个人账户资金规模要适度,由劳动与社会保障部统一管理。为提高职工缴费的积极性,关键在于提高个人账户的收益率,实现有效保值增值。我国基本养老保险个人账户的"空账"实质是以不明晰的债权形式存在。当前所讨论的"做实"个人账户,实质是个人账户资产存在形式的转换。对于历史"空账",不应该立即"做实",而应比较机会成本与效益,逐步"做实"。而对于新缴纳的个人账户资金,则应明晰产权,不能随便挪用,但当统筹基金不足时,可以有偿使用。个人账户待遇以自身平衡为原则。     

Dualit?t aus gesetzlicher und privater Krankenversicherung überholt?

The present division between statutory and private health insurance in Germany (GKV and PKV) is hard to justify. If it is the goal to include the whole population in the GKV eventually, one author states that the only legal way is to change its financing from wage-based contributions to a per-capita amount, which would generally reduce incentives to join the PKV. Possible reform alternatives for the financing of health insurance are analysed by another article according to the following principal questions: Are they able to raise sufficient funds and allocate them efficiently? How does that affect employment and distributive justice? These questions can be used to benchmark various insurance models, i.e. citizens insurance, citizens private insurance and premium models. Another article focuses on a non-profit private legal framework, e.g. a co-operative or a limited society.