Franco Amatori and Geoffrey Jones, eds. Business History around the World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xv + 425 pp. ISBN 0-521-82107-X, $65.00.

This important cluster of perspectives on practice and prospectin business history derives from a fall 1998 colloquium heldat Bocconi University in Milan, sponsored jointly by the Institutefor Economic History, the Italian Association of Business Historians(ASSI), Reading University, and Johns Hopkins University. Thecollection echoes its support team’s transnational diversity,presenting an opening set of conceptualizing essays, elevenconcise national/regional overviews, and four closing chaptersthat identify themes for comparative business history. Botha snapshot of the discipline’s preoccupations in the late1990s and a handbook of historiography and work then in progress,Business History around the World is a volume every referencelibrary should own. For practicing historians and graduate students,in my view, parts one and     

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     

Gordon Boyce. Over Half a Million Careful Owners: A 75-year history of PSIS, 1928-2003. Wellington, NZ: Dunmore Publishing, 2005. 326 pp. ISBN 0-476-0129-29, NZ$29.95 (paper).

Gordon Boyce traces the history of New Zealand’s PSIS,the Public Service Investment Society, in a book commissionedby the company. Boyce, now Professor of International Businessat Queensland University of Technology after thirteen yearsof teaching business and economic history at Victoria Universityof Wellington, is well qualified for the project. His recentpublications include Co-operative Structures in Global Business(2002). Boyce fulfills his commission well, narrating an engagingstory. "Vignettes" provide personal and anecdotal details thatformer staff     

Arthur L. Norberg. Computers and Commerce: A Study of Technology and Management at Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company, Engineering Research Associates, and Remington Rand, 1946-1957. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005. x + 347 pp. ISBN 0-262-14090-X, $40.00 (cloth).

Arthur Norberg’s Computers and Commerce is a much-neededstudy of the technical and business history of the Eckert-MauchlyComputer Corporation (EMCC) and Engineering Research Associates(ERA). Although there have been many historical studies aboutIBM, there have been relatively few accounts describing thefirm’s primary competitors or of the early formation ofthe industry. Norberg’s study offers valuable insightsinto the latter by providing a detailed history of the technicaldecisions and financial strategies of the two entrepreneurialfirms that     

Business ethics in Italy: The state of the art

Up until now, the work which has been done in Italy might be considered of a preparatory nature. In 1985 and in 1986, the association of Catholic businessmen produced two documents on the ethical implications of economic activity. But in those years, the world of big business, had not yet realised how central the argument was becoming.The first significant signs of interest for business ethics appeared in 1987. In June, 1988, the first Italian National Conference on Business Ethics took place in Milan. The main outcome of that conference has been the constitution of the Italian Chapter of the European Network. In 1988, I founded the first issue of the journal entitled Etica degli-Affari. Promotional efforts have developped along two lines. The first regards programs of executive training and, eventually, consulting. In the second place, efforts are being made to elaborate and introduce codes of ethics in Italian corporations. There are, however, some very fundamental difficulties involved in the promotion of Business Ethics in Italy. The first problem is the fact that Italy is a country with a low ethical temperature. We don't have a strong sense of national identity, nor do we have a strong sense of the state. The second difficulty has to do with the business environment — the Italian business community itself. As a self-conscious, self-aware nucleus of a sector of society, the Italian business community is a very recent, and rather minoritarian social phenomenon.I personally feel that a certain protagonism on the part of prominent business leaders who are quite sensitive to the theme of ethics would prove to be very influential and greatly accelerate the process.Mario Unnia is managing director of Prospecta, a research firm, Milan, Italy. He has lectured and published extensively in the fields of Business and Public Policy, Corporate Culture and Labour Relations. He has founded and is chairman of the Italian Business Ethics Network. He is editor of Etica degli Affari.     

Edith Sparks. Capital Intentions: Female Proprietors in San Francisco, 1850-1920

The history of business is an ever expanding topic. Numerousbooks on the role of women in modern American business and onwhy women continue to lag behind men in both earning power andbusiness leadership are available. But, few such studies haveplaced the issue of women in business in a historical context.Edith Spark's Capital Intentions: Female Proprietors in SanFrancisco, 1850–1920 is thus both welcome and overdue.Sparks, an assistant professor of history at the University     

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 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     

Marcelo Bucheli. Bananas and Business: The United Fruit Company in Colombia, 1899-2000. New York: New York University Press, 2005. xi + 241 pp. ISBN 0-8147-9934-5, $45.00 (cloth).

The United Fruit Company (UFC) long has been maligned as animperial bastion of American business interests, quick to exploitits workers for a buck and slow to return profits to where itscommodity is extracted. This interpretation came early to Colombiancritics after a 1928 massacre of striking workers left hundreds,maybe thousands, dead. Gabriel Garcia Marquez exaggerated thedetails of this violence for One Hundred Years of Solitude,and few others have believed the company did more     

Charles Loft. Government, the Railways and the Modernization of Britain: Beeching's Last Trains

"This book," writes Charles Loft, "is first and foremost aboutrailway closures ... [It] is not a business history, or an economicstudy" (p.2). What, then, does it have to offer to readers ofEnterprise & Society, who may not expect much of a bookwhich is part of a series on "British Politics and Society"?The simple answer is that it provides much more than the author'smodest opening remarks. By analyzing the political and popularopposition     

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’;     

Lowell J. Satre. Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics, and the Ethics of Business. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005. xi + 308 pp. ISBN 0-8214-1625-1, $55.00 (cloth); 0-8214-1626-X, $24.95 (paper).

Solid scholarly historical studies of overseas businesses inAfrica are rare. Rarer still are studies of this area that dealwith ethics and corporate responsibility without cant or overheatedrhetoric. Lowell J. Satre’s Chocolate on Trial standsout as a nuanced history of the dilemmas of doing business responsiblyin a colonial setting. The paradoxes it describes are similarto what many corporations face today. The book demonstratesthat the     

Large and entangled: Italian business groups in the long run

This article, by using both a qualitative and quantitative approach, focuses on large business groups (BGs) in Italy. It provides a methodology of analysis which aims at re-constructing the boundaries and the relevance of BGs in a national economy in the long-run, identifying a country-specific taxonomy of both their forms and the rationales (logics) for their existence. By adopting an original methodology, that is the network analysis, and by using a large and comprehensive dataset (Imita.db), this article also provides some proxy measures of the relevance of the largest BGs in the Italian economy, something which has never been done before in Italian business history research. The analysis clearly shows the persistence of large and entangled BGs in the Italian economy. It confirms that this particular form of business organisation is neither limited to the less developed countries, nor is simply a second best functional substitute of the multi-divisional form diffused in the liberal market economies. Finally, this article also suggests a research itinerary which can also be fruitfully applied in business history to other specific cases.     

Madeleine Zelin, Jonathan K. Ocko, and Robert Gardella, eds. Contract and Property in Early Modern China. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004. vii + 398 pp. ISBN 0-8047-4639-7, $65.00.

In 1887 the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society—ChinaBranch sponsored a symposium on "Chinese partnerships," in whicha number of eminent China hands such as E. H. Parker and ChalonerAlabaster shared their long experience with the subject. Thediscussants agreed, among other things, that liability for debtsof the firm was enforceable in Chinese courts, that this liabilitywas shared among the partners according to their contractuallydetermined shares in the business, and that a contractuallydesignated "managing partner" normally     

“Made in Italy”: The Italian Contribution to the Development of Business Marketing Discipline and Practices

Purpose: The authors analyze the main contributions of Italian literature in the business-to-business field as it relates to the characteristics of the Italian industrial manufacturing system. Even if not directly labeled as business-to-business marketing, Italian and other scholars who have studied Italian business experiences have largely faced the topic of business marketing management with innovative approaches and distinctive benchmark examples. In particular, the analysis of the Italian contribution to business marketing relies on the specific nature of the Italian industrial structure as recognized by the international literature. In this respect, the authors argue that three main areas of interest progressively arose from the peculiarities of the Italian industrial system: industrial districts, subcontractors/subcontracting relationships, and mid-sized manufacturing companies. These three research topics have been thoroughly investigated by both Italian and international scholars. They analyze the contributions that Italian researchers provided to advance business marketing discipline and practices.

Methodology/approach: The authors reviewed the literature of the main contributions developed in the three individual areas of research that have a strong focus on the Italian experience. The methodology was in three steps. First, the review planning process was guided by the three areas of research that were assumed to have a major contribution to business marketing discipline. Second, the SCOPUS database was used as a primary source for paper identification by using a keywords search method. Third, the dataset was refined by excluding non relevant contributions (not focused on business management and marketing or not specifically dealing with the three areas of interest) and validating/integrating the original dataset by using other complementary sources (e.g., Google Books, Google Scholar). Finally, a set of 268 products were taken into account in the analysis.

Findings: The results of the analysis suggest that the Italian contribution to the field of business marketing is valuable in light of the three chosen areas of research. These three empirical arenas—industrial districts, subcontractors, and mid-sized firms—contribute to providing a better understanding of business market structure and dynamics as well as the improvement of business marketing studies.

Originality/value: The article is an original and first attempt to elaborate and reflect on the contribution of the Italian business experience literature to the advances of business marketing discipline. The authors develop an original comprehensive review of “Made in Italy” business marketing and management research that has not been used in previous studies. The review will increase international knowledge of Italian practices and theoretical frameworks that can contribute to the reinforcement of the business-to-business marketing discipline.     

Scott A. Sandage. Born Losers: A History of Failure in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. x + 362 pp. ISBN 0-674-01510-X, $35.00 (cloth).

Born Losers is a masterpiece that maps the misery of misfitbusiness failures in success-crazed, nineteenth-century America.The narrative sparkles with lively anecdotes, pithy quotes fromfamous people and failures, and Sandage’s own exquisiteprose, which rivals the catchy lines of the ubiquitous successmanuals. Skeptical scholars will find the research provocativebecause Sandage documents the wide range of sources availableto study the "forgotten men" of "the other nineteenth century"(p. 3): "private letters, diaries, business records, bankruptcycases, suicide notes, political     

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,     

Neil Dahlstrom and Jeremy Dahlstrom. The John Deere Story: A Biography of Plowmakers John and Charles Deere. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005. xix + 204 pp. ISBN 0-87580-336-9, $24.00

The John Deere Story is exactly what historian David Vaughtpromises on the jacket: an "informative, fast-paced, and livelynarrative" of the lives of noted plowmakers John and CharlesDeere. Neil and Jeremy Dahlstrom provide an introduction tothe life of John Deere, his plowmaking partnerships, and hisson Charles Deere’s role in managing the business. Theauthors remind readers that John Deere was not the first touse steel in plowmaking and never made such a claim. Instead,     

Diane C. Vecchio. Merchants, Midwives, and Laboring Women: Italian Migrants in Urban America

In Merchants, Midwives, and Laboring Women: Italian Migrantsin Urban America, Diane C. Vecchio takes on "inherent assumptionsabout Italian culture and male control of women as a paradigmfor understanding Italian women's work and wage-earning experiences"(p.2). Instead, she offers a portrait of working women who areagents in the economic fortunes of their families and the culturalpractices of their communities, making decisions about theiremployment based on local economic conditions and a varietyof additional variables: gender segmentation of the workforce,geographical     

Clifford J. Doerksen. American Babel: Rogue Radio Broadcasters of the Jazz Age. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. xi + 157 pp. ISBN 0-8122-3871-0, $34.95 (cloth).

In American Babel: Rogue Broadcasters of the Jazz Age, CliffordDoerksen presents a lively discussion of the economic implicationsof cultural hierarchy on radio broadcasting. In this slim volume,only 176 pages (including footnotes), he tells the stories ofseveral radio pioneers who have been largely ignored in theretellings of the medium’s history. The difficulties inexploring the world of independent broadcasters long has beena lament of radio scholars, and Doerksen’s book represents