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     

Robert M. Collins. Transforming America: Politics and Culture during the Reagan Years

Robert Collins has written two superb books treating modernAmerican business history—The Business Response to Keynes(1981), and More: The Politics of Growth in Postwar America(2000). In this, his most recent and elegantly written book,he takes on the rather more slippery, amorphous cultural historyof the period. He even dives undaunted into that most murkyphenomenon, "postmodernism." There, he has some delightful thingsto say about "the therapeutic culture" and the "self-esteem"fad that it produced. In his treatment     

Walter A. Friedman. Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. 356 pp. ISBN 0-674-01298-4, $27.95.

Given the centrality of selling to the emergence of the modernbusiness corporation, it is surprising that there has been nofull-length study of the subject before. Walter A. Friedman’spathbreaking Birth of a Salesman is a truly welcome attemptto fill this void. While he begins with earlier developmentsin selling techniques, Friedman’s real focus is on theemergence of "modern" selling, when the selling process becamesystematically organized and managed. Friedman maintains thatthis came about in the United States, not in Europe,     

Paul J. Kubicek. Organized Labor in Postcommunist States: From Solidarity to Infirmity. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004. xiv + 256 pp. ISBN 0-8229-5856-2, $29.95 (paper).

Labor unions in formerly communist societies have gone, in justfifteen years, from being large and sometimes very powerfulorganizations—think of Poland’s Solidarity—tobeing much smaller and weaker organizations. In discussing thisweakness, Paul Kubicek notes the irony that workers in communistsocieties "were able to organize to help overthrow a systemthat purportedly ruled in their name. However, they are poorlypoised to do battle against governments and policies that makelittle pretense to serve their interests"     

John E. Murray. Origins of American Health Insurance: A History of Industrial Sickness Funds

John E. Murray's Origins of American Health Insurance concernsa little-known precursor to commercial health insurance, the"industrial sickness funds" of the book's subtitle. This well-researchedbook makes a compelling case for the importance of these fundsin shaping the American health insurance system as we know it.Murray argues that the success of sickness funds during theearly twentieth century helps to explain why European-styleuniversal health insurance does not exist in the United States. In 1915, industrial sickness funds     

"Business Responsibilities in a Divided World": The Cold War Roots of the Corporate Social Responsibility Movement

Both business executives and management scholars have, in recentyears, focused a great deal of attention on the theme of corporatesocial responsibility (CSR). Calls for business leaders to expendresources on behalf of "social good" tend to downplay, if notignore, what is fundamentally an ideological question: justwhat is a "good" society and who defines "goodness"? The ideologicalunderpinnings of social responsibility and its relationshipto the "good" society can be explored through an historicalperspective. The roots of the CSR movement trace back to theearly years of the Cold War. Led by Donald K David, Dean ofthe Harvard Business School and supported by other academicsand executives given voice on the pages of the Harvard BusinessReview, advocates urged expanded business social responsibilityas a means of aligning business interests with the defense offree-market capitalism against what was depicted as the clear-and-presentdanger of Soviet Communism. Today's enthusiastic calls for businessto "do well by doing good" could benefit from a similar criticalanalysis not just of the goals of CSR but also the ideologicalassumptions, often unacknowledged, that underlie those goals.     

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     

Justin Kaplan. When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods and and Hotels in a Gilded Age

Justin Kaplan's When the Astors Owned New York is a probingaccount of how and why the two cousins—William WaldorfAstor and John Jacob Astor IV—spent much of their livesdecorating Manhattan's skyline with grand hotels. Kaplan, aPulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Mark Twain, draws on personalpapers, contemporary press accounts, and various literary worksto locate the Astors in Gilded Age New York high society. TheAstors built hotels not simply to make money, Kaplan contends,but also     

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     

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     

Pioneering Modern Corporate Governance: A View from London in 1900

Around 1900 Britain was exceptionally suited to pioneering largescale enterprises because of the precocious development of itsequity markets and London's experimentation with a more eclecticrange of corporate governance techniques than the world's smallerand less cosmopolitan financial centers. Information dissemination,incentives, and reputation—developed by a serendipitousmix of legal compulsions and flexible voluntarism—setthe scene for the growth of large, UK-based, national and internationalcorporations in the twentieth century. "The investment business is not with us as well developed oras well understood as it is in England." W. H. Lyon, Capitalization (Boston, 1913), 207.     

Frederick H. Smith. Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History

Frederick Smith's early evocation (p. 2) of Sidney Mintz's 1985master-work Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in ModernHistory is most unfortunate because Smith is no Mintz—exceptthat they are both anthropologists. This sad little book suffersby comparison on most every page. In contrast to Mintz, it isnot good social history, it is not good economic history, andit is not good anthropology. More particularly for readers ofEnterprise Society, Caribbean Rum is not good     

H. Roger Grant. "Follow the Flag": A History of the Wabash Railroad Company. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004. xii + 291 pp. ISBN 0-87580-328-8, $49.95 (cloth).

"Follow the Flag" reaffirms Roger Grant’s status as oneof the preeminent historians of transportation in the UnitedStates. The book reflects the predilection of many railroadhistorians to focus on a specific firm, rather than addresslarger thematic issues. Far more than being "just another railroad,"however, the Wabash reflected changes in its political, economic,and social milieu, while also playing a leading role in shapingthe very environment that surrounded it. The Wabash rose from the ashes of an 1830s Illinois internal     

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,     

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     

Marina Moskowitz. Standard of Living: The Measure of the Middle Class in Modern America. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xii + 300 pp. ISBN 0-8018-7947-7, $45.00.

In Standard of Living: The Measure of the Middle Class in ModernAmerica, Marina Moskowitz seeks to elucidate a term that cameinto broad usage at the turn of the twentieth century but seemedto have no clear definition. Sociologists, journalists, novelists,and government officials alike all referred to the "standardof living," yet they did not necessarily agree on just whatthat standard was. Moskowitz argues that the standard of livingwas a measure not of how     

Chandler in a Larger Frame: Markets, Transaction Costs, and Organizational Form in History

In 1977, when Alfred D. Chandler's pathbreaking book The VisibleHand appeared, the large, vertically integrated, "Chandlerian"corporation had dominated the organizational landscape for nearlya century. In some interpretations, possibly including Chandler'sown, The Visible Hand and subsequent works constitute a triumphalistaccount of the rise of that organizational form: the large,vertically integrated firm arose and prospered because of itsinherent 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-likeforms that often resemble some of the "inferior" nineteenth-centurystructures that the managerial enterprise had replaced.     

Youssef Cassis and Ioanna Pepelasis Minoglou, eds. Entrepreneurship in Theory and History

In a paper delivered during the founding of Harvard's ResearchCenter in Entrepreneurial History, Joseph Schumpeter commented,"Personally, I believe that there is an incessant give and takebetween historical and theoretical analysis and that, thoughfor the investigation of individual questions it may be necessaryto sail for a time on one tack only, yet on principle the twoshould never lose sight of each other" [Joseph Schumpeter, "EconomicTheory and Entrepreneurial History," in Change and the Entrepreneur(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949), p. 264]. With thenotable exception of the theoretically inspired work producedat the Research Center in the early 1950s, historians largely     

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