Autocratic tensions,cronyism, and the opacity of business information: party newspapers and circulation figures during the Francoist dictatorship (1939–1975)

Autocracies draw their political power from cronyism and organized repression. The opacity of business information (economic censorship) protects these regimes and their crony firms from any opposition. However, autocracies might also desire to eliminate cronyism (and therefore opacity) because it dampens economic growth. Autocracies survive through repression that engenders tensions, as evident in the Spanish newspaper industry during the Francoist dictatorship. State control over this industry was important because the press disseminated news to the public. From 1939 to 1957, the autocracy institutionalized both cronyism and the opacity of circulation figures to sustain the political powers of Franco and the single party state. Opacity concealed the economic performance of newspapers owned by sole legal party and any distribution of resources in its favor. Franco authorized voluntary disclosure of reliable circulation figures in 1964, after eliminating cronyism in favor of a freer market. Repression guaranteed support for this industry until Franco's death.     

Marketing Gum, Making Meanings: Wrigley in North America, 1890-1930

This essay is a business and cultural history of Wrigley marketingin North America from the 1890s until the early 1930s. Wrigleyrelied on wholesalers at a time when consumer goods makers wereexpanding their sales forces. A prolific advertiser, Wrigleyprovided favorable terms to retailers carrying chewing gum,countering the view that advertising, by enabling direct communicationbetween manufacturer and consumer, diminished retailer cloutin the chain of distribution. Wrigley advertising constructedmeanings on multiple levels, discussed here with the theoreticaltools of liminality and semiotics. The text of Wrigley ads championedrelief for two modern conditions: indigestion and stress. Theimagery, mainly that of the liminal "Spearman," evoked notionsof unworldly escape and infantile nostalgia. The ads were richlypolysemic. Accordingly, Wrigley's widespread popularity andmarket dominance by 1930 should be assessed in terms of bothmarketing function and representational process.     

The Colombian Stock Market: 1930-1998

Abstract

This article studies the behavior of the stock market in Colombia with the information given by the Bolsa de Bogota Index (Indice de la Bolsa de Bogota, IBB). The index is analyzed from January, 1930 to December, 1998. The inflation rate covers the same period; the inflation rate as measured by the Consumer Price Index. The results of this analysis show that monthly and per annum return-nominal and real-are well below from the expected return of any financial investor. A first hypothesis to explain this is that the investor and entrepreneurs receive benefits that are non-measurable in terms of economic return. Also it can be said that inflation is negative to the return at the stock market, thus: the larger the inflation rate, the smaller the real return. It is shown that the market does not anticipate the future inflation, and of course it is not included in the actual price. Probabilities for selected real return values are presented. The probability to obtain a real return greater than 0% and other values (5%, 10%, 12% and 18%) as well, is much less than 50%. This might show that investing at the stock market is just gambling.     

The German Octopus: The British Metal Corporation and the Next War, 1914-1939

After World War I, the nonferrous metals trade played a criticalrole in Britain's preparations for a future European war. Yetit has attracted little attention. The British Metal Corporation(BMC) was formed at the end of the Great War as a state-sponsoredcorporation to conduct the development of the nonferrous metalsindustry on behalf of the British state. This article uses thepapers of the BMC to explore the politics of a strategicallyvital trade, the functioning of the British state's institutionalmemory, and the role of business in appeasement and rearmament.It concludes that the state-sponsored corporation was, on balance,an effective strategic instrument. Although politics, trade,and strategy proved difficult to reconcile with one another,the pursuit of profit did not dictate business attitudes towardNazi Germany in the 1930s.     

Robert M. Fogelson. Bourgeois Nightmares: Suburbia, 1870-1930

Bouregois Nightmares is a useful supplement to Robert Fishman'sBourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (1987) andKenneth Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization ofthe United States (1985). It examines the rise and continueduse of restrictive covenants for suburban land development inthe 60 years between 1870 and 1930. Restrictive covenants werenot new in 1870, but they did not become common until the turnof the century The intellectual father, if not the originator     

Multiples of Six: The Six Companies and West Coast Industrialization, 1930-1945

In this article I explore the protean organizational forms usedby the Kaiser and Bechtel construction companies between 1930and 1950. Kaiser and Bechtel prospered during the Depressionand World War II because, as members of the Six Companies consortiumof construction firms, they refused to adopt a "best practice"model of corporate organization drawn from the diversified manufacturingand distribution sectors. Instead, Kaiser and Bechtel used avariety of organizational forms to win numerous government contractsfor public works and defense production, transforming themselvesfrom small regional firms into substantial national and globalcorporations. I contribute to modern academic debate over thehistorical forms of business enterprise and the conjunctionof state consumption and private production.     

Competition, Collusion, and Confusion: The State and the Reorganization of the British Cotton Industry, 1931-1939

British industrial policy in the 1930s has generated considerablehistorical controversy. This article furthers the debate byusing the cotton industry as a case study. The biggest constrainton active government policies toward cotton was not institutionalinertia or "industrial diplomacy," as some historians claim,but the sheer practical difficulty of intervening in such acomplex industry. Cotton also poses problems for historianswho see British industrial policy in the 1930s as largely aboutrestraining competition. The government feared that restrictionwould make matters worse in the cotton industry and was thereforehesitant about backing schemes designed to limit competition.Its dilemma was how best to maintain private-sector confidence.     

Marketing Diversity: The Making of a Global Consumer Product--Hohner's Harmonicas, 1857-1930

Unlike most nineteenth-century makers of traditional musicalinstruments, who did not aim at mass markets, German harmonicamanufacturers were able to develop a large and worldwide marketfor their product. Located in regions outside Germany's industrialcore districts, they epitomized successful specialty production.From the beginning, they relied on exports, especially to NorthAmerica, a trade that was initially assisted by transatlanticemigrants who helped test market potential and tap into commercialnetworks. Hohner, the most successful harmonica manufacturer,created a wellknown brand and extensively applied strategiesof market segmentation and product differentiation from the1890s onward, in part to satisfy customers' demand for myriadproduct variations. Sales channels and marketing methods alsowere far from homogeneous, being most effective when adaptedto local conditions and cultures. For harmonica makers, diversityrather than uniformity was the key to global marketing success.     

Cynthia Lee Henthorn. From Submarines to Suburbs: Selling a Better America, 1939-1959

Cynthia Henthorn has written a thoughtful, wide-ranging analysisof commercial propaganda and its meaning in mid-twentieth centuryAmerica. Demonstrating that wartime marketing strategies promoted"better living" after the war, she argues that commercial messagesabout technology and management were tied to human engineering,promising a socially hygienic future for all Americans. The author begins with a retelling of the 1959 "kitchen debate,"when U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon argued with Soviet PremierNikita Khrushchev about     

Manly Boys and Enterprising Dreamers: Business Ideology and the Construction of the Boy Consumer, 1910-1930

Early twentieth-century advertising discourses on the archetypalboy consumer promoted a masculinized ideal of consumption thatbroke decisively from the stereotype of the emotion-driven femaleshopper. Boys were lauded as rational, informed buyers who prizedtechnological innovation and influenced parents and peers. Whiletouting boys'ample consume appetites, promoters of the boy consumealso depicted boys'interest in advertised goods as worthy ofentrepreneurial-minded self-improvers. The ideal of the boyconsumer thus harmonized the potentially hedonistic ethos ofconsumerism with older ideals of productivity and industriousness.Newideologies of manhood that valorized enthusiasm, loyalty,and salesmanship confirmed the boy consumer's manly vitality.     

Dwayne R. Winseck and Robert M. Pike. Communication and Empire: Media, Markets, and Globalization, 1860-1930

Dwayne Winseck and Robert Pike present a wide-ranging studyof communications technologies, global media, and the growthof international cable and wireless telecommunications providersin Communication and Empire: Media, Markets, and Globalization,1860–1930. Over the course of ten chapters, Winseck, aprofessor of media studies at Carleton College, and Pike, ProfessorEmeritus of Sociology at Queen's University, uncover the complexorigins of the international telecommunications industry inthe mid-nineteenth century, and explore its growing influenceover commerce, information     

Stuck on gold: Real exchange rate volatility and the rise and fall of the gold standard, 1875-1939

Did the gold standard diminish macroeconomic volatility? Supporters thought so, critics thought not, and theory offers ambiguous messages. Hard regimes like the gold standard limit monetary shocks by tying policymakers' hands; but exchange-rate inflexibility compromises shock absorption in a world of real disturbances and nominal stickiness. A model shows how lack of flexibility affects the transmission of terms-of-trade shocks. Evidence from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century exposes a dramatic change. The classical gold standard did absorb shocks, but the interwar gold standard did not, supporting the view that the interwar gold standard was a poor regime choice.     

Informal Financial Service Institutions for Survival: African Women and Stokvels in Urban South Africa, 1930-1998

Traditional kinship relations denied African women access toproperty and cash income. As they moved out of the traditionalsector to urban centers, women created opportunities for independentearnings, and they displayed remarkable entrepreneurial spiritin undertaking informal economic activities. One of their tacticswas the utilization of a type of rotating credit and savingsorganization (ROSCA), the stokvel, to mobilize savings outsidethe formal financial structure. This article brings togetherscattered research on stokvels, traces their past and presentuses by African women, and concludes with an exploration ofthe reasons for the persistence of these forms despite the developmentof sophisticated financial structures in modern South Africa.     

Anne Clendinning. Demons of Domesticity: Women and the English Gas Industry, 1889-1939. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004. xvii + 352 pp. ISBN 0-7546-0692-9, $109.95 (cloth).

This book examines the role of women, both as employees andas consumers, in the English gas industry in the fifty yearsbetween the 1880s and the eve of the Second World War. By thelate nineteenth century, the gas industry was well establishedthroughout England, using coal as its main raw material andwith the provision of lighting as its main market. The historicalliterature on the     

Martin J. Iversen. GN Store Nord. A Company in Transition, 1939-1988

The history of the Great Northern Telegraph Company (GN), asa born multinational enterprise, an exception in Danish businesshistory, starts in 1869. International telegraphy had been itscore business for seventy years when the board of the companyin 1939, "made a historical decision" (p. 9) and supplementedtelegraphy activities by investments in the manufacturing industry.Although the year 1988     

"Rosie the Realtor" and the Re-Gendering of Real Estate Brokerage, 1930-1960

Rapidly increasing numbers of women entered the field of realestate brokerage from the 1930s through the 1950s. "Rosie theRealtor" took advantage of the postwar building boom to createan expanding career niche, capturing residential brokerage asa female domain. In the process, she stretched gendered boundariesin the masculine world of brokerage to the breaking point. Employinga complex and internally antagonistic mix of liberal feministand conservative ideologies, female realtors created their ownprofessional space, expanding career opportunities for womenat the same time that their economic and political practicesreinforced the constraints of domesticity.     

Larry G. Gerber. The Irony of State Intervention: American Industrial Relations Policy in Comparative Perspective, 1914-1939. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005. viii + 212 pp. ISBN 0-87580-347-4, $40.00.

This is a most interesting comparative study of labor relationsin the United States and Britain across the divide of WorldWar I and encompassing the whole of the interwar period. A concludingchapter provides retrospective insights derived from post-1945experience in both countries. The author’s central concernis to resolve the paradox of the long-established American commitmentto small government ("antistatism")     

Richard J. Orsi. Sunset Limited: The Southern Pacific Railroad and the Development of the American West, 1850-1930. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. xxii + 615 pp. ISBN 0-520-20019-5, $29.95.

This richly detailed labor of love by Richard J. Orsi attempts"a new approach to an important theme in the history of theAmerican Far West: the complex impact of a large, powerful businesscorporation on the process of settlement, economic development,and environmental change in a frontier region" (p. xiii). Itpays scant attention to traditional corporate history, withits emphasis on leaders, interline relations, politics, regulation,labor, freight, and passenger matters. Orsi dispatches