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.     

Global Knowledge Transfer and Telecommunications: The Bell System in Japan, 1945-1952

This study evaluates the Bell System's role in the revival ofJapanese telecommunications during the post-World War II occupation.Civilian and military personnel who had worked for the firmand who served in the Civil Communications Service (CCS) ofthe Supreme Command Allied Powers represented the primary agentsfor knowledge transfer to Japan's Ministry of Communications(MOC) and its supporting independent equipment manufacturers.The MOC became a channel for communicating ideas about managementpractices at the Bell System to the local telecommunicationsindustry. The CCS's actions in Japan represent what Alfred D.Chandler has termed the "integrated learning base" in actionin the public sector. The CCS's role in knowledge transfer hasbeen underestimated by many scholars who have focused primarilyon its contributions to promoting production and quality engineeringin telecommunications manufacturing. Its central achievementwas laying the managerial groundwork for the establishment in1952 of the governmental enterprise Nippon Telegraph and Telephone.     

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.     

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.     

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     

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     

Konrad H. Jarausch. After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945-1995

Konrad Jarausch has undertaken the ambitious project of describingthe transformation of Germany from a nationalistic society capableof horrific crimes to a civilized society that respects humanrights. The author contends that Germany changed over decadesthrough a collective learning process initially spearheadedby a minority of anti-Fascist Germans as well as by the UnitedStates and the Soviet Union. By analyzing the development ofpublic discourse and individual experiences since World WarII, the book seeks to show     

绿色安康生态旅游产业化的新思考

安康生态旅游具有独特的条件,即中国自然“国心”之地;四通八达的铁路中枢点:丰富的生态资源,对安康兴起的旅游产业进行分析,提出安康生态旅游发展的新思路:突出安康的独特旅游资源,使安康在大区域旅游中占据一席之地;选好旅游精品项目,打响旅游品牌;加强旅游宣传,积极开拓游客市场。     

Innovation and Corporate Failure: Cyril Lord in U.K. Textiles, 1945-1968

This article is a response to Patrick Fridenson’s callfor more research into the life cycle of enterprises and especiallyinto business failure. Its subject is the textile group establishedin 1945 by Cyril Lord, which went on to encompass merchanting,manufacturing, retailing, and finance, operating in the UnitedKingdom, the United States, and South Africa. Using unpublishedrecords as well as the financial and trade press, the articleexplains the nature of Lord’s financial, mercantile, andmanufacturing networks, and his rapid growth, based on productinnovation, novel sales techniques, and massive advertising.The article then examines his subsequent insolvency and receivershipin 1968. It contributes to our understanding of corporate failureand the role of the receiver, financial institutions, and governmentin that process.     

The British house magazine 1945 to 2015: The creation of family,organisation and markets

Abstract

This article examines the history of British house magazines from 1945 to 2015. It discusses their content, audience and function within companies. From tools of internal public relations, house magazines switched to being used as mediums of industrial relations in the 1960s and 1970s, and by the late 1980s were increasingly applied to the creation of corporate identity, organisational culture and internal marketing. They were also forced to accommodate the rise of internal communications and electronic media. The article discusses the rise and relative decline of the British house magazine, and ends by asking whether it has a future.     

海峡西岸经济区港口物流网络体系的构建

本文认为,当前港口成为福建物流的中心节点,港口物流是实现海峡西岸经济区发展要素整合、协调和优化的重要途径,构筑适应经济社会发展需求的港口物流网络体系对加快海峡西岸经济区建设具有十分重要的现实意义。文章采用模糊聚类方法对福建省沿海主要港口进行了宏观规划层次分析,根据各个港口与城市的关系、港口特征,将福州港和厦门港定位为主枢纽港(第一层次),泉州港和湄洲湾港定位为地区性重要港口(第二层次),漳州港和宁德港定位为地方性中小港口(第三层次),构建了一个以主枢纽港为骨干,区域性重要港口为辅助,地方中小港口为补充的层次分明的海峡西岸经济区港口物流网络体系。     

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.