Graeme J. Milne. North-East England, 1850-1914: The Dynamics of a Maritime-Industrial Region

Graeme J. Milne has written a wide ranging study of the maritimeindustrial heartland of north-eastern England. North East Englandis a work that should be of interest of scholars working wellbeyond the shores of British maritime history. Indeed, usefulparallels could be drawn between the North East of England andthe American automotive heartland. The author's geographic focus runs from the southern limitsof urban Teeside to the northern edge of the Northumberlandcoalfield, and from the North     

Hermann-J. Rupieper, Friederike Sattler and Georg Wagner-Kyora, eds. Die mitteldeutsche Chemieindustrie und ihre Arbeiter im 20. Jahrhundert

This collection of fifteen articles is based on the proceedingsof a November 2003 conference held by the Martin-Luther Universitätin Mitteldeutschland, or Central Germany. Most people tend toforget that the area of Mitteldeutschland in the former easternGermany (German Democratic Republic or GDR), that is the areaaround Halle, Dessau, Leipzig, and Jena, was traditionally oneof the centers of German intellectual and economic life. MartinLuther posted his 95 Theses at a Wittenberg church. It was hometo such firms as the original     

Peter H. Spitz, ed. The Chemical Industry at the Millennium: Maturity, Restructuring, and Globalization. Philadelphia, Pa.: Chemical Heritage Foundation, 2003. x + 387 pp. ISBN 0-941901-34-3, $45.00 (cloth).

Peter Spitz’s new book is a continuation of his earlierwork, Petrochemicals: The Rise of an Industry (1988), whichdetailed the development of the modern chemical industry beginningin the 1930s. The Chemical Industry at the Millennium picksup the story at the end of the 1970s and examines the momentouschanges that have taken place in the last twenty-five years.Subtitled Maturity, Restructuring, and Globalization, this isan excellent collection of essays by industry     

Steven F. Wilson. Learning on the Job: When Business Takes on Public Schools

Plagued by failures, the corporate educational movement wasnearly consumed by the flames after the dot-com stock crash.Out of the ashes, however, now comes a remarkable book by StevenF. Wilson. Readers are treated to a most unusual set of meaculpas involving corporate excesses and mistakes. Yet, Wilsondoes not perform any last-rites, but rather joins contritionwith frank suggestions to reposition a new generation of educationmanagement organizations (EMOs) for the coming day when No ChildLeft Behind mandates that     

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     

Leslie Berlin. The Man behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. xi + 402 pp. ISBN 0-19-516343-5, $30.00.

The last few years have seen a number of books on the rise ofSilicon Valley. Martin Kenney’s Understanding SiliconValley (2000), Ross Bassett’s To the Digital Age (2002),Frederick Terman at Stanford by C. Stewart Gillmor (2004), andmy own book on Making Silicon Valley (2006) are notable examples.Another addition to this literature is The Man behind the Microchip:Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley by     

John Storey, ed. The Management of Innovation. 2 vols. Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2004. xxxi + 734 pp. (vol. 1); ix + 570 pp. (vol. 2). ISBN 1-84376-429-6, $495.00 (cloth).

Edited by John Storey of Open University Business School inthe United Kingdom, The Management of Innovation (MoI) consistsof fifty-three of the most important social science works onorganizational and technological innovation. Predominantly journalarticles with some book chapters, the contents of the twin volumesare organized into nine sections that, as Storey says in hisintroduction, shift from overviews and general issues to morenarrowly focused topics. In the former category are three sections:Theoretical Perspectives and Overviews; National Systems, Diffusionand Historic Trajectories; and Business Strategy, Entrepreneurshipand Innovation. In the latter category are the remaining sixsections: Technology Strategy and New Product Development; Barriersand Enablers; Managing Innovation through     

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     

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’;     

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     

C. L. Bragg, Charles D. Ross, Gordon A. Blaker, Stephanie A. T. Jacobe, and Theodore P. Savas. Never for Want of Powder: The Confederate Powder Works in Augusta, Georgia

Never for Want of Powder is a lavishly illustrated history ofthe Confederate gunpowder factory in Augusta, Georgia that operatedbetween 1862 and 1865 and furnished the South's armies withover three million pounds of explosives. Published with supportfrom the Watson-Brown Foundation, Inc., of Thomson, Georgia,the book describes how Colonel George Washington Rains, an engineerand West Point graduate, built a successful munitions factoryin an agricultural region dominated by a plantation economy.     

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     

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     

Carl A. Zimring. Cash for Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. xi + 220 pp. ISBN 0-8135-3686-3, $39.95.

Paul Revere rode to Concord on a horse shod with shoes re-forgedfrom scrap iron. New York City’s Mayor, Michael Bloomberg,misstepped when he decided that residents would sort only thoserecyclables that actually had a market, rather than the beveragecontainers that went straight to the landfill. During the intervening226 years, Americans recycled for reasons of economy, and ontothat base we recently have grafted a goal of recycling to promoteenvironmental quality. Carl Zimring’s Cash For Your Trashlinks     

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,     

John Franch. Robber Baron: The Life of Charles Tyson Yerkes. Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2006. vii + 374 pp. ISBN 0-252-03099-0, $45.00 (paper).

Robber Baron, John Franch’s biography of Charles TysonYerkes, provides a fascinating window into the workings of laissez-fairecapitalism. Yerkes, one of the most notorious self-made menof nineteenth-century America, embodied the drive, avarice,and unscrupulousness of his age—taking each to its limits.Robber Baron is an academic work that should appeal to a wideraudience. Yerkes’s dealings are fascinating: the samemen did business with him time after time as they tried to getthe     

Fred Turner. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism

The Whole Earth Catalog provided the commune-dwellers of the1960s with a forum in which to discuss tools and systems forbuilding alternative life styles. From Counterculture to Cybercultureexplains why and how the Catalog's perspective on tools andsystems became a dominant paradigm for information networksand the technology industry. Using archival material and hisown interviews with many key figures, Fred Turner has writtenan engrossing and in-depth account of the role the Catalog andits founder, Stewart Brand, played     

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     

Jarol B. Manheim. Biz-War and the Out-of-Power Elite: The Progressive-Left Attack on the Corporation. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004. xii + 216 pp. ISBN 0-8058-5068-6, $34.50 (cloth).

Over the past ten years a large, diverse, and increasingly sophisticatedliterature has emerged to explain the decline—indeed thedeath—of liberalism and the rise of the New Right to politicaldominance. Jarol Manheim argues that the death knell for liberalismand the left has been rung too soon. While conservatism currentlyis the dominant American ideology, Biz-War contends that itfaces a real threat from a reinvigorated left now known by anew, less pejorative name, the Progressive movement. Manheim’s