This article provides a critical examination of the way in which Britain's trading firms coped with radical changes in local business conditions. Recent work by Jones has shown that a small number of such companies successfully 'reinvented' themselves in the post-war period. Using evidence drawn...

This article traces the development of BAT's cigarette distribution network in China. It demonstrates that BAT utilised the connections that expatriate managing agencies had developed with Chinese merchants in the treaty port economy of Shangai during the late nineteenth century, and shows how...

The prosecution and imprisonment of Lord Kylsant in 1931, following the collapse of the Royal Mail Shipping Group, has long been acknowledged as a landmark event in the history of financial accounting. Far less attention has been given to the equally high profile conviction and imprisonment of...

This paper analyses inter-organizational networks that link together firms operating in the food processing and distribution industry in the UK. In doing so, the paper draws on insights recently developed by Mark Casson that treat inter-firm networks as an institutional response to the changing...

We present an historic industry study of the consolidation of the UK alcoholic beverages firms to inform debates in organisation studies relating to co-evolution and the dynamics of internationalisation. We distinguish behavioural and structural co-evolutionary factors in firms’ strategic...

This paper highlights the management of subcontracted networks as alternatives to internalisation. The contrasting examples of the UK frozen food and chilled ready meals sectors are examined to understand different nature of economic relationships in these sectors. The paper examines the shift...