Purpose – The purpose of this article is to describe the life and contributions to the marketing discipline of Theodore N. Beckman whose academic career at the Ohio State University spanned some 50 years. Design/methodology/approach – This research used traditional historical interpretation...

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to present a biographical sketch of Lee C. Nehrt, who, in 1962, became the first person to obtain a PhD in International Business. Design/methodology/approach – This study is mainly based on an in‐depth interview of Lee Nehrt followed up by several...

Purpose – During the 1920s and into the 1930s, German‐language work on consumer behavior led the world; for example, segmentation was clearly discussed from the late 1920s. The purpose of this paper is to show how marketing thought in Germany and Austria reached a peak even as the...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify the development of the 4Ps idea from the 1910s to the 1940s in the USA and explore its historical background. Design/methodology/approach – The historical consideration of the precedents for the 4Ps idea is not only focused just on the idea,...

Purpose – Brand heritage is an emerging concept within the marketing discipline, which suggests that the historical status of older companies is often explicitly linked to their brand identity and consumer appeal. The aim of this paper is to illustrate and validate this concept....

Television became a possible medium for advertising in the late 1930s but its emergence as a major medium dates from 1947. Arguments about the likely effectiveness of television as a source of entertainment attracting large numbers of viewers were coloured by fears of responses to ill‐devised...

Purpose – Corporations and businesses have been a major influence on society since before the industrial revolution, but academic focus on corporate responsibilities is a recent phenomenon which focuses predominantly on globalised multi-national corporations of the late twentieth century. The...

Purpose – This paper seeks to examine why and how M&A activity has been used by UK hotel companies over a 26‐year period and aims to provide a preliminary exploration of its relative success, given that the M&A literature suggests high failure rates or M&A transactions which do not achieve...

Attempts to contextualize the current high level of interest in business process re‐engineering (BPR) in UK business and industry. Reviews a number of surveys of UK business involvement with BPR and suggests long‐term secular trends in the business environment of Western firms that seem...

Accounting for organizational history is essential to any change process. We argue, however, that the intentional revision of that history also can be important. We treat history as malleable, because events and actions from the past are susceptible to reinterpretation as organizations try to...