Between around 1885 and 1920 the handling of mineral bulk cargo in the port of Rotterdam was mechanised by a series of innovations. During this process, the identity of the main innovators shifted from the local government and integrated or integrating trading and transport firms to stand-alone...

The tendency to cut out middlemen (disintermediation) is a common theme in the literature. This article focuses on the functions performed by middlemen for buyers and sellers. If there are large gaps between the conditions of supply and demand, uncertainty for buyers and sellers is relatively...

This article tests Alfred Chandler's thesis that the managerial revolution, that is, the building of managerial hierarchies, clustered in a selected set of industries where the need for co-ordination was particularly high. These fast-growing, capital-intensive, and high-volume producing...

During the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the port of Rotterdam experienced very strong growth. Changing views and concrete experiences induced the port to widen the initially limited circle of regular users of berths. We study this case in order to increase our understanding of the...

To counterbalance the proliferation of studies on the emergence of new organizational categories, this study asked how organizational categories disappear. In a historical case study of vemen in Rotterdam warehousing, specific mechanisms contributing to the demise of that category are...