British overseas investment was a powerful force behind rapid global integration before World War I. Close to half of the total was in the form of foreign direct investment. Weetman Pearson was among the most successful of Britain's overseas-based entrepreneurs of the period. By 1919, the...

The entrepreneurial activity of Enrico Mattei, who headed the Italian state oil company AGIP (later ENI) from 1945 to 1962, laid the groundwork for the company's growth during the 1950s and 1960s. Mattei relied on a group of knowledgeable specialists, who were equipped with a complex set of...

The intricate interplay among environmental pressure groups, oil companies, and governments is revealed from the perspective of the Anglo-Dutch company Royal Dutch Shell. An examination of three environmental issues demonstrates the company's awareness of such problems and describes its efforts...

This issue brings together five articles on the modern petroleum industry. Two cover the growth of the industry in the early twentieth century: Michael Adamson's study of the development by independent oilman Ralph Lloyd of California's coastal oil region; and the study by Lisa Bud-Frierman,...

The automobile industry was a leader in Germany's economic recovery after World War II. In the 1950s and 1960s, carmakers found a ready market for their products as mass motorization created a manufacturing backlog. But, by the 1970s, rapid changes in sales and the arrival of new competitors in...

Ethnographic methods are applied to this investigation of the links between language and business culture found in letters exchanged in the 1880s, 1900s, 1930s, and 1940s among members of a long-lived family-owned business. The letters are contained in three sets of correspondence between three...

The introduction of comparative product testing in Germany reflected the rise of a mass consumer society within a rapidly changing market economy. The first proposal to establish a federally supported institute for product testing was made in 1957. Proponents wished to reduce the asymmetries of...

The management scholar Henry Mintzberg has situated company strategies on a continuum that ranges from those that are the result of deliberate internal decisions, on one extreme, to those that emerge largely as a response to external pressures, on the other. This framework is applied to the...

There has been considerable and ongoing debate about the performance of the British economy since 1945. Empirical studies have concentrated on aggregate or industry level indicators. Few have examined individual firms' financial performance. This study takes a sample of c.3000 firms in 19...

This clinical paper analyzes which fraction of Deutsche Bank's market value of equity during the decade of 1990 to 1999 can be attributed to its portfolio of industrial shareholdings. The residuum then serves as a proxy for the valuation of its universal banking business. A new method for this...