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Books > Humanities > History > History of specific subjects > History of specific institutions
Originally published in 1989 this study examines some new facets in the development of the iron industry in the USA between 1839 and 1921 through the study of an individaul form, namely the Thoms Iron Company, one of the leading merchant furnace companies. It charts the end of the anthracite iron age and the changes which brought about the advent of open-hearth steel and integrated steel works. The book discusses the problems the managers of the firm faced with the appearance of industrial innovations which tended to undermine their firm's very existence and provided a new set of optimal conditions necessary for the survival of the firm. It provides a clear understanding of the destructive forces of industrial innovation and the place of creative entrepreneurship in the survival of the firm.
In 1836, Charles Henry Harrod found himself in a prison hulk awaiting transportation to Tasmania for seven years' hard labour. He had been convicted at the Old Bailey of receiving stolen goods, and this should have been the beginning of the end for his fledgling business and his family. And yet, in miraculously escaping his fate and vowing to turn his back on crime, he would become the much esteemed founder of the now legendary Harrods in London's fashionable Knightsbridge district. Some years later Charles was succeeded by his son, who brought with him the necessary energy and drive to take the shop from a successful local grocer's to a remarkable and complex department store, patronised by the wealthy and famous. Robin Harrod's fascinating family story reveals the previously unknown origins of the store, and follows its remarkable fortunes through family scandal, the devastating fire of 1883 and its subsequent rise from the ashes, to the end of the nineteenth century when its shares were floated on the stock exchange, thus completing one of the most extraordinary comeback stories in the history of commerce.
In the twenty-first century technology has become global, and firms compete using knowledge and capital. The 'traditional firm' has a need for innovation and depends on efficient knowledge management to improve productivity. This book examines five firms that produce the same commodity, white chicken meat, in different parts of the world and under very different conditions. It brings to bear the expertise and international perspectives of the author team, utilizing theoretical discussions and case studies to address the question: How do local firms use knowledge to compete in an increasingly globalized world? This book will be of interest to any postgraduate student, researcher or policymaker hoping to achieve a firmer grasp of innovation and knowledge management: a recurring and highly pertinent theme in contemporary economics.
* Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year * Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize * 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year * A New York Times Notable Book * A Washington Post Notable Book * An NPR Best Book of 2017 * A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2017 * An Economist Best Book of 2017 * A Business Insider Best Book of 2017 * "A gripping story of psychological defeat and resilience" (Bob Woodward, The Washington Post)-an intimate account of the fallout from the closing of a General Motors assembly plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, and a larger story of the hollowing of the American middle class. This is the story of what happens to an industrial town in the American heartland when its main factory shuts down-but it's not the familiar tale. Most observers record the immediate shock of vanished jobs, but few stay around long enough to notice what happens next when a community with a can-do spirit tries to pick itself up. Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Amy Goldstein spent years immersed in Janesville, Wisconsin, where the nation's oldest operating General Motors assembly plant shut down in the midst of the Great Recession. Now, with intelligence, sympathy, and insight into what connects and divides people in an era of economic upheaval, Goldstein shows the consequences of one of America's biggest political issues. Her reporting takes the reader deep into the lives of autoworkers, educators, bankers, politicians, and job re-trainers to show why it's so hard in the twenty-first century to recreate a healthy, prosperous working class. "Moving and magnificently well-researched...Janesville joins a growing family of books about the evisceration of the working class in the United States. What sets it apart is the sophistication of its storytelling and analysis" (Jennifer Senior, The New York Times). "Anyone tempted to generalize about the American working class ought to meet the people in Janesville. The reporting behind this book is extraordinary and the story-a stark, heartbreaking reminder that political ideologies have real consequences-is told with rare sympathy and insight" (Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Soul of a New Machine).
Out of Paypal's ranks have come three billionaires and dozens of multi-millionaires, including household names like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman. Paypal's alumni have built, funded and advised almost all of the billion-dollar-plus companies to emerge from Silicon Valley in the past two decades. Today, every online video you watch and every internet purchase you make bears PayPal's fingerprints -- its inventions made the modern internet possible and are embedded in our social networks, our banks and our intelligence agencies. This book tells the gripping story of how a scrappy start-up became one of the most successful businesses of all time, worth over $70 billion today. Full of fascinating characters and anecdotes about Silicon Valley's biggest titans, The Founders also shows how the so-called PayPal Mafia continue to shape our future today.
From before the dawn of the twentieth century until the arrival of the New Deal, one of the most protracted and deadly labor struggles in American history was waged in West Virginia. On one side were powerful corporations and industrialists whose millions bought political influence and armed guards for their company towns. On the other side were 50,000 mine workers, the nation's largest labor union, and the legendary "miners' angel," Mother Jones. Attempts to unionize were met with stiff resistance. Fundamental rights were bent, then broken, and the violence evolved from bloody skirmishes to open armed conflict. The fight for civil rights and unionization in West Virginia verged on civil war and stretched from the creeks and hollows to the courts and the U.S. Senate. In The Devil Is Here in These Hills, celebrated labor historian James Green tells this story like never before.
Lukens Steel was an extraordinary business that spanned two centuries of American history. The firm rolled the first boiler plate in 1818 and operated the largest rolling mills in America in 1890, 1903, and 1918, Later it worked on the Manhattan Project and built the steel beams for the base of the World Trade Center. The company stayed in the family for 188 years, and they kept the majority of their business papers."The Language of Work" traces the evolution of written forms of communication at Lukens Steel from 1810 to 1925. As standards for iron and steel emerged and industrial processes became more complex, foremen, mechanics, and managers began to use drawing and writing to solve problems, transfer ideas, and develop new technology. This shift in communication methods - from 'prediscursive' (oral) communication to 'chirographic' (written) communication - occurred as technology became more complex and knowledge had to span space and time.This richly illustrated volume begins with a theoretical overview linking technical communication to literature and describing the historical context. The analysis is separated into four time periods: 1810 to 1870, when little writing was used; 1870-1900, when Lukens Steel began to use record keeping to track product from furnace, through production, to the shipping dock; 1900-1915, when written and drawn communication spread throughout the plant and literacy became more common on the factory floor; and 1915-1925, when stenographer typists took over the majority of the written work. Over time, writing - and literacy - became an essential part of the industrial process.
One of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies, the Swiss multinational Novartis traces its history and that of its predecessor companies back to the first dye factories in Basel in the early 19th century. This second edition of the company's history covers early exports and expansion abroad, the unparalleled upsurge of the chemical industry in Basel during the First World War and then the emergence of pharmaceuticals in the interwar years. The enormous challenges of the Second World War were followed by an economic boom in the 1950s and 60s, the merger of CIBA and Geigy, the numerous diversifications in the 1970s and 80s, the merger of Ciba and Sandoz to found Novartis, and finally the first 25 years of Novartis. Those 25 years have included innovations in pharmaceuticals and medicine, and game-changing technologies such as the modification of T-cells. In addition to the running text, fifteen thematic articles outline the company's widely different innovations: from CIBA's early hormone preparations to the outstanding graphic design of Geigy Design, from revolutionary drugs like Sandimmune or Gleevec right through to the Novartis Campus project.
In June 2017, Travis Kalanick, the CEO of Uber, was ousted in a boardroom coup that capped a brutal year for the transportation giant. Uber had catapulted to the top of the tech world, yet for many came to symbolise everything wrong with Silicon Valley. In the tradition of Brad Stone's Everything Store and John Carreyrou's Bad Blood, award-winning investigative reporter Mike Isaac's Super Pumped delivers a gripping account of Uber's rapid rise, its pitched battles with taxi unions and drivers, the company's toxic internal culture and the bare-knuckle tactics it devised to overcome obstacles in its quest for dominance. Based on hundreds of interviews with current and former Uber employees, along with previously unpublished documents, Super Pumped is a page-turning story of ambition and deception, obscene wealth and bad behaviour, that explores how blistering technological and financial innovation culminated in one of the most catastrophic twelve-month periods in American corporate history.
This book provides an authoritative study of interfirm and supplier relationships in leading Japanese industries, which thoroughly disrupts existing cultural stereotypes by pursuing a carefully crafted evolutionary and comparative perspective combined with compelling original research' - Geoffrey Jones, Harvard Business School, USThe goal of this path-breaking volume is to relativize the experience of Japanese industries in terms of both location and time, exploring its similarities and differences with other countries and its unique relationship with the global standard of company performance set by US firms. Yongdo Kim looks beyond organizational principles, overturns stereotypes, and covers a wide range of industries. In particular, this book focuses on the intertwining of the market principle and the organizational principle in interfirm relationships among the steel, machine tool, integrated circuit and liquid-crystal display materials industries, concluding that there is no such thing as 'Japanese uniqueness' in the history of interfirm relationships. This book compares several intermediate product industries within a global context to offer insights into the studies of businesses across the globe. Numerous interviews with key individuals in the Japanese steel, integrated circuit and machine tool industries offer unique and illuminating information. This analysis covers a broad range of firms by examining the relationships within large companies as well as smaller corporations. This fresh and varied analysis is a critical resource for both business practitioners and scholars of business history, business strategy, industrial marketing, product development management, and economic history.
'A fascinating page-turner... An indispensable guide to modern innovation and entrepreneurship.' Walter Isaacson, no. 1 bestselling author of Steve Jobs Perfect for readers of Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance and Zero to One by Peter Theil Out of PayPal's ranks have come household names like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and Reid Hoffman. Since leaving Paypal, they have formed, funded, and advised the leading companies of our era, including Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, SpaceX, Yelp, Palantir, and LinkedIn, among many others. Yet for all their influence, the incredible story of where they started has gone largely untold. In The Founders, award-winning author Jimmy Soni narrates how a once-in-a-generation collaboration turned a scrappy start-up into one of the most successful businesses of all time. Facing bruising competition, internal strife, the emergence of widespread online fraud, and the devastating dot-com bust of the 2000s, their success was anything but certain. But they would go on to change our world forever. Informed by hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to thousands of pages of internal material, The Founders explores how the seeds of so much of what drives the internet today were planted two decades ago.
This important book assembles formative articles that demonstrate how business history emerged as a discipline from the interwar years until the present day. The essays, drawn from authors in the United States, Europe, Asia and Latin America, document the remarkable intellectual achievements of the field, as well as exploring the challenges it faced securing a wider impact on other disciplines. The editors provide a wide-ranging and original introduction. The book will appeal to both social scientists and historians interested to learn how the field of business history was shaped.
First published in 1985, this book is about Imperial Chemical Industries' response to the changing social, political, business and economic environment over the past twenty years. Using personal interviews and archival material, Andrew Pettigrew examines the evolution of business strategy, organisation structure and culture, technology and union-management relations within this corporate giant over an extended period of time. It is a compelling account, told from the inside, by one of the world's leading management and organisation theorists. The Awakening Giant has made a major practical and theoretical contribution to the study of corporate strategy, organisational analysis and change, and business history. Anyone with an interest in managing change in a large corporation will find this reissue rewarding reading.
"Brick by Brick" takes you inside the LEGO you've never seen. By
following the teams that are inventing some of the world's
best-loved toys, it spotlights the company's disciplined approach
to harnessing creativity and recounts one of the most remarkable
business transformations in recent memory.
The United States has been near the forefront of global consumption trends since the 1700s, and for the past century and more, Americans have been the world's foremost consuming people. Informed and inspired by the literature from consumer culture theory, as well as drawing from numerous studies in social and cultural history, A History of American Consumption tells the story of the American consumer experience from the colonial era to the present, in three cultural threads. These threads recount the assignment of meaning to possessions and consumption, the gendered ideology and allocation of consumption roles, and resistance through anti-consumption thought and action. Brief but scholarly, this book provides a thought provoking, introduction to the topic of American consumption history informed by research in consumer culture theory. By examining and explaining the core phenomenon of product consumption and its meaning in the changing lives of Americans over time, it provides a valuable contribution to the literature on the subjects of consumption and its causes and consequences. Readable and insightful, it will be of interest to scholars and advanced students in consumer behaviour, advertising, and marketing and business history.
How chartered company-states spearheaded European expansion and helped create the world's first genuinely global order From Spanish conquistadors to British colonialists, the prevailing story of European empire-building has focused on the rival ambitions of competing states. But as Outsourcing Empire shows, from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, company-states-not sovereign states-drove European expansion, building the world's first genuinely international system. Company-states were hybrid ventures: pioneering multinational trading firms run for profit, with founding charters that granted them sovereign powers of war, peace, and rule. Those like the English and Dutch East India Companies carved out corporate empires in Asia, while other company-states pushed forward European expansion through North America, Africa, and the South Pacific. In this comparative exploration, Andrew Phillips and J. C. Sharman explain the rise and fall of company-states, why some succeeded while others failed, and their role as vanguards of capitalism and imperialism. In dealing with alien civilizations to the East and West, Europeans relied primarily on company-states to mediate geographic and cultural distances in trade and diplomacy. Emerging as improvised solutions to bridge the gap between European rulers' expansive geopolitical ambitions and their scarce means, company-states succeeded best where they could balance the twin imperatives of power and profit. Yet as European states strengthened from the late eighteenth century onward, and a sense of separate public and private spheres grew, the company-states lost their usefulness and legitimacy. Bringing a fresh understanding to the ways cross-cultural relations were handled across the oceans, Outsourcing Empire examines the significance of company-states as key progenitors of the globalized world.
'Early in my research, a friend with excellent knowledge of the United Auto Workers internal operations told me, "Don't give up. They are hiding something"...' It's 1990, and US labour is being outsourced to Mexico. Rumours of a violent confrontation at the Mexican Ford Assembly plant on January 8 reach the United Auto Workers (UAW) union in the US: nine employees had been shot by a group of drunken thugs and gangsters, in an act of political repression which changed the course of Mexican and US workers' rights forever. Rob McKenzie was working at the Ford Twin Cities Assembly plant in Minnesota when he heard of the attack. He didn't believe the official story, and began a years-long investigation to uncover the truth. His findings took him further than he expected - all the way to the doors of the CIA. Virtually unknown outside of Mexico, the full story of 'El Golpe', or 'The Coup', is a dark tale of political intrigue that still resonates today.
The service sector occupies a dominant position in the Japanese economy, yet few studies have looked at the way the industry developed. This book, first published in 1992, focuses on the growth and development of a major world security and communications corporation, SECOM. The success of the company has been rooted in the management strategies of Makoto Iida, who has shaped the company from a small localized business to an international industry at the forefront of innovation. The book first looks at the background of Makoto Iida, offering an insight into the nature of an entrepreneur and the issues this raises within the context of Japanese management styles. It then follows the company development stage by stage, assessing the importance of individual creativity in adapting and implementing traditional management techniques. It shows how strategies for human resources, service quality, new technology, globalization and corporate restructuring evolve within the context of a growing organization, and includes an analysis of the innovative marketing techniques and product development processes needed to sell security services to one of the world's safest countries.
Direct Wines, The Sunday Times Wine Club, Laithwaites or just Wine People. Known by various names over the last 50 years, Laithwaites is now the top wine company in the UK and a leading example of a thriving family business turned empire. In the 1960s young geography student Tony Laithwaite took a job washing wine bottles in Bordeaux and soon fell head-over-heels in love with the wine and the people who make it. After his inspiring time in Bordeaux, he took a van stocked with his favourite French wines back to the UK to share with friends and neighbours at home as part of a small start-up business. He wrote to Harold Evans at the Times to persuade him of the superior quality of his imported wine, and they soon joined forces to set up the hugely successful Sunday Times Wine Club. It wasn't long before hundreds of small wineries around the world were queuing to take part in Tony's venture, which transformed from a tiny operation to a massive business virtually overnight. Today, nearly 50 years on from its foundation in 1969, Laithwaites' parent company Direct Wines is the world's number one home-delivery wine merchant with operations in the UK, US and Australia and New Zealand. Direct: Tony Laithwaite My Story is not just the remarkable story of a wine company, or its wines, but a tale of the people who have created its success. Filled with rich archive imagery and newly commissioned illustrations by David Eldridge, as well as anecdotes of Tony's early years in France, this inspirational memoir is perfect to enjoy with your favourite bottle of wine.
The tale of the Bechtel family dynasty is a classic American business story. It begins with Warren A. Bechtel, who led a consortium that constructed the Hoover Dam. From that auspicious start, the family and its eponymous company would go on to "build the world," from the construction of airports in Hong Kong and Doha, to pipelines and tunnels in Alaska and Europe, to mining and energy operations around the globe. Today Bechtel is one of the largest privately held corporations in the world, enriched and empowered by a long history of government contracts and the privatization of public works, made possible by an unprecedented revolving door between its San Francisco headquarters and Washington. Bechtel executives John McCone, Caspar Weinberger, and George P. Shultz segued from leadership at the company to positions as Director of the CIA, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of State, respectively. Like all stories of empire building, the rise of Bechtel presents a complex and riveting narrative. In The Profiteers, Sally Denton, exposes Bechtel's secret world and one of the biggest business and political stories of our time.
This book provides a collective view of the five major English chartered trading companies which were active during the period 1688-1763: The East India Company, the Royal African Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, The Levant Company, and the Russia Company. Using both archival and secondary sources, this monograph fills in some of the knowledge gaps concerning the less well-studied companies, and examines the interconnections between international rivalry, the financial operations of the companies, and politics which have not featured prominently in the historiography. |
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