Suchergebnisse

During the first global economy, roughly from Western industrialization to World War I, the gramophone, much like other consumer goods, circulated relatively freely around the world. This paper compares the market in India and China asking how gramophone companies established themselves there and focuses on the interaction between Western businesspeople and local partners. The article first shows how agents started exploring strategies for "localizing" music and, second, how in both countries their interaction with local partners was first shaped by curiosity and commercial interest, and later by traditionalism and nationalism, the latter of which paradoxically both inhibited and enabled Western business. Based on diaries, corporate files, trade journals, and consular reports, the paper shows that the highly localized and politicized demand for music made access to local knowledge a crucial competitive advantage.

This article is concerned with business strategies of political risk management during the twentieth century. It focuses especially on Beiersdorf, a pharmaceutical and skin care company in Germany. During World War I, the expropriation of its brands and trademarks revealed its vulnerability to political risk. Following the advent of the Nazi regime in 1933, the largely Jewish owned and managed company faced a uniquely challenging combination of home and host country political risk. This article reviews the company's responses to these adverse circumstances, challenging the prevailing literature that interprets so-called "cloaking" activities as one element of businesses' cooperation with the Nazis. We also depart from the previous literature in assessing the outcomes of the company's strategies after 1945 and examine the challenges and costs faced by the company in recovering the ownership of its brands. While the management of distance became much easier over the course of the twentieth century because of communications improvements, this article shows that the management of governments and political risk grew sharply.

Considerations about the legitimacy of futures trading have been ubiquitous in the highly integrated world economy since the late nineteenth century. This article compares two national debates in Germany and British India from the 1880s to the 1930s. Despite significant differences in the cultural and economic contexts of the two countries and in the emergence of futures trading, there are interesting similarities. In both countries, individual futures exchanges were organized and controlled by small privileged groups of traders. These minorities were glued together by social ties, de facto controlling (or profiting from) access to futures markets and facing criticism because of their privileged position. While contemporaries and historians often focus on futures trading as trading without intent to deliver, the historical analysis in this article shows that an equally important issue was the conflict over distribution and power between more and less privileged interest groups and their respective market access.

In contrast to widespread assessments that family enterprises lack sufficient resources and capabilities to go global, many family companies are competing successfully in an increasingly globalized business environment. Worldwide, a large number of thriving multinationals are still family-owned and/or under family control. While there is abundant literature on the phenomenon of globalization from many different disciplines, neither the literature on multinationals nor the growing field of family business studies have systematically investigated family multinationals yet. This volume is one.