In The World's Newest Profession, Christopher McKenna offers a history of management consulting in the twentieth century. While management consulting may not yet be a recognized profession, the leading consulting firms have been advising and reshaping the largest organizations in the world since the 1920s. This groundbreaking study details how the elite consulting firms, including McKinsey and Booz Allen, expanded after U.S. regulatory changes during the 1930s, how they changed giant corporations, nonprofits, and the state during the 1950s, and why consultants became so influential in the...

Brands help explain why, in a world focused on science and new technology, several of the world's multinational corporations have little to do with either. Rather they are old firms with little critical investment in patents or copyrights. For these firms, the critical intellectual property is trademarks. Global Brands explains how the world's largest multinationals in alcoholic beverages achieved global leadership; the predominant corporate governance structures for firms' marketing-based industries; and why these firms form alliances with direct competitors.

This book examines how multinational enterprises and international finance influenced the course of electrification around the world. Multinational enterprises played a crucial role in the spread of electric light and power from the 1870s through the first three decades of the twentieth century. Their role did not persist, as over time they exited through domestication (buy-outs, confiscations, or other withdrawals), so that by 1978 multinational enterprises in this sector had all but disappeared, replaced by electrical utility providers with national business structures. Yet, in recent...

This history of Schering AG (one of Germany's best known pharmaceutical companies) traces its origins as a pharmacy in the middle of the nineteenth century to the first steps of its re-birth as a multinational corporation in 1950. It reveals the various stages of Schering's development, its relationships to other chemical companies, government, bankers and other shareholders. The book presents this corporate history in the context of Schering's changing and increasingly hostile political, social and economic environment.

This book questions conventional accounts of the history of European integration and British business. Integration accounts conventionally focus on the nation-state, while Neil Rollings focuses on business and its role in the development of European integration, which business historians have overlooked to this point. Business provided a key link between economic integration, political integration, and the process of Europeanization. British businessmen perceived early on that European integration meant much more than the removal of tariffs and access to new markets. Indeed, British entry...

This history of Schering AG (one of Germany's best known pharmaceutical companies) traces its origins as a pharmacy in the middle of the nineteenth century to the first steps of its re-birth as a multinational corporation in 1950. It reveals the various stages of Schering's development, its relationships to other chemical companies, government, bankers and other shareholders. The book presents this corporate history in the context of Schering's changing and increasingly hostile political, social and economic environment.

This book examines how multinational enterprises and international finance influenced the course of electrification around the world. Multinational enterprises played a crucial role in the spread of electric light and power from the 1870s through the first three decades of the twentieth century. Their role did not persist, as over time they exited through domestication (buy-outs, confiscations, or other withdrawals), so that by 1978 multinational enterprises in this sector had all but disappeared, replaced by electrical utility providers with national business structures. Yet, in recent...

Brands help explain why, in a world focused on science and new technology, several of the world's multinational corporations have little to do with either. Rather they are old firms with little critical investment in patents or copyrights. For these firms, the critical intellectual property is trademarks. Global Brands explains how the world's largest multinationals in alcoholic beverages achieved global leadership; the predominant corporate governance structures for firms' marketing-based industries; and why these firms form alliances with direct competitors.

Based on newly available and extensive archival evidence, this book traces the history of international news agencies and associations around the world from 1848 to 1947. Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb argues that newspaper publishers formed news associations and patronized news agencies to cut the costs of news collection and exclude competitors from gaining access to the news. In this way, cooperation facilitated the distribution of news. The extent to which state regulation permitted cooperation, or prohibited exclusivity, determined the benefit newspaper publishers derived from these...

The essays in this volume discuss the worldwide economic integration between 1850 and 1930, challenging the popular description of the period after 1918 as one of mere deglobalisation. The authors posit that markets were not only places of material exchange, but also socially structured entities, shaped by the agency of individual actors and by complex structures of political and economic power. Economic transactions were supported by an array of different institutions, ranging from formalized regulations to informal relations of personal trust. They argue that these networks were strong...