This article examines the postwar Franco-Italian struggle over Sudameris (Banque Française et Italienne pour l’Amérique du Sud), a multinational bank operating across South America. After 1945, Paribas sought to transform Sudameris into a French institution, backed by government pressure and asset sequestration. Italy’s Banca Commerciale Italiana (BCI) resisted, regaining majority control in 1948 through strategic share acquisitions. The ensuing conflict (1948–1955) centered on executive power. Paribas relied on French corporate law to maintain managerial dominance, while the BCI finally succeeded in appointing an Italian managing director in 1955. Under Italian leadership, Sudameris shifted from transactional to relationship banking in South America, reversing stagnation and achieving renewed growth by 1960. Sudameris’s early postwar history reveals how postwar European economic rivalries extended into South America and how multinational banks adapted to nationalist environments amid the contradictory forces of regional integration and global competition.

Applying the New Entrepreneurial History framework, this paper examines how ArcBest Corporation, an integrated logistics firm based in Fort Smith, Arkansas, became the last legacy less-than-load (LTL) carrier operating in the United States. It argues that the firm’s enduring viability is partially the product of an internal distributed agency among executives over a century that involved continual entrepreneurial processes: Envisioning and valuing opportunities informed by the multiplicative form of values, strategically reallocating and reconfiguring resources, and legitimizing novelty to stakeholders in response to profound market and regulatory shifts. These entrepreneurial processes, paired with the company’s commitments to a unionized labor force, informed executives’ strategic decisions that transformed the carrier from a regional hauler into a national, technologically sophisticated, integrated logistics provider. In applying the new entrepreneurial history to ArcBest, it considers how entrepreneurial opportunities are enacted within the context of a single firm over time.

Money and Edinburgh go back a long way. The Bank of Scotland was founded in 1695, just a year after the Bank of England. Three centuries later, the first edition of the Global Financial Centres Index (in 2007) confirmed what everyone had always assumed: second only to London in the UK, sixth in Europe. But how? This small city, its population only topping 500,000 in the twenty-first century, was far from the centers of power and finance, with only a modest trading and manufacturing base of its own. This paper marries fresh oral history from the city’s mid-twentieth century financial elite—that is, an Edinburgh before the Global Financial Crash—with Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus in the relatively new paradigm of Historical Organisation Studies, treating the industry as a single unit across banking, life assurance, and investment management. This reveals their personal characteristics and demonstrates the “symbolic violence” which socialized them into absorbing and embracing both the values and practices of the organizations where they worked and the external structures, including professional bodies and, not least, the Church of Scotland, which helped maintain some of those values.

During World War II, condom consumption increased in both belligerent and non-belligerent countries, including Sweden. Yet the relationship between state-led initiatives and commercial marketing in driving this trend has received little scholarly attention. The main sources in this article consist of wartime public health campaigns and condom advertisements. Applying the concepts of social and consumer engineering, the article examines how government interventions, specifically through public health measures, influenced condom marketing practices. The findings show that wartime campaigns sought to engineer citizens’ sexual behavior and that businesses strategically aligned their messaging with government propaganda. This convergence was instrumental in positioning condoms as essential tools for public health and facilitated a more permissive attitude toward condoms as prophylactics, bridging state-led public health efforts with commercial objectives. By examining this dynamic, the article contributes to understanding how wartime policies shaped consumer behavior and forged enduring connections between public health and market strategies.

This article examines American “capitalist feminism” as a type of “business feminism” through the lens of biography. To demonstrate crucial linkages between business culture and historical social developments, the article foregrounds an account of the first woman president of a major commercial bank, Mary G. Roebling. Roebling sought women’s collective uplift primarily through economic empowerment, forwarding her message through accommodationist tactics, such as presenting a “feminine” image, embracing capitalism, and espousing moderate politics. This essay briefly explores additional biographies to suggest that other professionally successful, elite white women held similar “capitalist feminist” views. The article also employs biographical and associational examples to illustrate how capitalist feminism is a distinct category of business feminism.

Abstract This article examines how the ideological outlook of the British worker co-operative movement gradually assumed a neoliberal character. Drawing on methods from conceptual history, it traces the evolution of the movement’s key ideas and explores the changing language in which they were expressed. Central to this shift was the emergence of a social-enterprise discourse that reframed an earlier New Left commitment to pursuing worker control “in and against the market” as a conviction that such control could be achieved only “in and through” market participation. The study centres on the Industrial Common Ownership Movement (ICOM), a national federation of worker co-operatives active in Britain between 1971 and 2001. It uses items published by ICOM, material from numerous archives, and oral interviews conducted with some of those involved in the federation’s final years.

Commodity grades seem like innocuous measures of quality and thereby escape scrutiny as to their origin, purpose, and effect. Drawing on the National Live Stock and Meat Board’s executive meeting minutes and US Food Administration (USFA) records, this essay contextualizes and politicizes government beef grading. The USFA played a key role in the lead-up to government beef grading and in the creation of the Meat Board. USFA messaging as well as a post war depression curtailed consumption of feedlot-derived beef. In response, industry leaders formed a trade association called the Meat Board that acted as a liaison between industry and public sector scientists and helped bring about government beef grading. Beef grading emerged in the broader context of a campaign launched by the USFA to modernize meat retailers. At the same time, breeders, feeders, and western ranchers pushed for government beef grading in response to low prices and as a panacea. The Meat Board also cooperated with agricultural scientists in coordinating research to boost feedlot-derived beef. Rather than industry cooptation of science, this essay shows an alignment of vision in a mutually beneficial relationship. These actors, furthermore, used government beef grading to protect the feedlot system of production.

Since the 1990s, growing interest in the relationship between clusters and economic growth has highlighted the importance of understanding their internal structures and life cycles. Still, the mechanisms underlying cluster emergence remain largely unknown, especially regarding the influence of public policies in this initial stage. This paper examines the emergence of a metalworking cluster in the Spanish steelmaking pole of Asturias, focusing on Francoist industrial policy and the regime’s relationship with regional firms. Findings indicate that Asturias presented favorable conditions for cluster formation since the late eighteenth century. However, only the establishment of the national steelmaking champion Ensidesa in 1950 triggered the appearance of self-reinforcing dynamics, finally boosting the cluster’s emergence. This process resulted from the indirect externalities generated by the steel industry and was never part of the Francoist industrial agenda. Despite the recognized sector’s potential, the regime prioritized strategic base industries and systematically ignored calls for direct support for metalworking firms.

“Diplomacy at Work: The South African Worker, U.S. Multinationals, and Transnational Racial Solidarity” examines the history of corporate reform and anti-apartheid activism through the lens of South African labor and global worker movements. It argues that Black workers in apartheid South Africa repurposed U.S. corporate codes—especially the Sullivan Principles—as instruments of resistance. The labor movement transformed reformist rhetoric into tools for collective action and transnational worker solidarity. Drawing on oral histories, trade union archives, corporate reports, and government records in both the United States and South Africa, the dissertation reveals how workers used weak corporate reforms to pressure multinational companies, connect with U.S. labor allies, and challenge the violence of apartheid from the shop-floor. In doing so, it bridges business, labor, and diplomatic history to show that workers helped shape global debates over corporate ethics and U.S. foreign policy in the late Cold War era. Diplomacy at Work thus recasts South African labor as a central force in the transnational struggle against apartheid.