Archiv für die Kategorie ‘Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte / Journal of Business History’

Buchbesprechungen (Reviews)

Christian Kleinschmidt, Konsumgesellschaft

Wolfgang König, Kleine Geschichte der Konsumgesellschaft. Konsum als Lebensform der Moderne

Heinz-Gerhard Haupt/Claudius Torp (Hrsg.), Die Konsumgesellschaft in Deutschland 1890-1990. Ein Handbuch (Thomas Welskopp)

Neil Coe/Neil Wrigley (Hrsg.), The Globalization of Retailing (Berti Kolbow)

Yavuz Köse, Westlicher Konsum am Bosporus. Warenhäuser, Nestlé & Co im späten Osmanischen Reich (1855-1923) (Meral Avci)

Vera Hierholzer, Nahrung nach Norm. Regulierung von Nahrungsmittelqualität in der Industrialisierung 1871-1914 (Christian Henrich-Franke)

Gerd Hardach, Der Deutsche Industrie- und Handelskammertag 1861-2011. Der Spitzenverband der Industrie- und Handelskammern im Wandel der Zeit (Werner Bührer)

Bertelsmann AG, 175 Jahre Bertelsmann. Eine Zukunftsgeschichte (Alexander Moutchnik)

Aktiengesellschaft der Dillinger Hüttenwerke (Hg.), 325 Jahre Dillinger Hütte 1685-2010: Chronik. Menschen. Technik (3 Bde.) (Veit Damm)

Barbara Eggenkämper/Gerd Modert/Stefan Pretzlik, Die Staatliche Versicherung der DDR. Von der Gründung bis zur Integration in die Allianz (Adrian Jitschin)

Charles Barthel/Josée Kirps, Terres rouges. Histoire de la sidérurgie luxembourgeoise. Bd. 1 und 2 (Veit Damm/Esther Spicker)

Manfred Rasch (Hg.), August Thyssen und Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza. Briefe einer Industriellenfamilie 1919-1926 (Werner Bührer)

Silke Fengler, Entwickelt und fixiert. Zur Unternehmens- und Technikgeschichte der deutschen Fotoindustrie, dargestellt am Beispiel der Agfa AG Leverkusen und des VEB Filmfabrik Wolfen (1945-1995)

Gerhard Jehmlich, Der VEB Pentacon Dresden. Geschichte der Dresdner Kamera- und Kinoindustrie nach 1945 (Eckart Schremmer)

Michael Epkenhans/Ralf Stremmel (Hrsg.), Friedrich Alfred Krupp. Ein Unternehmer im Kaiserreich (Peter M. Quadflieg)

Else Kröner-Fresenius-Stiftung (Hg.), Wer, wenn nicht wir – Else Kröner – Unternehmerin und Stifterin (Dorothea Schmidt)

Claudia Nieke, Volkswagen am Kap. Internationalisierung und Netzwerk in Südafrika 1950-1966 (Christian Marx)

Michael Berg, Die Motorschifffahrt auf dem Bodensee unter der Deutschen Reichsbahn und in der Nachkriegszeit. Planung, Bau und Einsatz der Weißen Flotte 1920 bis 1952 (Hartmut Knittel)

Timo Luks, Der Betrieb als Ort der Moderne. Zur Geschichte von Industriearbeit, Ordnungsdenken und Social Engineering im 20. Jahrhundert (Claudia Schütze)

Christopher Neumaier, Dieselautos in Deutschland und den USA. Zum Verhältnis von Technologie, Konsum und Politik, 1949-2005 (Christiane Katz)

Hans-Ulrich Schiedt/Laurent Tissot/Christoph Maria Merki/Rainer C. Schwings (Hrsg.), Verkehrsgeschichte – Histoire des transport (Christian Henrich-Franke)

Susanne Hilger/Achim Landwehr (Hrsg.), Wirtschaft – Kultur – Geschichte. Positionen und Perspektiven (Tobias Riedl)

Dieter Stiefel (Hg.), Der «Ostfaktor». Die österreichische Wirtschaft 1989-2009 (Peter Borscheid)

Katherine Carté Engel, Religion and Profit. Moravians in Early America (Swen Steinberg)

Siegfried Jaschinski, Das deutsche Finanz-System. Achillesferse der Wirtschaft? (Christopher Kopper)

Zur Rezension in der Geschäftsstelle eingegangene Bücher

  • Content Type Journal Article
  • Pages 86-116

European Cartels and Technology Transfer: the experience of the rayon industry, 1920 to 1940

Business historians generally agree that European cartels, while proliferating after 1918, favoured the international spread of technology. Moving along similar lines, economist Baumol has argued that big firms sell proprietary technology and cooperate on the technological front with the double fold aim to make a profit and to internalise knowledge spillovers. This article qualifies both claims suggesting a less optimistic view about the effects of the visible hand of international cartels. The history of the rayon industry, a high-tech sector until 1940, shows that cartels tended to inflate the price of borrowed technology and to influence the direction of technology flows. Another important conclusion is that the successful adoption of technology did not necessarily translate into expansion for the receptor firms since the cartel leaders, i.e. the licensors, tended either to retain vital information or to check the growth of the licensees by attaching certain commercial limitations to the sale of know-how.

  • Content Type Journal Article
  • Pages 206-224
  • Authors
    • Valerio Cerretano, School of History and Cultures, Arts Building, University of Birmingham

Belgian Catholic entrepreneurs’ organizations, 1880 to 1940. A dialogue on social responsibility

During the last decades of the 19th century and the interwar period the Belgian Catholic Church entered into an intense dialogue with the entrepreneurial milieu. Building on older networks several Catholic entrepreneurs’ organizations were created. These structures developed intricate discourses, confronting business men with their social responsibility, shaping and affirming their identity and worldview in contrast to that of their liberal counterparts. Belgian Catholic entrepreneurs associations radiated a particular organizational culture, exuding a genteel atmosphere of a socio-religious debating club. But they also advocated a clear Christian identity, in line with Catholic social teachings and neo-scholastic philosophy. Only a (re) Christianization of the business world, so they argued, would provide a durable solution to existing social tensions. The bon patron catholique had to become an instrument of moral regeneration and social renovation. Members were urged to highlight the Catholic identity of their company, to guide and monitor the families that worked for them and to offer clear and regular support to social works. The discourse of the Belgian Catholic entrepreneurial organizations on the social responsibility of their members would only slowly move away from its paternalist roots. Nonetheless in the interwar period a more structural vision of social relations arose, resulting in a closer collaboration with the Christian workers movement. This prepared the Belgian Catholic entrepreneurs’ organizations for their leading role in the post-war welfare state and its systems of interest mediation and collective bargaining.

  • Content Type Journal Article
  • Pages 163-186
  • Authors
    • Peter Heyrman, KADOC, Documentation and Research Centre on Religion, Leuven, Belgium

Ostdeutsche Unternehmen im Transformationsprozess 1935 bis 1995. Ein neues Forschungsfeld der modernen Unternehmensgeschichte

East German companies in the process of transformation from 1935 to 1995. A new research area of modern business history

The history of companies in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) has been neglected until very recently. Historical research on the East German economy continues to explain the economic decline of the GDR with the structural deficits rooted in the planned economy. Based on the assumption that under those conditions companies neither had much freedom of movement nor much economic influence, their role and history is considered marginal at best, irrelevant at worst. The present article challenges this assumption. Its authors argue that businesses played an important role in keeping alive and stabilizing the East German economy, and that without them the GDR as a political system could not have survived for forty years. To investigate the economic and political relevance of companies in the history of the GDR, an overarching research program is necessary, one that allows for a methodologically refined, empirically anchored analysis of East German business history. The authors offer a suggestion for such a research program called Business History as Transformation History. Arguing that the procedural dimension of business history needs to be taken into consideration more systematically, they challenge the political caesura of 1945 and 1989, which are traditionally employed in historical research on the GDR, and call for historical studies that investigate the time between 1935 and 1995 in order to do justice to the economic, structural, and local conditions and constraints under which the companies operated. Similarly, the far-reaching transformation businesses experienced in the 70s, a phenomenon that has been discussed with regard to Western Europe recently, should receive due attention. Finally, the authors argue that the economic performance of East German companies should be analyzed not isolated but in the context of national and international trade relations, both within and outside the COMECON. The article begins with an outline of the research program for business history as transformation history. It then presents three case studies to exemplify the research agenda, each of them analyzing different phases of transformation.

  • Content Type Journal Article
  • Pages 187-205
  • Authors
    • Veit Damm, Saarbrücken (Damm), Bielefeld (Schulz), Dresden (Steinberg und Wölfel)
    • Ulrike Schulz, Saarbrücken (Damm), Bielefeld (Schulz), Dresden (Steinberg und Wölfel)
    • Swen Steinberg, Saarbrücken (Damm), Bielefeld (Schulz), Dresden (Steinberg und Wölfel)
    • Sylvia Wölfel, Saarbrücken (Damm), Bielefeld (Schulz), Dresden (Steinberg und Wölfel)

Mitteilungen (Announcements)

  • Content Type Journal Article
  • Pages 248-251

The German-Jewish Economic Elite (1900 to 1930)

In the early 20th century, a dense corporate network was created among large German corporations, with about 16 percent of the members of this corporate network of Jewish background. At the centre of the network (big linkers) about 25 percent were Jewish. The percentage of Jews in the general population was less than one percent in 1914. What comparative advantages did the Jewish minority enjoy that enabled them to succeed in the competition for leading positions in the German economy? Three hypotheses are tested: (1) The Jewish minority was integrated in a dense network of solidarity, which provided it with comparative advantages in competing with non-Jewish entrepreneurs (hypothesis: embeddedness); (2) The Jewish minority had a high level of education that enabled it to gain access to positions of leadership in big companies during a period in which science and technology became very important for industrial production (hypothesis: human capital); (3) The Jewish minority possessed experience in banking and the financing of large projects since the Middle Ages which gave Jewish bankers comparative advantages in entrepreneurial financing (hypothesis: Jewish private bankers). Our data do not support any of these hypotheses. The observed correlation between Jewish background and network centrality cannot be explained by a higher level of education, a higher level of social capital, or a higher proportion of Jewish managers engaged in (private) banking.

  • Content Type Journal Article
  • Pages 135-162
  • Authors
    • Paul Windolf, Department of Sociology, University Trier

Buchbesprechungen (Reviews)

Christina Lubinski, Familienunternehmen in Westdeutschland. Corporate Governance und Gesellschafterkultur seit den 1960er Jahren (Thomas Hermann)

Adelheid von Saldern, Netzwerkökonomie im frühen 19. Jahrhundert. Das Beispiel der Schoeller-Häuser (Benjamin Obermüller)

Alexander Engel, Farben der Globalisierung. Die Entstehung moderner Märkte für Farbstoffe 1500-1900 (Elisabeth Vaupel)

Geoffrey Jones, Beauty Imagined. A History of the Global Beauty Industry (Endora Comer-Arldt)

Ralf Ahrens/Harald Wixforth (Hrsg.), Strukturwandel und Internationalisierung im Bankwesen seit den 1950er Jahren (Christian Marx)

Tobias Straumann, Die UBS-Krise aus wirtschaftshistorischer Sicht. Expertenbericht erstellt zu Händen der UBS AG (Olaf Bach)

John Orbell, A Guide to Tracing the Historyof a Business (Klemens Grube)

Toni Pierenkemper, Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Die Entstehung der modernen Volkswirtschaft (Olaf Bach)

David Gilgen/Christopher Kopper/Andreas Leutzsch (Hrsg.), Deutschland als Modell? Rheinischer Kapitalismus und Globalisierung seit dem 19. Jahrhundert (Werner Bührer)

Dominik Schrage, Die Verfügbarkeit der Dinge. Eine historische Soziologie des Konsums (Endora Comer-Arldt)

Nepomuk Gasteiger, Der Konsument. Verbraucherbilder in Werbung, Konsumkritik und Verbraucherschutz 1945-1989 (Armin Müller)

Marius Lange, Zwischen Demokratie und Diktatur. Unternehmerische Öffentlichkeit in Deutschland 1929-1936 (Werner Bührer)

Achim Prossek/Helmut Schneider/Horst A. Wessel/Burkhard Wetterau/Dorothea Wiktorin (Hrsg.), Atlas der Metropole Ruhr. Vielfalt und Wandel des Ruhrgebiets im Kartenbild (Dieter Ziegler)

Gerold Ambrosius/Christian Henrich-Franke/Cornelius Neutsch/Guido Thiemeyer (Hrsg.), Standardisierung und Integration europäischer Verkehrsinfrastruktur in historischer Perspektive (Hartmut Knittel)

Elisabeth Timm, Zwangsarbeit in Esslingen 1939-1945. Kommune, Unternehmen und Belegschaften in der nationalsozialistischen Kriegswirtschaft (Thomas Urban)

Klaus Tenfelde/Karl-Otto Czikowsky/Jürgen Mittag/Stefan Moitra/Rolf Nietzard (Hrsg.), Stimmt die Chemie? Mitbestimmung und Sozialpolitik in der Geschichte des Bayer-Konzerns (Benjamin Obermüller)

Beat Bächi, Vitamin C für alle! Pharmazeutische Produktion, Vermarktung und Gesundheitspolitik (1933-1953) (Roman Rossfeld)

Zur Rezension in der Geschäftsstelle eingegangene Bücher

  • Content Type Journal Article
  • Pages 225-247

«Angewandte Geschichte» als Apologetik-Agentur? Wie man an der Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg Unternehmensgeschichte «kapitalisiert»

Content Type Journal ArticlePages 102-115Authors
Cornelia Rauh, Leibniz-Universität Hannover

Journal Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte / Journal of Business HistoryPrint ISSN 0342-2852

Journal Volume Volume 56

Journal Issue V…

Die Deutsche Evangelische Heimstättengesellschaft (Devaheim) Aufstieg und Fall einer kirchlichen Bausparkasse von 1926 bis 1931

The Deutsche Evangelische Heimstättengesellschaft (Devaheim) Rise and fall of a church-affiliated building and loan society 1926-1931 The Bausparkasse Devaheim was a building and loan society affiliated with the Lutheran church in Germany. Founded as …

Verkannte Propheten? Zur Diskrepanz zwischen Status und Einfluss der «Gründergeneration» deutscher Werber in der westdeutschen Werbewirtschaft, 1945 bis 1966/67

Unrecognized Prophets? Examining the Discrepancy between the Status and Influence of the «founding generation» in the West German Advertising Industry, 1945 to 1966/67 The paper examines the standing as well as the socioeconomic influence of those We…