Harm G. Schröter

The Rise of Multinationals in Continental Europe.

Part 1: Continental European multinationals 1850-1992, Geoffrey Jones continuity and change - German foreign direct investment 1850-1990, Harm G. Schroter Swiss multinational enterprise in historical perspective, Harm G. Schroter outward bound - the rise of Dutch multinationals, B.P.A. Gales securing the markets - Swedish multinationals in a historical perspective, Ulf Olsson the multinational companies of Norway, Fritz Hodne. Part 2: the German electrotechnical industry in the Italian market before the Second World War, Peter Hertner the internationalization of West German banks, 1945-1987, Richard Tilly the development of Pirelli as an Italian multinational 1872-1992, A. Montenegro Agfa-Gevaert and Belgian multinational enterprise, Greta Devos.

The Americanisation of distribution and its limits: the case of the German retail system, 1950–1975

The change in European distribution systems, exemplified by West Germany, represented a general change from a more cooperative towards a more competitive way of thinking and behaviour in everyday life. Substantial parts of the change towards a more competitive, more dynamic approach can be understood as Americanisation, an adapted and always selective process. Besides, in self-service we find Americanisation in supermarkets. These were no longer within walking distance but situated outside the cities, where customers needed a car in order to shop – a total break with European traditions. Mail-order business learned a lot concerning organisational matters. Channels of Americanisation were mainly travels by managers to the US and brochures, specially written for a distinctive branch of business. Americanisation also had its limits. Wholesale stayed neutral but unchanged. Other sectors, such as the institution of weekly private local markets, or of mobile retailers, resisted stubbornly. Some attempts failed utterly, for instance the attempt to introduce automats on a large scale. Also ignorance occurred: the discounter Aldi failed to recognise American experience in this sector, and consequently had to ‘reinvent the wheel’. In spite of failures, ignorance and neutrality we have to acknowledge a wave of Americanisation in retail trade during the boom period of the 1950s which did not start to peter out before the late 1960s.

The Cooperative Business Movement, 1950 to the Present

The United Nations declared 2012 the year of cooperatives, emphasizing that there is an alternative to privately owned firms. While greed and mismanagement have caused world financial and economic crises, co-ops offer another type of business for economic activities that is less exposed to aggressive capitalism. This book provides a problem-oriented overview of the development of cooperatives over the last fifty years. The global study addresses the major challenges cooperatives face, such as the organizational innovations introduced to acquire necessary risk-capital and implement growth-related strategies, the wave of demutualization in developed nations and their ability to construct an original consumer politics. The contributors to this volume discuss the successes and failures of the cooperatives and ask whether they are an outdated model of enterprise. They document a wave of foundations of new co-ops, new forms of collaboration between them and a growing trend toward globalization.

Economic culture and its transfer: an overview of the Americanisation of the European economy, 1900–2005

Americanisation is the (selected and adapted) transfer of values from the US to Europe. While this model is well established in cultural history, economist and economic historians had difficulties with this concept. However, the books title ‘Culture Matters!’ is the latest insight of distinguished economists such as Michael E. Porter, Jeffrey Sachs, Francis Fukuyama and others.1 The contributors to this issue not only agree, but try to provide an answer to the question that is asked in the subtitle of the book: ‘How Values Shape Human Progress’. More precisely, they ask how American values influenced European economic performance during the twentieth century. Europe experienced three major waves of Americanisation: in the 1920s, during the boom-phase 1949–1973, and finally from about 1985 until the present day. By using Americanisation as a cultural concept, as well as describing the waves, why they occurred can also be explained: the Europeans were eager to learn how to improve their economy during phases in which the US excelled not only in the economic field but also in others (politics, military strength, etc.). Thus, it can be understood how and why rationalisation swept over Europe as a wave in the 1920s, and why the US film industry became dominant; why during the boom European countries set up business schools; why firms changed their systems of government; and finally why since about 1985 Europeans have embarked on a process of privatisation and de-regulation. Thus, Americanisation gives us a better understanding of what has happened and is still happening with us Europeans – and why. The general trend was to become less cooperative and more competitive in all aspects. Why did Americanisation occur in waves? Already by 1914 some branches of American industry were superior to their European competitors. Selected European firms successfully adopted US standards. But what caused the three waves was not action by a couple of individual businesses: it needed a general feeling of American superiority. Cultural, political, military and financial strength provided the background for each of the waves, while they petered out when this background was no longer existent: during the world economic crisis of the 1930s, in the 1970s with the Vietnamese War, and at the time of the financial and oil crises. Americanisation started again when, with the breakdown of socialism, the US emerged as the worlds sole hegemonic power, due to the US IT industry, and American ideas on private property and in the financial sector, all of which pressed for less cooperative and more exclusive, private ways of doing business and conducting ones personal life. The contribution shows how rationalisation spread in Europe during the 1920s. For the boom-period 1950–1973, the showcases are the Marshall Plan, mass distribution including the introduction of self-service and market research, management education, de-cartelisation, foreign direct investment and specific changes within internal organisation of enterprise. The last wave is explained by the changed role of finance, both in private life and in the economy, and in technological change. All these changes over time were entrenched in a handful of American values. It was the deepening of these values in the US themselves that, in combination with an upswing of political, military, cultural and economic power, prepared the next wave of Americanisation.

Demutualization and its Problems

Over the last three decades, cooperatives experienced acceleration of institutional innovation with the introduction of many variations to the reference model. It is certainly not surprising that coops changed their organizational structure over time to face the challenges of world. In the United States and in Canada they are commonly referred to as new generation cooperatives, in Italy and Spain as cooperative groups or network of cooperatives. One of the main feature of these new organizational structures is their attempt to take some advantages of the investor oriented firms (above all in capital raising activities) while retaining the mutual/cooperative status. Many of these changes have been undertaken to facilitate the growth of the enterprises both in domestic market and abroad. Due to the wideness of the phenomenon we could name the last three decades the age of hybridization. However in some cases the search for new structures went further and assumed the aspect of conversion of mutuals into stock firms. Our paper will deal with this latter part of the story, focusing on cooperatives that preferred conversion or demutualization to hybridization. The paper describes the chronology and the geography of demutualization and analyses the forces that drove it over the last decades. The main conclusion is that demutualization provided solutions for real problems, as hybridization did, however the choice between these two options seems to have been more a matter of ideology than of efficiency.

Easy prey? Firms based in small nations and international cartels, 1919–1939

Abstract It is taken as common sense that small countries have been more pressed and exploited by transnational enterprises than large ones. Economists call this the ‘small-country-squeeze’. Our contribution tries to transfer the thesis to the micro-economic level: Did mighty international cartels exploit their cartel partners based in small countries more easily than enterprises from larger states? From a viewpoint of political logic, or everyday feeling, such a thesis looks straightforward. In the following we apply the thesis of small-country-squeeze to several cases of cartels during their peak period, 1919–1939, and find surprisingly little evidence for this ‘common sense’. The assumption rather needs to be reversed: We should take non-discrimination as the normal case and try to find contradicting cases of discrimination.

The Cooperative Business Movement, 1950 to the Present: Introduction: Principal Problems and General Development of Cooperative Enterprise

How important are cooperatives in our society and economy? Are they a vanishing form of enterprise useful only in developing countries and imperfect markets? Or are they a resilient form of enterprise that parallels investororiented firms? We’d like to start with these questions because the main aim of this book is to offer answers to them by surveying the evolution of cooperatives (co-ops) all over the world in the last sixty years. At first glance, the questions seem to be answered by the United Nations’ declaration of the year 2012 as the “International Year of Co-operatives.” This is a remarkable development, apparently establishing co-ops firmly back on the agenda of economists, politicians, and ordinary people throughout the world. The UN’s declaration of the International Year of Co-operatives is particularly remarkable because the twenty to thirty years preceding 2012 seem to have been decades of stagnant progress for co-ops in many countries. Recently, however, co-ops did a remarkable job of withstanding the financial crisis that started in 2008. That alone would seem to justify a careful look at cooperatives and at their important role in the world economy. The cooperative sector is certainly large: the world’s three hundred largest coops do an annual business of

An Issue of Different Mentalities

1.1 trillion (in U.S. dollars), which is roughly equal to Spain’s gross national product (GNP). In Sweden and Switzerland, coops provide about 20 percent of the country’s GNP. In addition, a recent statistical report comparing cooperative and conventional business ownership worldwide shows that there are 328 million people who own shares, compared to 1 billion who are member-owners of cooperative enterprises. These figures suggest that, yes, co-ops matter!

Die Institutionalisierung der Unternehmensgeschichte im deutschen Sprachraum

The reasons why the industry of one nation is overtaken by the same industry of a rival nation are extremely complex, and have, so far, defied satisfactory explanations. In those cases where the outcompeted industry belongs to a country which is much further advanced economically such a development is often quite striking, even puzzling, and certainly begs for explanation. This presents a daunting challenge to economists and historians, who have not provided clear-cut reasons as to why industries surpass and are surpassed. Nevertheless their studies, reaching back to the earliest stages of industrialization, afford much valuable evidence that is amenable to analysis. Thus one group of historians has tackled the question of what brought about the so-called ‘British decline.’ This, it now appears, was not an absolute decline but a relative slowdown in economic growth as compared to the progress made by other nations.1 Furthermore, this slowdown was prevalent throughout British manufacturing industries, especially those based on new technologies such as the chemical, electrical and optical industries. Despite the fact that other sectors in Britain, particularly finance, continued to flourish, the relative decline in industrial production led to a substantial loss of national power and wealth, which was evident even before the close of the nineteenth century.

Kartelle als Kriseninstrumente in Europa nach 1970. Das Beispiel des europäischen Chemiefaserkartells

After the Second World War different organisations for Business History emerged in Austria, the FRG, GDR, and in Switzerland. The author connects these foundations and their development to the ongoing discourses in society and the academic world while simultanously pointing out to the involvement of certain decisive persons. Thus he tries to apply Douglas Norths theory of institutional change to the subject of Business History. Einleitung: Z u r Aktualität der Frage Jahrzehntelang hat die Unternehmensgeschichtsschreibung ein Aschenputteldasein gefuhrt, jedoch scheint in den 1990er Jahren der Märchenprinz fur unser Aschenputtel gekommen zu sein. Prominente Professoren haben an dieser Reorientierung teilgenommen, und exemplarisch läßt sich diese Wende an der Person von Lothar Gall festmachen. Als Vorsitzender des Verbandes der Historiker Deutschlands und gleichzeitig Herausgeber der Historischen Zeitschrift hat er lange Zeit öffendich wenig Interesse an Unternehmensgeschichtsschreibung gezeigt. Das änderte sich schlagartig in den 1990er Jahren, als er als einziger Vertreter der Historikerzunft ohne spezielle Aufgabe unter die Repräsentanten der Großwirtschaft in den Vorstand der Gesellschaft für Unternehmensgeschichte (GUG) eintrat.1 Ebenso wie Lothar Gall fingen in den 1990er Jahren viele andere Historiker an, sich fur Unternehmensgeschichte zu interessieren. Warum und wie kam diese Neubewertung zustande, und welche institutionellen Änderungen waren mit ihr verbunden? Welche organisatorischen Konsequenzen