This article explores the long-term effects of foreign direct investment on the human capital development of host economies, based on the historical analysis of the Spanish operations of four leading American firms: ITT, J. Walter Thompson, Merck Sharp & Dohme, and John Deere. Our research shows that the training and working practices of these companies had a positive impact on the Spanish subsidiaries in terms of technological upgrading and managerial development. However, the local context was also relevant, through mandatory agreements that empowered local partners from the start and the availability of locally educated professionals eager to absorb new knowledge.

This article explores the case of Deutsche Werkstätten Hellerau (DWH)—a furniture and interior manufacturer founded in 1898—through state socialism after 1945 and reprivatization in the 1990s. Our analysis suggests that the firm's survival through multiple systemic disruptions was partly due to the preservation of a unique identity despite heavy institutional pressures for conformity. DWH adopted a “mixed conformity” strategy that attempted to pitch multiple concerns (cultural-aesthetic, ideological, economic) of political authorities against one another to buffer sociopolitical pressures, thus ultimately conforming to some (identity-consistent) demands, while violating other (identity-threatening) ones. This allowed DWH to successfully navigate tensions between sociopolitical expectations and the need to preserve a collective sense of distinctiveness and continuity over time.

General Motors (GM) became the world's dominant automaker in the 1920s and 1930s thanks in part to a dynamic, centralized public relations operation. The intended audience of this marketing included GM's own overseas employees. As the company opened new plants in foreign countries, it used media such as General Motors World, an employee newspaper, to communicate that it understood the needs of different foreign consumers and to advocate against protectionist economic policies that hindered its ability to sell cars. The messages of General Motors World shaped global perceptions of GM's corporate structure and brand, and were a core element of the automaker's overseas activity.

This article studies the genesis and early international expansion of the bank-issued credit card—an American innovation that quickly took hold in western Europe. Empirical evidence undermines the proposition of a single firm building a proprietary network. In fact, it was a constellation of participants that combined three characteristics, namely, a critical mass of both retail customers and retail merchants; the capacity to implement new technological solutions; and the ability to forge resilient collaborations across national borders. The evidence supports the value of collaboration in retail financial services as means of appropriating network externalities. Moreover, other conceptual and empirical studies, especially those based on two-sided markets, neglect the greater implications that initial conditions in this industry have on long-term success.

Sir Christopher Wren was the architect of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, in which he is buried in a simple tomb with a famous Latin epitaph, which can be paraphrased for our purposes as “if you are searching for a monument, look about you.” Joshua Freeman, in his sparkling history of the factory, says much the same about his book's subject: if you want a monument to the factory, look about you, to your house, your study, your clothes, or your desk. What is there that hasn't been manufactured in a factory? And yet Freeman's book is also something of an epitaph to a business model. We live, we are often told, in a postindustrial age. The factory has lost its ability to awe or to amaze (though not, perhaps, the ability to produce indignation and anger). The factory as technology's avatar has been replaced by the high-tech campus, where things are not made manually but digitally, keystroke by keystroke. Still, we are very much products of the age of the factory.

Tumbling barriers once heralded globalization's ascent. The abolition of capital controls propelled the integration of financial markets from the mid-1970s, and the free movement of capital, goods, services, and labor soon became foundational commitments for the European Union. Multilateral trade reforms, orchestrated after 1995 by the new World Trade Organization, lowered barriers to commerce, while telecommunications and transportation technologies slashed the costs of long-distance transactions. In a stunning development, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 showcased the incapacity of even totalitarian regimes to contain the desires of ordinary citizens for freedom, openness, and global engagement. Recalling that halcyon moment, when a bifurcated Cold War subsided and a new era of globalization and openness took tangible form, the journalist Edward Luce invokes Wordsworth: “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive.”