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  • Introduction
  • Philip Scranton

With this issue, Enterprise and Society completes its first decade of publishing distinctive and often distinguished contributions to the literature of business history. The journal’s sponsor, the Business History Conference, has renegotiated and renewed our contract with Oxford University Press, and we look forward with pleasure to many years of association with OUP’s Journals Division. Starting in 2009, Oxford is funding the BHC’s annual dissertation seminar, held just before the association’s general meeting, as well as our yearly award for the outstanding article published in this journal. For 2008, this prize went to Dr. Giorgio Riello (University of Warwick, UK) for “Strategies and Boundaries: Subcontracting and the London Trades in the Long Eighteenth Century.” Also in 2009, the BHC inaugurated a second E&S article prize for international and comparative business history, honoring the long and influential career of Professor Mira Wilkins (Florida International University). The first recipient of this award will be selected from authors publishing articles in Volume 10. The editors wish to thank UCLA’s Mary Yeager for organizing the Wilkins Prize’s development. Last, and far from least, recognizing the professionalism and durable contributions of its retiring president, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has confirmed a major grant to the BHC to endow the Ralph Gomory Prize, which will annually recognize “historical work on the effect business enterprises have on the economic conditions of a country in which they operate.”1 Both a book and an article prize, each $5000, are envisioned, with books nominated by publishers and articles by journal editors worldwide, for review by a three-person committee. This is a remarkable and much-welcomed initiative. [End Page 609]

As is our custom, each year’s closing issue includes the BHC presidential address and summaries of the finalist dissertations for the Krooss Prize. Thus the opening salvo for December is Mark Rose’s linked discussion of his career trajectory and a historian’s assessment of banking system bailout politics. Then follow dissertation summaries by Michael Easterly (UCLA), Andrew L. Russell (The Johns Hopkins University) and Dominique Tobbell (University of Pennsylvania). The Krooss review committee selected Dr. Easterly’s work on white-collar credit and personal loans in Progressive Era New York City as the prize winner. Three insightful studies of retailing, banking and production provide 19th and 20th century research centerpieces for this issue. Richard Harris (McMaster University) explores the creation of home improvement specialty stores in North America, whereas Paula Petrick (George Mason University) takes us back in a wonderfully timely fashion to an era of Wild West bank promotion –Montana in the 1880s/1890s. Last, Espen Storli and David Brégant, doctoral candidates at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, analyze a complex and conflicted aluminum industry joint venture spanning the first half of the last century.

Enterprise and Society for 2009 draws toward a close with a forum treating the at-times difficult relationship between management studies and business history. At the 2008 Sacramento BHC meeting, Professor Eric Godelier (Ecole Polytechnique) delivered a provocative paper examining how this tension has played out in French scholarship and in academic interactions. With his permission, I circulated a revised version to colleagues in France, the US, and the UK; commentaries by Christopher Kobrak (ESCP—Europe, Paris Campus), Paul Tiffany (Haas School, UC-Berkeley), and Andrew Popp (Management School, University of Liverpool) fill out the forum’s discussions. As always, book reviews complete this quarter’s communications to colleagues.

On another front, some years ago a group of Alfred D. Chandler Jr.’s friends and colleagues created a fund to honor his scholarly contributions and to further the study of business history, principally by helping junior scholars take part in the activities of the Business History Conference. We wish to recognize the contributions in 2008 that have helped to support travel grants to Milan for more than 50 graduate students presenting papers at the shared meetings of the BHC and EBHA this past June. The donors are: [End Page 610]

  • Stephen Adams

  • Gerben Bakker

  • Mark Billings

  • Veronica Binda

  • Per Boje

  • Hubert Bonin

  • John K. Brown

  • Marcelo Bucheli

  • Ludovic Cailluet

  • Steven Campbell

  • Albert Carreras

  • Adriana Castagnoli...

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