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In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, the long-held confidence that ‘nationality’ would not matter in a globalised economy has dwindled. As the impact of economic and foreign policy on firms’ internationalisation and investment decisions appears to grow, and economic nationalism built on constructs of ‘nationality of the company’ gains weight, companies doing business abroad, including multinational enterprises operating in the US and Europe, are increasingly exposed to (often unexpected) implications of their ‘nationality’. We elaborate on related perspectives to the theme developed in the IB, global strategy, and international management literature and in business history. Based on these readings, we conceptualise the opaque notion of ‘nationality of the company’ and outline perspectives. We argue that ‘nationality’ appears in very different ways and suggest that research should focus more on specific political and institutional environments, and specific constructs of ‘nationality’.

Social transformation is core to the idea of entrepreneurship, yet it plays a minor role in entrepreneurship research. We explore humanistic approaches to change by building on the Schumpeterian perspective of transformation/creative destruction and expanding it in three critical ways. First, we argue that entrepreneurship and history should engage methodologically with transformation ‘as a perspective’ taken by the researcher or observer. Second, we contend that to explore the process of entrepreneurial transformation historically, it is necessary to engage in a broader conceptualisation of temporality. Third, we posit that to fully grasp transformation, we ought to study not just the reconfiguration of material resources that Schumpeter has proposed but also the immaterial (intellectual and imaginative) re-evaluations that trigger social transformation, thus focussing on the semantics of transformation. The articles in this Special Issue explore entrepreneurship and transformation through these three lenses, making social transformation more central to historical entrepreneurship research.

Utilising a unique and original dataset on the board composition of the 35 largest German chemical producers over the 1950–2015 period, the article tracks the entire lifespan of the industry’s reconstituted board interlock network. Regarding the network as a mechanism for controlling competition among its members, we consider changes in its strength over time. We find that a close-knit network came into existence in the 1950s, culminating in the 1970s and 1980s, after which it began to weaken. We highlight the importance of various meeting places for top-level directors from the chemical industry, including bank boards, and moreover introduce a novel measure that makes it possible to consider the significance of past ties to the strength of the network. Situating the findings in a wider political-economic context, we suggest that in important respects Germany’s coordinated form of capitalism is likely to have been even more coordinated than has been recognised.

This article draws on the concept of ‘strategic action fields’ to examine the interaction of law and organisations in the nineteenth-century United States. Focusing on the emergence of savings banking, it analyses how new legal rules were created to define the actors, actions and relationships that constituted the organisational field. The article develops three conceptual claims about the dynamics of institutional contexts: (a) the configuration of state fields shaped the nature and timing of legal rule making vis-à-vis organisational fields; (b) state actors engaged in ‘inter-field framing’ by applying analogies from the legal field to define social order in the organisational one; and (c) the legal and organisational fields were mutually constituted through these interactions. The article concludes by elaborating on the broader value of the theory of fields in business history.

The article offers a cultural view of narrativity in studies of leadership in addition to the mimetic, the structural and the communicative views to account for the role of culture in making sense of leadership. It proposes three interlinked aspects of narrativity: performativity, structure and cultural embeddedness as methodological considerations challenging the alleged innocence of narratives. It demonstrates the cultural propensity of certain understandings of leadership, and it suggests historical accounts of leadership constitute templates for future understandings of leadership. This is unfolded in the case of a symphony orchestra, and exemplified by two narratives producing different understandings of leadership.

Through a study of the co-operatively organised dairy company Arla the article argues that the influence of co-operative societies in Denmark goes far beyond the economic sphere. Since the founding of the co-operative movement in the late nineteenth century it has been viewed as a unique Danish way into modernity that is more democratic than the traditional process of industrialisation seen in other European countries. Thus the narrative of the co-operatives has become part of Danish memory and identity. In the post-war years, however, and especially in the last two decades, the process of globalisation in the food industry has eroded the foundation of this narrative from within, such that it has begun to turn against the co-operative societies. Accused of being monopolistic, multinational and undemocratic, the companies today find themselves trapped in their own history and storytelling. The article draws on a cultural-historical framework, narrative theory and Pierre Nora's notion of memory.

What can we learn from the detailed exegesis of Carl von Clausewitz for the study of strategy? Based on a detailed reading of Clausewitz' book On War, this paper proposes that Clausewitz' reflections on strategy unfold along two parallel arguments. First, he explores the principal difficulties of a positive theory of strategy. This critical inquiry shows how quantities and qualities influence each other in war; how events emerge rather uncontrollably from the interplay of action and reaction; and how the fog of war puts a veil of uncertainty over all information. Clausewitz's fundamental critique leads him to the conclusion that a normative theory of strategy is impossible. Clausewitz' second stream of thought investigates how strategy could be studied instead. On the one hand – and based on his famous dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means – he suggests understanding strategy as a socio-political (rhetorical) mechanism through which people can be convinced in deliberations about a specific course of action. On the other hand, Clausewitz also reflects on the pedagogy of strategy. He concludes that theory may be useful to educate the mind of the future leader, but not to accompany him on the battlefield. The contribution this paper hopes to make to The Age of Strategy: Exploring the Cultural, Organizational, and Political Dimensions of Strategy is twofold: first, the study of Clausewitz represents a contribution to the study of the history of strategic thought. The second contribution is aimed at the relation between strategy as theory and practice. Following Raymond Aron's suggestion, On War does not offer a normative doctrine but rather a critical theory that equips the student of strategy to understand the task at hand ‘without entertaining any absurd claim to communicate the secret of victory.’

When the Great Northern Telegraph Company in 1913 bought the exclusive rights to exploit the Valdemar Poulsen Arc Transmitter it was not because the company wanted to take advantage of wireless telegraphy. Instead the company decided not to develop or implement the arc transmitter – a decision that has been described as a ‘wasted opportunity’. This article, however, explores the behaviour of Great Northern and argues that there was little else the company could have done because of the structure of international telegraphy. Great Northern reacted as all other cable companies, and in this context the case of the Danish telegraph company is not just about the behaviour of one single firm. Rather, the case reveals important aspects of the business structures of international cable telegraphy and helps us to understand how one of the world's most powerful industries was brought to its knees by a new technology.

This article extends current scholarship on the role of branding and trade marking in establishing competitive advantage. Using a case study of Danish butter exports to the British market, 1880–1914, we demonstrate that many of the technological and organisational innovations in this industry were not in themselves sufficient to guarantee that Danish butter would command price premiums in the British market. We argue that the introduction of the ‘Lurbrand’, together with the rigorous prosecution of vendors misrepresenting other butters as Danish, were vital to maintaining the reputation of Danish butter at a time when rival countries were producing butter of comparable quality. Of particular importance to current debates on branding and trade marking is our finding that independent butter producers collaborated with the Danish government to use the same trade mark and to ensure that state inspection guaranteed that Danish butter was produced consistently to the highest quality.

This article examines the growth strategies and ownership of the 40 largest corporations in Spain and Denmark from 1973 to 2003 in the light of European economic integration. It follows the tradition of the Harvard Program and builds on the work of Richard Whittington and Michael Mayers on the history of European corporations. These studies have been extended in three ways: geographically, introducing a small north European and a medium sized south European economy; methodologically by supplementing internationalization to diversification as main growth strategies; and chronologically by analysing three decades of corporate changes, 1973–2003. The result showed no convergence in diversification or ownership patterns while in both countries the largest corporations were less market oriented and more international at the end of the period.