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Thomas Friedman's 2005 book The world is flat was meant as a wake-up call to those in the United States who direct its corporate boardrooms and govern its political/economic state, a warning that globalization has brought about a level economic 'playing field' in which the United States might be losing the game. As rhetoric, the title certainly works well to raise fears about North America's future economic role. It also works in concretizing a popular view of globalization, a view that obscures its uneven, discordant, and decidedly unflat processes and practices. In this paper I help deconstruct this view by fleshing out the everyday ways through which United States expanded economically in its early (1890-1927) global empire. Based on archival work in Argentina, Russia, Scotland, and the United States, I provide a historical look at encounters between North American business men and women and their foreign customers, students, and workers. Focusing on the diverse practices and personal encounters that were critical to the early global efforts of select United States-based corporations, I expose the uneven, contested, and messy ways in which economic expansion works. By analyzing early global encounters when the economic dominance of the United States was just becoming apparent, I am able to highlight the sheer complexity and truly relational nature of United States' expansion in the early twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper illustrates the construction of CEO charisma within the US stock market. By metaphorically employing the myth of the Minotaur, we discuss three forces underlying the rise of heroic CEO images in the USA: Ariadne, or charismatic leadership theory and its formulation of charisma; Theseus, or the CEOs struggling to obtain power over stock market actors; and the Minotaur, or the stock market itself and the securities analyst profession. Building on the literature on organizational symbolism, we present a qualitative study of two CEO successions, focusing on the form and content of the persona and the vision projected by CEOs and elaborated by securities analysts. The results suggest that jointly constructing charisma through discourse, CEOs and analysts enact a form of power that does not lie in top-down coercion, but rather on the emergent, active involvement and contribution of its very subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social and cultural contexts, as well as public policies, shape the experiences of women and men in demanding occupations. This article compares work-family themes in the conference papers to research outside of the United States, especially to a mid-1990s survey of twelve hundred women and men holding the highest positions in elected politics and business in twenty-seven capitalist democracies, the Comparative Leadership Study. Analyses show that most leaders in the comparative study have married and are parents. Family responsibilities fall disproportionately on the women in top leadership positions. Marriage and parenthood impinge on women's careers to a far larger extent than they do on similarly situated men's. An international perspective on work-family conflicts highlights ways in which the United States is similar to and different from comparable countries. In many ways, the United States differs little. Yet the Nordic countries appear more successful in lessening work-family conflicts, even for top leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large numbers of new products introduced annually by manufacturers may strain the relationship between retailers and manufacturers regarding assortments carried by retailers. For example, many retailers in the grocery industry will agree to broaden their assortments only if the manufacturer agrees to pay slotting fees for the new products. We investigate the role played by slotting fees in coordinating the assortment decisions in a supply chain. To do so, we study a single-retailer, single-manufacturer supply chain, where the retailer decides what assortment to offer to end customers. Double marginalization results in a discrepancy between the retailer's optimal assortment and the assortment that maximizes total supply chain profits. We consider a payment scheme that is analogous to slotting fees used in the grocery industry: the manufacturer pays the retailer a per-product fee for every product offered by the retailer in excess of a certain target level. We show that, if the wholesale price is below some threshold level, this payment scheme induces the retailer to offer the supply-chain-optimal assortment and makes both parties better off. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the role of lay people during the period called 1859 Revival. It mentions that the transatlantic spiritual revival which occurred from 1857 to 1859 and recalls that the spiritual life in several churches in the U.S. had declined in the mid-1850s. Several lay leaders during the revival are cited which include lay city missioner Jeremiah Lanphier and mass evangelist Dwight L. Moody. It also examines the contributions made by women during the period including Phoebe Palmer of Scotland and Geraldine Hooper of England.

Since most researchers use the terms "culture" and "nation" interchangeably, the majority of empirical cross-cultural studies aiming to isolate the role of culture tend to be cross-national studies that are confounded with the influence of the national environment. This study employs a hybrid, quasi-experimental design to investigate whether the cultural or national effects have a stronger influence on entrepreneurs' perception of the environment and their strategic orientations. Specifically, I draw on three samples of entrepreneurs from two cultures and two countries, namely, mainland Chinese, Chinese Americans, and Caucasian Americans. Such a quasi-experimental design allows us to better isolate the role of culture. Compared with the cultural effect, the national effect is more influential. In light of China's emerging economy in which entrepreneurship figures prominently, these findings point to the importance of institution-building efforts that foster a more entrepreneur-friendly national environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the traits of successful entrepreneurs. Locating new businesses has always been a problem. By their very nature, they do not appear in any listings until they are already established and have identified themselves as requiring a telephone, a credit rating, as employing others, or as registering for Value Added Tax or sales tax. Moreover, these listings are not always publicly available, they may be incomplete or out-of-date, or they may not list the firm by age or by size, making the task of isolating the new and small firm both long and laborious. On the surface, however, this problem should not arise when attempting to find the more established firms and their founders. In 1992, researchers were asked by a European Task Force to conduct a pilot study to assess the viability and cost of identifying the hundred largest, high-growth, entrepreneurial firms that would form the base for the creation of the European equivalent of the American Business Conference. This group would not only provide visible role models for other entrepreneurs across Europe, but would also be an important "sounding board" for European policy in relation to the entrepreneurial firm.