The articles in this issue of Business History Review treat the themes of globalization and government policy, and the relationships between them. Núria Puig and Adoración Álvaro-Moya's examination of four American companies in Spain in the middle decades of the twentieth century details the way in which American labor and management practices influenced work in their Spanish subsidiaries. Jacob Anbinder's article on General Motors’ public relations operations in the interwar period analyzes a common strategy companies adopted in their expansion across national boundaries—using media, including an employee newspaper, to influence employees’ opinions. General Motors World became an important element of GM's strategy for establishing a global brand. Bernardo Batiz-Lazo and Gustavo A. Del Angel's contribution, “The Ascent of Plastic Money: International Adoption of the Bank Credit Card, 1950–1975,” traces another means by which companies and markets transcended national borders—through technology platforms. Their article outlines the development of the credit card from a specialized mechanism for cooperation among banks and merchants to a global payment system. Finally, Katrin Schreiter and Davide Ravasi consider the complex cultural and economic negotiations between the furniture manufacturer Deutsche Werkstätten Hellerau and the government of the German Democratic Republic in the period after World War II, when strategies for maintaining organizational identity came into conflict with the project of creating a new national industrial identity.
The issue also includes two review essays. Peter Eisenstadt's review essay, centered on Joshua Freeman's Behemoth: A History of the Factory in the Making of the Modern World, considers the role of large factories in shaping the physical, as well as the economic, world as industrialization became a globalized phenomenon. Finally, Daniel Sargent's review essay, “The Fates of the West: Globalization, Populism, and the Prospects for Western Liberalism,” considers Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed, Bill Emmott's The Fate of the West: The Battle to Save the World's Most Successful Political Idea, Edward Luce's The Retreat of Western Liberalism, and Samuel Moyn's Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World.
