Although Geoffrey Jones's book covers a fairly short period—from 1965 to 1990—it could not have been an easy history to write. Unilever is one of the world's largest multinational conglomerates. Throughout much of its history it behaved more like a portfolio of businesses rather than a unified organization with a strong corporate identity. Even after rationalizing its businesses during the 1980s and 1990s, the scope of Unilever's products remains broad. And the firm has an unusual dual governing structure, with headquarters in both London and Rotterdam.

How does one tell the story of such a complex firm? To manage both the historical and thematic aspects, Jones divides his book into two parts. The first one-third or so chronicles Unilever's history from 1965 to 1990. The rest of the book examines the firm's “Dynamics and Routines,” including chapters on marketing and brands, emerging markets, and corporate culture.

If the book has an overarching theme, it is Unilever's protracted attempt to overcome its historic aversion to acting cohesively. Unilever's very origins militated against centralization. It began life as a multinational, the result of a 1929 merger between a group of Dutch companies and the United Kingdom's Lever Brothers. (The dual-nation governing structure was set up primarily for tax purposes.) The firm grew through opportunistic acquisitions rather than organically. In the early twentieth century, the need to secure a steady source of palm oil had led Lever Brothers into Africa, where Unilever eventually built an impressively large and diverse business, then southeast Asia. Later, Unilever's tea interests pushed the firm into India. In stark contrast to rival Procter & Gamble (a comparative latecomer in the multinational arena), Unilever made little attempt to impose a “Unilever way” of doing business on its acquired firms. There was, moreover, an understanding that the Dutch would not meddle with the British parts of the business, and vice-versa. The two parts of the company did not even communicate with one another much, save through the Special Committee. Aware of these shortcomings, the firm in the 1950s implemented a “Co-ordination” program to better manage its product groups. But the program applied only to Europe and the United Kingdom, and coordinators were given the power only to advise and persuade. Unilever's growing investment in the foods business also worked against centralization because markets for foods tend to be much more localized than those for products such as detergents and personal care.

Unilever was a prime example of a firm that was run through informal networks rather than by formalized, bureaucratic methods that would have allowed for a more analytical approach to yields and returns. Underperforming businesses were tolerated because few in the firm wished to judge performance solely by the criteria of net return on sales, or return on capital employed. Strong-willed companies within Unilever, such as T.J. Lipton in the United States, succeeded in fending off any interference from London even when intervention was well justified. The United African Company subsidiary became a miniconglomerate in its own right and operated with almost complete autonomy. Unilever's strong respect for local autonomy resulted in an organizational structure based on nation rather than product. The structure was advantageous during crises such as World War II, but it proved much less so when Europe began to integrate, international competition grew keener, consumer tastes began to converge, and retailers and their private-label brands became more powerful. Extreme decentralization kept the firm from achieving economies of scale and scope, hampered the transfer of knowledge among the different parts of the organization, and slowed the internationalization of its strongest brands. One might expect that decentralization would have fostered more innovation and “intrapreneurship,” but these did not become a strong part of the corporate culture either.

Where the firm did succeed was in emerging markets. The strengths that Unilever cultivated—networks, informal methods, and national (rather than product) expertise—served it well in volatile places such as Africa and South America. Jones treats this success as an anomaly, and here his business-school orientation and interest in intrafirm transfers of knowledge may have skewed his perspective somewhat. Certainly it would be difficult to craft a good business-school case study about how informal business and government networks, along with that slippery thing called “influence,” can play a critical role in a multinational's success. And country-specific knowledge is, by its nature, not amenable to replication. Yet Unilever clearly had impressive skills in these areas, which probably deserve greater attention.

In the mid-1980s, when terms such as synergy and core competency had become management buzzwords, and conglomerates grew increasingly vulnerable to leveraged buyouts, Unilever finally got serious. It shed noncore businesses along with its United Africa Company subsidiary. Simultaneously, the firm bolstered its cleaning, personal care, and foods businesses. By 1990 when this history ends, Unilever was still far from achieving its potential efficiencies. Its stock traded at a 20 percent discount to competitors', a reflection of the market's dissatisfaction with the slow pace of restructuring. (As of early 2006, the jury was still out on whether Unilever would succeed in growing its markets while continuing to improve operating margins.)

A commissioned history is always a delicate balancing act between the needs of the commissioning organization and the professional standards of the scholar it authorizes to tell its story. Jones has balanced these tensions to write an impressively thorough and candid account of Unilever that will stand as the definitive history of the company during this period. Still, the book shows some of the limitations of a commissioned history, including a too-tight focus on the organization at the expense of larger historical developments—in this case the evolution of multinationals, of which Unilever was an early prominent example. And because there are previous volumes covering Unilever's history up to 1965 (Charles Wilson, The History of Unilever: A Study in Economic Growth and Social Change. London: Cassell, 1954: Volume 1 and 2. New York: Praeger, 1968: Volume 3), Jones's volume does not contain the whole story of how Unilever's corporate DNA was created and embedded. To gain these broader perspectives, scholars should also read Wilson's earlier volumes as well as Jones's Multinationals and Global Capitalism: From the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).