In this article, Professor Dintenfass reexamines entrepreneurial efficiency in the interwar British coal industry. Using previously neglected company documents, he shows that cost-reducing and price-enhancing innovations in coal extraction, organizational practice, and marketing were not widely diffused, though neither geology, finance, nor industrial relations inhibited their adoption. He concludes that mismanagement was an important cause of the British coal industry's misfortunes in the 1920s and 1930s, but that the coalowners' failure to employ the new techniques cannot be attributed to the structure of the industry or to the survival of outmoded forms of business organization.

In this article Dr. Michie examines the origins and development of the Canadian securities market from its appearance in the mid-nineteenth century until the First World War. He traces the growth of Canadian-based and Canadian-owned joint-stock enterprise and the rise of a distinct Canadian investing public, which led to the establishment of a Canadian securities market, and he explains why so much Canadian business continued to be transacted on both the London and New York stock exchanges. Dr. Michie also discusses the rivalry between the Montreal and Toronto stock exchanges and its detrimental consequences for the creation of a strong and unified Canadian market. Finally, he argues that, despite Toronto's rapid growth, Montreal remained the financial center of Canada throughout this period.

In this study of a neglected topic, Dr. Channon examines the attempts of British railway leaders to regulate competition among routes. Drawing illustrative material from the management of Anglo-Scottish traffic and making comparisons with the American railroad industry, Dr. Channon concludes that pooling agreements did not provide the long-term stability and savings that railway managers sought. Changes in traffic patterns led to dissatisfaction with pool allocations, and competitive pressures from outside, as well as legal and political uncertainties, undermined cconfidence in the pools. In contrast to the United States, where railroads were able to turn to consolidation after pooling had failed, in Britain this strategy was not a politically viable option.

Historians and social scientists have often described modern America as a uniquely pluralist society in which a collective bargaining model of industrial relations won an early triumph over other conceptions of labor relations. Professor Gerber challenges this traditional view. Comparing American and British thinking and policies relating to labor relations during and just after the First World War, Professor Gerber concludes that, in large part because of the war's impact, corporatist conceptions of political economy had by 1920 achieved a wide appeal in both Britain and America. Though a pluralist conception of collective bargaining may later have become dominant in the United States, at least as of 1920 many parallels existed between the emerging “corporatist bias” of British thinking about labor relations and American thinking about this issue.

In this article, the curator of manuscripts and archives at the Harvard Business School's Baker Library discusses the opportunities and difficulties confronting present-day archivists as they seek to establish rational collecting policies for their repositories. Ms. Lathrop first describes the past focus of Baker Library's collection decisions and the strengths to which those emphases have led. She then discusses some areas of less comprehensive coverage, as well as the general problems archivists face in dealing with twentieth-century materials. She points out that collecting gaps tend to be replicated among other repositories, a situation leading her to believe that a national collecting policy, developed by both historians and archivists, is necessary to ensure the widest possible documentation of the varieties of American business history.