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We investigate how and why the Nokia Corporation failed to develop a successful strategic response to the threats of Apple and Google in the smartphone business and instead worsened its situation through several badly timed decisions. We identify key choices in technology and organisational design that jointly constituted sufficient cause for the abandonment of the mobile phone business. By focusing on choices instead of attributes (e.g. fear or hubris), we make progress in strategic failure research and simultaneously emphasise the strength of oral history methods and the philosophy of history as fruitful starting points for such an inquiry.

PurposeThe primary purpose of this paper was to perform an in‐depth analysis of the strategic process that occurs within family firms.Design/methodology/approachThis study analyzed the historical development of the growth strategies of four family firms in the US, Finland, and Sweden.FindingsThe results of this study suggest that family firms typically adopt conservative strategies in the early part of their life cycle. During their formative years, family firms often implement financially conservative strategies and place an emphasis on maintaining tight control of the strategic decision‐making process within the family unit. However, the competitive pressures experienced by family firms over time often force these companies to embrace a more entrepreneurial posture during the latter stages of their life cycle.Research limitations/implicationsThe stage in the company life cycle plays an important role in determining the strategic behavior of family firms. Future research aimed at replicating the results of this study may help shed further light on the strategic process that occurs within family firms.Practical implicationsAlthough the firms examined in this study were from various cultures, their strategic development over time was very similar. This tentatively suggests that the evolution of the strategic process that occurs within family firms may be generalizable across cultures.Originality/valueOur findings indicate that there may be an important distinction between family firms and entrepreneurial organizations. That is, all family firms are not necessarily entrepreneurial, especially early on in their company life cycle.

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This study analyses the impacts of a technological change (the steam engine) on wage premiums. Using historical employer-employee panel data, we found that steam technology had both new skill-demanding and skill-replacing aspects. The former manifested itself as an increase in the demand for high-skilled engineers, the latter in a decline in the demand for intermediate-skilled, able-bodied seamen and an increase in the demand for unskilled engine room operators. Our panel data analysis, which controls for unobserved heterogeneity, implies that highskilled labourers in abstract tasks and unskilled labourers in manual tasks improved their wage positions relative to intermediate-skilled labourers in routine tasks. These findings are compatible with the hypothesis of technologybased polarisation.

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In this article we want to evaluate how often quantitative tools and methods were utilized in the two premier journals in business history in the 1990s.Thus we tap into an important methodological discussion among the post-Chandlerian business historians. We found that simpler quantitative tools were employed quite often, but not necessarily going much beyond that. Also, it became apparent that the most cited business history articles were often written by scholars coming from ‘outside’ the fluid disciplinary core of business history field. The analyses performed in the article revealed that the level of quantification seemed to have either no discernible impact (Business History Review) or even a negative impact (Business History).

We analyze historical and longitudinal research focusing on industry decline. Our analysis suggests that the literature's general reliance on a few meta-theoretical arguments has important consequences for how decline is framed and explained. We identify four meta-theoretical clusters in the literature: politics and market dynamics are seen as exogenous factors with deterministic features, whereas technology and management capabilities are framed as firm-internal failures with causally questionable explanations of how firm-level characteristics explain industry-level decline. We propose that it is important to understand the limitations of distinct meta-theoretical arguments for an enhanced theoretical and methodological understanding of what industry decline is, how it takes place, and why. Accordingly, this study contributes to business history research by restructuring and clarifying latent theoretical issues, demonstrating the pros and cons of researchers' choices, and offering guidelines and propositions for researchers interested in industry decline.