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Professor of History
John.Heitmann@notes.udayton.edu
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Recent Scholarship & Works in Progress
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Kobrak, Christopher. National Cultures and International Competition: The Experience of Shering AG, 1851-1950 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 394 pp., $50.00 ISBN 0-521-81481-2 Publication Date: September 2002
Christopher Kobrak's National Cultures and International Competition: The Experience of Shering AG, 1851-1950 is anything but a run-of-the-mill company history of one of Germany's best known pharmaceutical firms. The reader should be forewarned, however, that it is not book for casual perusal by the faint-of-heart historian looking for an easy read on the beach. Rather, National Cultures is an intense and thoroughly scholarly work. Yet the rewards from examining this book are considerable, for the author spins an analytical, factually detailed, and broadly reconstructed story. In short, Kobrak tells us much about the evolution of Shering AG from its beginnings as a family-owned pharmacy in 1851, discussing its leadership, organizational structures, and business strategies within the sweep of late 19th and early to mid-20th century German History . The author's title reflects the work's main point; namely, that decision makers at Shering AG were caught between two powerful and seemingly mutually exclusive imperatives, one driven by national concerns and the other by international markets and opportunities. Shering AG, based in Berlin, but with offices and operations scattered around the globe, was a mid-sized German firm with an vast international presence. As such, its primarily German executives could not help but get swept up in the intense nationalism prevalent during the decades before World War I, the negative anti-Versailles Treaty attitudes of the Weimar era, the destructive patriotism that led to the rise of the Nazis, and the ultimate the destruction borne by World War II. Yet Shering AG also was an organization that thrived on scientific discoveries and technological innovations. Hence international markets rather than homeland issues, were key to its long term profitability and successes. How to strike a viable balance between two currents that were often opposed to one another was Shering AG executives' central challenge, a problem, that according to the author, was never solved during the period under study. Put another way, Shering AG executives could never formulate a structure for corporate governance that could detach the firm from a German national context in a manner so as to take full advantage of the firm's pharmaceutical discoveries on the international scene. Kobrak is currently an Associate Professor of Finance at the ESCP-EAP, European School of management. The author began this work while a graduate student at Columbia, and indeed, the book is the outgrowth of a doctoral dissertation and nearly twenty years of study. While there are several slow-going sections of this monograph where accounting ledgers and annual reports are dissected, I found this study for the most part eminently readable. Ambitiously aimed at an audience composed of business practitioners and students as well as historians, upper level undergraduate students taking offerings in business and economic history as well as German history may find it useful. With provocative sections dealing with Shering AG and the Third Reich, the author poses interesting questions concerning corporate and individual responsibility, as well as the role of the business person in the political process. |
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