For almost 100 years, the slogan "Harris' Has It" set a standard for quality merchandise, selection, and personal service. Starting in 1905 with only 25 feet of frontage at its original San Bernardino store, this partnership of three immigrant brothers grew into a corporation of nine stores, with the flagship store alone worth over $1 million. The Harris Company was the first in the region to enhance the shopping experience with the introduction of elevators, electric signs, and escalators. Although the store closed in 1999, the Harris Company is remembered throughout the Inland Empire as a shopping experience that was more than just business, it was "looking after people."
American novelists and poets who came of age in the early twentieth century were taught to avoid journalism "like wet sox and gin before breakfast." It dulled creativity, rewarded sensationalist content, and stole time from "serious" writing. Yet Willa Cather, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, James Agee, T. S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway all worked in the editorial offices of groundbreaking popular magazines and helped to invent the house styles that defined McClure's, The Crisis, Time, Life, Esquire, and others. On Company Time tells the story of American modernism from inside the offices and on the pages of the most successful and stylish magazines of the twentieth century. Working across the borders of media history, the sociology of literature, print culture, and literary studies, Donal Harris draws out the profound institutional, economic, and aesthetic affiliations between modernism and American magazine culture. Starting in the 1890s, a growing number of writers found steady paychecks and regular publishing opportunities as editors and reporters at big magazines. Often privileging innovative style over late-breaking content, these magazines prized novelists and poets for their innovation and attention to literary craft. In recounting this history, On Company Time challenges the narrative of decline that often accompanies modernism's incorporation into midcentury middlebrow culture. Its integrated account of literary and journalistic form shows American modernism evolving within as opposed to against mass print culture. Harris's work also provides an understanding of modernism that extends beyond narratives centered on little magazines and other "institutions of modernism" that served narrow audiences. And for the writers, the "double life" of working for these magazines shaped modernism's literary form and created new models of authorship.
The international or multi-national corporation has become an important phenomenon in today's business world and Massey-Ferguson is an ideal example of such an organization. Through its predecessor companies it can train its history to 1847, and so it has encountered virtually all the difficulties and developments of the last hundred years in business organization and management science. The development has not been straightforward for it has been much more than the growth of a single company in an expanding market. Management reorganization and the introduction of new management planning and control teachniques contributed a good deal to the company's expansion, and because mergers played a vital role, the history of other companies is also involved. Dr. Neufeld's study concentrates on the years after the Second World War, a period in which the company's international operations became increasingly complex. He records the events that helped to shape the company's character and structure, and at the same time investigates the company's successes and failures in adjusting to a changing national and international business environment. His study reveals why Massey-Ferguson developed into a global corporation, an organization that considers the whole of the international environment when making decisions relating to the allocation of its marketing, purchasing, manufacturing and engineering activities.
