Journal article
Accounting for Nonconvergence in Global Wool Marketing before 1939
DT Merrett, S Ville
Business History Review | CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS | Published : 2015
Abstract
From the mid-nineteenth century, raw wool became a global commodity as new producing countries in the Southern Hemisphere supplied the world's growing textile industries in the North. The selling practices of these big-five exporters - Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, and Uruguay - ranged from auction through a hybrid of auction and private sale to exclusively private sale. We explore why these countries persisted with different marketing arrangements, contradicting two streams of literature on institutions: isomorphism and the new institutional economics. The article makes several important contributions through blending distinct branches of theory and by focusing on the int..
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Funding Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Australian Research Council through Discovery Project grant DP1095758. Claire Wright and Alison Haynes are thanked for their research assistance. The authors received helpful advice and suggestions from Andrea Lluch, Luis Bertola, Jorge Alvarez, and Grietjie Verhoef. They are grateful to audiences at Harvard Business School, the FRESH (Frontier Research in Economic and Social History) meeting at the University of South Australia, and the Australian Conference of Economists for comments and suggestions. Gratitude is also expressed to Harvard Business School for providing a Chandler Visiting Scholarship for Ville during the earlier stages of this project. Finally, the helpful comments of three anonymous referees are appreciated.