Themes in Business and Society – serie

Canada’s social, economic, political, and environmental impacts on the Western Hemisphere have been largely overlooked by historians and other social scientists. Most narratives of the relationships between North America and the emerging markets of the south disproportionately focus on the United States. By downplaying Canada’s role, these narratives have fallen short in reconstructing the history of the region. Opportunism and Goodwill fills in these historical gaps, looking at the dynamics of the relationship between Canada and Colombia as they were spearheaded by Canada’s private sector.Stefano Tijerina argues that since the first era of globalization during the second half of the nineteenth century, Canada’s private sector has carved out niche markets across Latin America, sometimes working independently and in other instances working on behalf of foreign interests. In his historical analysis of these temporal and spatial dimensions, Tijerina shows that the long-term economic development of Canada and Colombia was intertwined and interdependent, ultimately stressing the importance of transnational approaches to the study of history. Contributing to questions about Canada’s "goodwill" and other benevolent constructs, Opportunism and Goodwill sets the historical foundation for current debates about Canadian industries across the world.

In this absorbing narrative, Barry E.C. Boothman traces the history of Abitibi Power & Paper Limited alongside the rise and fall of the newsprint industry and the advent of Canadian corporate capitalism. In the first half of the twentieth century, Abitibi was Canada’s biggest manufacturer – an apparent success story after the Wall Street crash of 1929 and a company deemed "too big to fail" – but the company eventually ended up at the centre of the longest and most controversial bankruptcy in Canadian history.Moving from the frontier areas of northern Ontario to the heart of the continental economy, Corporate Cataclysm shows how competitive strategies, industrial organization, corporate finance, and law combined with the empire-building dreams of entrepreneurs and the concerns of politicians to generate an economic disaster. It then chronicles the disputes and intense strife that plagued Abitibi’s fourteen-year receivership.

The auto sector is North America’s most iconic of industries. Since the North American Free Trade Agreement came into existence in 1994, the sector has undergone tremendous change: escalating concerns around climate change, advances in electric and automated vehicles, deindustrialization/reindustrialization, and the rise of low-cost locations as hubs for manufacturing.The North American Auto Industry since NAFTA examines the issues that have preoccupied the development of policy associated with the manufacture of automobiles in North America. The collection addresses the punctuations that have afflicted the industry since NAFTA’s implementation as well as the slower, incremental evolutions that have also occurred. Several aspects of automobility and the industry are explored, including but not limited to the Canadian, American, and Mexican automotive sectors and their evolution and interaction under evolving trade regimes. The book analyses issues surrounding labour, technology, trade policy, regional development, the environment, and broader societal impacts of the automobile. It also draws on the expertise of a wide cross-section of industry experts and scholars to provide readers with a deeper understanding of the automotive industry and its central role in North America’s economic, business, and political landscape.