In this article Professor Walton examines the influence of bourgeois women on industrial production in nineteenth-century Paris. She argues that women, as arbiters of taste and consumers for the family, sought art and originality in manufactured goods, and that their demands in turn fostered handicraft and less skilled hand methods of manufacturing as the best means of providing such goods. By establishing the connections between women's roles and bourgeois demand, and between bourgeois demand and hand manufacturing, this study offers a new perspective on the persistence of hand production in France.

In the following article, Professors Brown and Philips examine two questions concerning wage payment systems. First, has the prevalence of incentive systems been affected by the rise of the modern corporate enterprise? Second, what has been the effect of institutionalized unionism on the prevalence of incentive systems? Brown and Philips explore these issues through a historical case study of the decline of the piece-rate system in the California canning industry, from which they conclude that in the context of Chandlerian industrial development piece-rate systems tend to give way to more complex incentive and hourly wage-rate systems. They explore this hypothesis further through an examination of historical data on wage payment systems for American manufacturing as a whole.

Despite recent interest in the history of the American worker, relatively little attention has been paid to the evolution of corporate employment and labor relations practices, particularly in the nonunion sector. In this article, Professor Jacoby examines the employee attitude testing program at Sears, Roebuck and Company and places it in a larger historical context as well as in the narrower framework of developments in personnel relations. During the 1940s and 1950s the Sears program was one of the most innovative and sophisticated applications of behavioral science to workplace problems, and it served as a model for many other companies. Although the testing program was developed as part of an ongoing effort to forestall unionization, it also had a research component that made important contributions to a number of academic disciplines, particularly organizational theory and industrial sociology.

Originally founded to house the papers and artifacts of the Stevens family, operators of several woolen mills in the Merrimack Valley, the Museum of American Textile History has grown to become a valuable resource for historians and others interested in the rise and fall of the New England textile industry. In the following essay, Dorothy Truman describes the depth and breadth of the museum's collections and highlights their importance to the study of business history.