Gendered Capitalism

Sewing Machines and Multinational Business in Spain and Mexico, 1850-1940

Paula A. De La Cruz-Fernández, Paula De La Cruz-Fernández

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367770433
• eBook ISBN: 9781000384826
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Gendered Capitalism: Sewing Machines and Multinational Business in Spain and Mexico, 1850–1940 is a history of the gendered corporation, a study that examines how ideas and ideals about domesticity and the cultures of sewing and embroidery, being gender-specific, shaped the US-headquartered Singer Sewing Machine Company's operations around the world. In contrast to production-driven and culture-neutral analyses of the multinational enterprise, this book focuses on both the supply and the demand side to argue that consumers and the cultural worlds of those—mainly women—using the sewing machine for personal purposes or for the market shaped corporate organization.

This book is a global history of Singer, but it also focuses on the cases of Spain and Mexico to highlight nations where the sewing machine multinational never established manufacturing operations. Casa Singer was a mostly profitable and a long-term selling and marketing operation in both countries. Gendered Capitalism demonstrates that local Spanish and Mexican agents, both men and women, developed and expanded Singer's selling system to the extent that the multinational company was seen as domestic, both in the location sense, and because of its focus on the private sphere of the home. By bringing the cases of Spain and Mexico, and the cultural, everyday realm of practices related to sewing and embroidery that the sewing machine was part of, to the center of the study of international business, Gendered Capitalism further reveals the layers of complexities and multitudes that conform the history of global capitalism.

This book will be of interest to readers and scholars in the fields of business history, economic cultural history, management studies, international business, women's history, gender studies, and the history of technology.

1
Multinationals Threads

A History of Global Singer

By the end of the nineteenth century there were several US-headquartered manufacturing enterprises operating in Europe, Latin America, Canada, and to a lesser extent in Asia and Africa. In less than thirty years, companies such as International Harvester (McCormick Harvesting Machine Company), the National Cash Register Company, Standard Oil, and Singer had grown from single manufacturing operations in the American Northeast to become multiunit organizations with operations overseas. Through subsidiaries and often times by establishing sales operations only, US companies employed thousands of factory managers, factory operators, selling agents, and many other professionals to make sure that new machines such as reapers and cash registers had a place in global markets. By the end of the 1910s, the list of investing companies abroad and the structure of these pioneers had matured and was well established (Wilkins 1970:46, 1974).

In the period between the mid-nineteenth century and the end of World War I, also called the first globalization era, multinationals emerged as key players in the global economy. Scholars have set apart the development of the corporation, and of the US multinational corporation in particular, as a unique model during this time frame. The multinational firm is broadly defined as a business enterprise that operates in other countries in addition to the location where it is headquartered. The multiunit and hierarchical structure of the parent company, integrated under a single organization, was often mirrored abroad as well. The home economy, where the business generally is first created or incorporated, is where headquarters often remain and from where top executive decisions are transferred down through managers and other locations worldwide. Host economies are the countries where foreign firms have appendage operations, which for the most part follow the model of the parent company, or the organization based in the home economy (Wilkins 1969; Kozul-Wright and Rowthorn 1998; Jones 2005; Silva Lopes et al. 2019). Thus the multinational corporation becomes global as it becomes local. It negotiates with consumer markets and establishes and deals with legal and other limitations to foreign business, world trading, and work trading patterns that vary from the home country, ultimately transforming cultures of work and management both at home and also in the host economies.

The US multinational corporation soon became a competitor in size and expansion to German and British businesses by the turn of the twentieth century, and the end of World War I opened a new era for US-headquartered companies. In Latin America, the war years were a period of expansion for most US businesses—except in Mexico where the Revolution (1910–1917) put a stop to the Southern neighbor’s second place in the ranking of US foreign investment. The Ford Motor Company, for example, looked south at a time when plants in Western Europe were turning into war production efforts and expanded rapidly in Brazil. In Europe, Spain was an exception for the opposite reason, as it remained neutral in World War I. Singer offices and sales increased steadily during the first three decades of the twentieth century. In Spain, it was not until the Civil War that started in 1936 and later when Francisco Franco’s dictatorship began in 1939 that Singer encountered resistance or competition to its operations in the country since 1870.

A global history of the multinational enterprise Singer follows a parallel, but different, chronology to the most common narratives and histories of international business written with a North-Atlantic emphasis. This chapter, and its focus on marketing, presents a perspective on foreign business that emphasizes continuity instead of breakthrough-obstacles and host economies’ deficiency. From 1970 to 1990, historians of the economy in Latin America first focused on foreign business to denounce dependence and later turned to local histories of industrialization and economic development to claim non-dependency (Haber 1997; Bulmer-Thomas 2003; O’Brien 2007; Beatty 2015). Imbued in social history, and in the study of both formal and informal imperialism, the business history of Latin America before 1990 parted ways from those business scholars in the Northern Hemisphere deeply focused on understanding the managerial working of enterprises. In Spain, a great part of business history has been centered on local firms and the negotiations of foreign companies for protectionism during the dictatorship and throughout the twentieth century. Recent studies of entrepreneurs and business history reveal the richness of local sources and the unique stories of growth and internationalization strategies of local firms and subsidiaries in Southern Europe and Latin America (Miller and Dávila 1999; Amatori and Jones 2003; Álvaro Moya 2010, 2012). This chapter looks into foreign business in both the home country and in host economies in order to highlight the connections between organizational growth of the parent company and the agency of local business in building the Singer Sewing Machine Company.

Importantly, by bringing global marketing and the so-called peripheral local business endeavors into the picture, the global history of Singer from 1870 to 1940 contrasts with previous perspectives that define the expansion of the multinational as aggressive. By this scholars mean that companies, especially US companies in Latin America, and Singer as well elsewhere, expanded fast and often dodged local particularities (O’Brien 1999, 2007; De Grazia 2005; Gordon 2008). In contrast, my research indicates that the evolution of Singer as a multinational business is one of steady organizational development, global integration, and multinational cultural embeddedness. Most studies on Singer examine the history of the global firm from its foundation in the nineteenth century to World War I. Robert B. Davies’ first global examination of the Singer Sewing Machine Company in 1976 is still to date the most inclusive study of how the sales organization developed around the world. Davies’ examination, in contrast to scholars after him, argues that the company’s expansion was steadfast, yet not forceful. More recent research has portrayed Singer’s international expansion in a diffusionist and unilinear framework, understanding the process of Singer global business operations as having a settled managerial plan since early in its international expansion that derived from center to periphery (Davies 1976; Godley 2006; Gordon 2012). Experienced US Singer agents were in charge of developing operations abroad, but soon managers in host economies were able to take control of doing business on the ground. Singer’s uniform marketing structure established by the turn of the twentieth century in more than twenty nations emerged from selling both in the US and in local economies, and they were the ones that kept the business running (see Chapter 2). The company sent out agents first, but they were no longer at the center after the body of operations was working—and they mostly served as legal representatives rather than business gurus—which in the case of Mexico, Spain, Italy, Russia, Germany, Eastern Continental and Mediterranean Europe, Japan, Canada, and India was true by the 1900s through the mid-twentieth century. The development of the business in the US was part of the global story as well. Singer’s system, as Andrew Godley (2006) explains, was developing simultaneously alongside its expansion in Great Britain and the rest of the world in locations such as Russia and Germany (Carstensen 1984). This chapter demonstrates that the history of the multinational Singer is one of many intersected national and international experiences.

The following lines focus on the one-hundred-year history of the organization in the US and in different countries around the globe, with an emphasis on the reaches of Singer management not only in manufacturing but also in all appendages of the business of distribution and relations with the consumer. This analysis examines marketing operations and the structural units derived such as instructional organizations. International operations and the building of an organizational skeleton to control them were a key concern throughout the first five decades of operations; by 1920, a pattern for business had been defined and Singer looked the same in thousands of retail spots and offices on every continent.

The 1850s and 1860s initially focused on the US, yet from the presidency of Edward Clark (1876–1882) on to Milton Lightner’s in 1950, Singer’s history is fundamentally a global history (Table 1.1). The decades between 1880 and 1900 were ones of growth and expansion, establishing the first plants that would be able to supply enough machines to stores in more than twenty countries. But after 1900 and through 1960, Singer continued to grow without much organizational change or innovation. Manufacturing had expanded worldwide by the 1900s. Singer produced sewing machines in five plants distributed in the US, Canada, Scotland, Austria, and Russia. Between 1900 and the beginning of the twenty-first century, there had been a total of fourteen factories operating in Europe, Latin America, Turkey, Japan, and Taiwan (see Table 1.2). More plants meant more managers, and more sales meant more employees working in both distribution and marketing. Douglas Alexander (in office 1905–1949) was the president who traveled the most to examine the company’s operations abroad, and Lightner had to deal with the fragmentation of the management in international offices in the 1960s. Although most factories outside the US gained much autonomy after this time, and most of them also closed in the 1980s in deindustrializing countries and because of greater national competition, Singer had continued to exert exceptional market dominance through the 1960s (Jones 2005).

Table 1.1 Singer Presidents, 1851-1965, and Major Organizational Milestones

Name	Dates in office	Milestone
Isaac Merrit Singer (1811–1875)	1851–1863	Invention and patent war in the US
		Mass production system, major factory established in Elizabethport, New Jersey
Inslee A. Hopper	1863–1876	Incorporation of The Singer Manufacturing Company of New York, 1863
		Singer exports to various locations in the world, especially Latin America and the Caribbean
		First manufacturing plant abroad opens in Scotland
Edward Clark	1876–1882	Direct selling system and store system developed in the US and the UK
		Introduction of novel installment payments options for family sewing machines
		Over six–months long showcase of domestic sewing machines at Singer's own building at the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia (1876)
George Ross McKenzie	1882–1889	Expansion and introduction of standardized selling system abroad
		Art or Embroidery Department established
		Manufacturing in Canada, Germany, and the UK
Frederick Gilbert Bourne	1889–1905	Singer displays inaugurated in the Liberal Arts Building and the Machinery Hall at the World's Columbian Exhibition (1893)
		Establishment of the Export Agency, Orient Department, and Trademarks Department
		Standardization and integration of selling companies and organizations around the world
Douglas Alexander	1905–1949	Educational Department created in the 1920s
		Publication of the Red S Review
		Selling in more than thirty countries. Manufacturing in eleven countries (not simultaneously, see Table 1.2)
		Sequestration of Russia's Singer factories and selling organization
Milton C. Lightner	1950–1958	Centennial celebrations
		Singer moves toward the production of other household goods

Source: Adapted from Davies (1976) and a variety of archival sources listed at the end of this chapter.

...

Table 1.2 Singer Manufacturing Plants Throughout the World, 1857 to Early 2000

Location	Opening date	Closing date
Elizabethport, New Jersey	1857 (this plant converted into war effort production during World War I and World War II)	1982
South Bend, Indiana, US (Cabinet factory)	Mid-1860s	1957
Kilbowie, Clydebank, Scotland	1867,1885	1980
Montreal, Quebec, Canada	1883	1906

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Multinationals Threads: A History of Global Singer
• 2 Singer in Spain and Mexico: A History of Collective Entrepreneurship
• 3 The Consumer as Marketing Expert: Sewing, Embroidery, and Singer Global Marketing
• 4 Female Economies in the Era of Global Capitalism: Credit and Entrepreneurship in Sewing and Embroidery
• Conclusion: Towards a Gendered History of International Business
• Index