Here are links to articles about Illinois businesses and industries, about the people who run and regulate them, about the relationship between business and labor, about the economic aspects of production, pollution, and regulation, about the business aspects of broader topics from energy and agriculture to urban development and government regulation, and commentaries and reviews of books about the same as they affected mainly Springfield and Chicago.

 

I worked for more than thirty years as a contributing editor to the fine monthly magazine published by The Conference Board, the New York-based information organization that was an intellectual servant to the nation’s Fortune 100 companies. I did a little of this for them and a little of that, but mainly I supplied feature stories (usually covers) in which I tried to elucidate the mysteries of the world to the men and (a few) women who ran our nation's biggest companies.

 

For all that, I never considered myself a business reporter. Only a series of editors at the Conference Board—Lewis Bergman, Howard Muson, Al Vogl, and Matthew Budman—who took the wide view of their magazine’s responsibilities to its readers (and to its patron organization) would have allowed me onto their pages. Only two of those many piece appear in this archives, none of the rest of them having an Illinois focus. The work did however give me a grounding in business issues.

 

During my Chicago years I wrote regularly for a similar magazine, a monthly titled Chicago Enterprise, which was published by the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, another (albeit local) big-company voluntary organization. (See Publications for more about Chicago Enterprise.) There again I wrote less about businesses and businesspeople than I did about the conditions—economic, social, and geographical—that affected business, this time in and around Chicago. Several of those pieces appear here.

 

Of course, business intrudes on the life of the commonwealth in a hundred ways, and while I only occasionally wrote about business per se for my other publications, business was an aspect of a great many Illinois topics, and thus of the articles listed below.

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Interested readers also should know that I devoted a chapter in my history of mid-Illinois—"Growing Factories"—to industry as it affected that part of the state.  See Corn Kings & One-Horse Thieves. See also "Public enterprise: Development and relocation incentives" on the Politics & government page.