ABSTRACT
This article concerns the long-term relation between market formation and corporate strategies in Danish business history, 1850–2000. The article follows the changing market formation in Danish capitalism from the early, private, competitive stage via the private regulation of the early twentieth century and the public restricted capitalism of the mid-twentieth century towards the last phase of increasing market based competition after 1980. Throughout the period, I will use the brewery group Carlsberg – founded in 1847 – as a microeconomic mirror showing how a dominant and important corporation responded – and contributed – to the Danish phases of market regulation. The underlying hypothesis of the article is that Danish capitalism has developed through historic phases of very different types of market formation – and the critical question is how these various phases related to microeconomic corporate strategies. In other words, how market formation affected corporate strategies regarded in a long-term business historical perspective.
