Constructing Corporate America: History, Politics, Culture

About the Book

Why and how has the business corporation come to exert such a powerful influence on American society? The essays here take up this question, offering a fresh perspective on the ways in which the business corporation has assumed an enduring place in the modern capitalist economy and how it has affected American society, culture and politics. The authors challenge standard assumptions about the business corporation's emergence and performance in the United States since the 1800s. Reviewing in depth the different theoretical and historiographical traditions that have treated the corporation, the volume seeks a new departure that can more fully explain this crucial institution of capitalism. Rejecting assertions that the corporation is dead, the essays show that in fact it has survived and even thrived down to the present in part because of the ways in which it has related to its social, political and cultural environment. In doing so, the book breaks with older explanations ground in technology and economics, and treats the corporation as a fully social institution.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Kenneth Lipartito and David B. Sicilia: Crossing Corporate Boundaries Part I: The Corporate Project 1: Naomi R. Lamoreaux: Partnerships, Corporations, and the Limits on Contractual Freedom in US History: An Essay in Economics, Law, and Culture 2: Colleen A. Dunlavy: From Partners to Plutocrats: Nineteenth-Century Shareholder Voting Rights and Theories of the Corporation 3: Kenneth Lipartito: The Utopian Corporation 4: Gerald Berk: Whose Hubris? Brandeis, Scientific Management, and the Railroads Part II: Corporate-State Interdependencies 5: Louis Galambos: The Monopoly Enigma, the Reagan Administration's Antitrust Experiment, and the Global Economy 6: David M. Hart: Corporate Technological Capabilities and the State: A Dynamic Historical Interaction 7: David B. Sicilia: The Corporation Under Seige: Social Movements, Regulation, Public Relations, and Tort Law since World War II Part III: The Business of Identity 8: Charles Dellheim: The Business of Jews 9: Juliet E. K. Walker: White Corporate America: The New Arbiter of Race? 10: Melissa Fisher: Wall Street Women's Herstories 11: Eric Guthey: New Economy Romanticism, Narratives of Corporate Personhood, and the Antimanagerial Impulse Afterword: Kenneth Lipartito and David B. Sicilia: Towards New Renderings

About the Author :
Kenneth Lipartito is Professor of History, and Chair of the Department of History, at the Florida International University. His previous publications include Investing for Middle America: John Elliott Tappan and the Origins of American Express Financial Advisors (St. Martins Press, 2001). David B. Sicilia is Visiting Fulbright Professor at the Copenhagen Business School. His previous publications include The Greenspan Effect (McGraw-Hill, 2000) with Jeffrey L. Cruikshank, The Engine that Could: Seventy-Five Years of Values-Driven Change at Cummins Engine Company (Harvard Business School Press, 1997) with Jeffrey L. Cruikshank, and The Entrepreneurs: An American Adventure (Houghton-Mifflin, 1986) with Robert Sobel.

Review :
The great achievements of Constructing Corporate America lie in its compelling demonstrations that US corporations' forms, functions, and discourses evolve - and still change - as products of their cultural, social, legal, and political environments. The authors of this unusually cohesive and well-written collection vary in how they balance abstractions with specifics, but all offer rich insights and abundant citations that can guide readers toward both theory and evidence. In looking beyond standard notions to explore corporate history and functions, Constructing Corporate America reflects and advances the state of the art in business history. This superb volume has demolished what was left of the artifical and unfortunate walls formerly separating business history from what everyone interested in American history should be reading.