Constructing Corporate America: History, Politics, Culture

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 over the past two centuries. The authors challenge standard assumptions about the business corporation's emergence and performance in the United States over the past two centuries. 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 environmental. In doing so, the book breaks with older explanations ground in technology and economics, and treats the corporation for the first time as a fully social institution. Drawing on a variety of social theories and approaches, the essays help to point the way toward future studies of this powerful and enduring institution, offering a new periodization and a new set of question for scholars to explore. The range of essays engages the legal and political position of the corporation, the ways in which the corporation has been shaped by and shaped American culture, the controversies over corporate regulation and corporate power, and the efforts of minority and disadvantaged groups to gain access to the resources and opportunities that corporations control.

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.