CONSTRUCTING CORPORATE AMERICA: HISTORY, POLITICS, CULTURE; ED. BY KENNETH LIPARTITO

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 as enduring place in the modern capitalist economy, and how it has affected American society, culture and politics over the past two centuries. Th 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 environment. 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 questions 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. 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.

Lipartito (history, Florida International University) and Sicilia (history, University of Maryland) present essays on why and how the business corporation has come to exert such a powerful influence on American society. Contributors from different theoretical and historiographical traditions challenge standard assumptions about this crucial institution of capitalism. Breaking with older explanations grounded in technological determinism and neoclassical economics, they treat the corporation as a fully social institution, examining the legal and political position of the corporation, controversies surrounding corporate regulation, and the efforts of disadvantaged groups to gain access to resources that corporations control. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This collection of cutting-edge research reviews the evolution of the American corporation, the domination trends in the way it has been studied, and at the same time introduces some new perspectives on the historical trajectory of the business organization as a social institution There is general consensus that, by the end of the nineteenth century, corporations were critical to the task of mobilizing capital for large-scale industry.