Richard N. Langlois

Richard N. Langlois is Professor of Economics at the University of Connecticut. A native of northeastern Connecticut, he was educated at Williams, Yale, and Stanford. He has been a visiting Senior Fellow at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; an Adjunct (Honorary) Professor at the Copenhagen Business School; and a Distinguished Professor in the School of Economics and Business Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Professor Langlois’s principal research is the economics of organizations and institutions. He is the author (with Paul L. Robertson) of Firms, Markets, and Economic Change: A Dynamic Theory of Business Institutions (Routledge, 1995), which articulates (among other things) the theory of dynamic transaction costs and the theory of modular technological systems. Another focus of Professor Langlois’s work has been the economic history of technology. He has written on such industries as computers, semiconductors, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, and software. His history of the microcomputer industry won the Newcomen Award as the best article in Business History Review in 1992. Recently, Professor Langlois has turned his attention to explaining the changes in corporate organization in the late twentieth century, a set of phenomena he refers to as the Vanishing Hand. His book The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism: Schumpeter, Chandler, and the New Economy (Routledge, 2007) received the 2006 Schumpeter Prize of the International Joseph A. Schumpeter Society. His latest book, The Corporation and the Twentieth Century: the History of American Business Enterprise, will appear from Princeton University Press in 2023.