"How Imagining “the Future” Blurred the Lines between Business and Government in the 1960s and 1970s"

This paper explores how a wide-ranging dialogue about “the future” helped American business managers rethink the relationship between businesses, government, and consumers in the 1960s and 1970s. During these decades, both politicians and business executives became concerned about managing a world that seemed to be changing in dramatic ways. As a 1968 General Electric report put it, the world was in a period of “accelerating change” that would “hasten the obsolescence of traditional political, economic, and ideological boundaries.” For business executives, the emerging future was presenting businesses with both new opportunities and challenges. As leaders in both business and government contributed to publications such as The Futurist and attended events like Stanford Research Institute’s International Industrial Conferences, they concluded that new demands being placed on corporations were blurring the lines between business and government. Drawing on archival material from the Institute for the Future, the Stanford Research Institute, the Nixon Administration, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, I argue that this preoccupation with the “the future” influenced both policy debates and a broader public’s understanding of the corporation’s role in the world economy.