"Conglomerates and the High Technology Pathway to Prosperity: Leveraged Buyouts, Electronics Subsidiaries, and the Business of U.S. Firm Growth, 1960-1985"

Recent scholarship in the history of capitalism has reframed our understanding of the “conglomerate bubble” in the United States of the 1960s and 1970s, examining this moment of exuberant firm growth as an extension of high modernism, as a precursor to leveraged buyout maneuvers of the 1980s and financialized debt of the early 2000s, or as a template for manipulating shareholder expectations around earnings and corporate growth. In this paper, I interrogate an under-examined aspect of that period’s conglomerate craze: the ways in which firms associated with emerging high technologies – transistors and electronic computing, satellites and media telecommunications, and aeronautics and systems management – became central to the myth of growth that propelled the conglomerate model. For representative U.S. conglomerates such as Litton Industries, Gulf + Western, ITT, Ling-Temco-Vought, and Teledyne, acquisition of technology-centric subsidiaries, or growth from existing systems technology core businesses, became central to the corporate narratives and financial engineering practices that drove the corporate acquisitions and managerial restructuring central to conglomerate expansion. Drawing on period news accounts, memoirs of business figures and regulators, corporate reports, and a wave of recent scholarly literature re-evaluating the structure, functioning, and financial underpinnings of midcentury American firms, I explore the intertwining of conglomerate identity and high technology rhetoric. Though centered on American firms of the 1960s and 1970s, I reference relevant scholarship on conglomerates in East Asia and Western Europe to illustrate how American firms adopting conglomerate strategies consciously pursued a particular technology-centered framing to inflate value perceptions of their holdings and bring some sense of thematic unity to their far-flung portfolios. If the actual business of conglomerates in the 1960s and 1970s was juggling inflated ledgers, the business image they conveyed was of savvy predictors of future technological trends.