Industrial organization and strategy

Subscribe to Industrial organization and strategy

Boundary Maintenance in U. S. Business, 1830-1980

Chair: Benjamin Waterhouse, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

“Shady Dealings: Deception and Fraud in Nineteenth-Century U. S. Business”
Stuart Anderson-Davis, Columbia University

“Oil Horizons: Monopoly Capital in the Texas ‘Petroleum Complex,’ 1900-1940”
Reinhold Martin, Columbia University

“The Folklore of Free Enterprise: Thurman Arnold’s New Deal”
Richard R. John, Columbia University

“Power Move: How Law and Public Policy Reshaped
the Late-Twentieth-Century U. S. Firm”

Laura Phillips-Sawyer, University of Georgia

The Business and Labor of “Quality” in the Twentieth Century

The notion of “Quality” has pervaded business, economic, and work life throughout the twentieth century–animating business people, consultants, policymakers, scientists, and workers, among others, to look and fight for such things as “quality of (work) life,” “quality work,” “quality control,” “quality assurance” (of products and commodities), or “air and water quality.” Some have even argued that after World War II, the social and economic program of American liberal capitalism itself shifted from being primarily concerned with matters of “quantity” towards matters of “quality.”

Economic Transformations: How Diverse Business Actors Reshaped Britain’s Economy between 1860 and 1920

How do economic actors influence change, and what role does business form play in economic development? The period after 1860 in Britain is often characterised by the arrival of free incorporation and the growing dominance of the corporate economy in shaping the trajectory of economic development. Both domestic and comparative explanations of Britain’s economic performance have tended to focus on ‘Big business’ and debates around the ownership and organization of these companies on corporate and economic performance.