I began my career as a historian of technology and a business historian (MIT PhD '88) and taught in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for 32 years. Around the turn of the twentieth-first century, I re-conceptualized myself as a historian of capitalism, which, for me, was a means of integrating business history, history of technology, labor history, and political economy in my research and teaching. Having retired from teaching in 2019, I am now able to concentrate on my research and writing. My latest publication is Small, Medium, Large: How Government Made the U.S. into a Manufacturing Powerhouse (Polity Books, 2024), on which I based a background paper for the World Bank's World Development Report 2025: Standards for Development. I am currently working on a history of the corporation in the U.S. for Polity Books as well as an essay on the history of "economic history."

A key theme motivating my research is the relationship between political and economic change—in particular, understanding the manifold ways in which economic change has been shaped by government policy, legal infrastructure (e.g., property rights), and the overall structure of political institutions. For this, comparative history is indispensable, and from the get-go I have been a comparativist at heart, with a particular interest in U.S. and German industrialization.