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This chapter discusses the position of African Americans in management in American corporations since the Civil Rights era. Examining the careers of prominent black executives and the history of anti-discrimination suits filed against major firms, it is argued that African Americans have confronted a glass ceiling in their rise to top corporate leadership position that has changed little in the past thirty years despite a few prominent counterexamples. Meanwhile, black entrepreneurship has increased substantially, with notable success stories in the media and entertainment such as Oprah Winfrey. A broader survey of black capitalism, however, shows that black-owned firms remain smaller and less profitable than white- or other minority-owned businesses. The end of segregation, moreover, decimated some sectors of black enterprise that had served a racially divided marketplace. The chapter concludes on a note of cautious optimism, juxtaposing the important but limited number of high profile success stories with the overall lack of change in the position of black business.

This chapter covers the years up to the official American entry into World War II on the side of Britain and the Soviet Union against Germany, Italy, and Japan. During the years 1933–41, strategies were developed by those six countries and then turned into actual policies that determined the shape of the relations of American big business with Britain and Germany during the subsequent wartime and postwar periods. And this decade was also decisive for the organization of both the world economy and world politics for the following fifty years until the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1989–90.

This chapter examines the third round in the German–American–British business relationship from 1941 to 1957. It begins with an account of Hitler's activities in Eastern Europe, before turning to the magazine article published by American businessman Henry Luce, entitled, “The American Century.” This article postulated that, if the twentieth century had not been an American one in its first half, the United States should at least make every effort to realize this idea in its second half, and shape a peace for the rest of the twentieth century that was based on American principles of sociopolitical and economic organization. From here, the chapter discusses the role of American big business in postwar and Cold War periods, the question of cartels, economic reconstruction, and others.

This chapter traces how American business relations with the two major industrial powers of Europe developed up to 1914. It shows how American economic ties with Britain had been weakening for several years, but then saw a restrengthening as the political threat of a major war loomed larger and larger on the horizon. The Anglo-American relationship became close and in this sense “special” at the outbreak of hostilities between Britain and Germany in August 1914. Meanwhile German–American economic relations, which, despite many political difficulties, had been intensifying after the turn of the century, became antagonistic in the summer of 1914, even if it took until April 1917 for Washington formally to enter the world conflict on the Allied side against Berlin and Vienna.

The American management mystique emerged from and is identified with the management system that grew up inside American business and manufacturing during the past century. This management system appeared in three interrelated places: (1) the shop floor (in factories), (2) the corporation, and (3) the university. This chapter begins by examining all three. It then deals with the propagation of American management ethics, methods, and techniques since World War II. For propagators and propagandized alike, success was achieved less because of measurable or measured appreciations of American management's effect on praxis than because of the mystique engendered by an economically powerful, militarily victorious America. It was the historical situation not the management system that counted more.

This introductory chapter argues that the decline of liberal and progressive politics and the ascent of a business-oriented, neoliberal political culture did not emerge naturally from the exigencies of economic crisis or the inexorable logic of political traditions, but rather as the result of specific efforts by a diverse set of conservative activists. Although their organizational cohesion did not endure, organized American business leaders nonetheless established a vital legacy that continues to shape politics into the twenty-first century. Through their political mobilization, these workhorses of the industrial economy helped establish the political preconditions for the success of conservative politics, electorally and in policymaking. By successfully parlaying their economic clout into a broad-reaching movement, they cemented a conservative and market-oriented political vision whose legacy lingers today.

This chapter focuses on major American business enterprises in France. It addresses three issues. First, did Coca-Cola and the others directly export their products, techniques, and strategies to France, or did they modify their ways to suit the locals? Did they impose or adapt? A second issue is an assessment of the impact of these American multinationals: What kind of reception did they get from French consumers, and what effects did they have on their French competitors? These questions lead toward a third and more general issue—the importance of culture and identity in determining French reaction. Were the perils of these outsiders caused by American managers' misunderstanding or disregard of French values, traditions, and sense of identity? Did culture hamper American business or did it prove so supple that it was of little consequence?

This chapter demonstrates how the Business Roundtable—a consortium of chief executive officers from approximately one hundred and fifty of America's largest publicly and privately held corporations—holds a unique place in the history of business lobbying. It emerged in direct response to business's crisis of confidence and quickly became a powerful symbol of business leaders' desire to shape politics as well as an expression of their collective power. The first decade of the Roundtable's activism coincided with the dramatic shift of production away from the United States, the permanent decline of both productivity growth and unionization, and the supplanting of manufacturing by financial services as the nation's most important industry. The specific policy threats that drove the leaders of American big business to create the Business Roundtable reflected these shifting dynamics.

This chapter explores the fate of diversification in the contested terrain of contemporary Europe. It examines whether European business did step on to the conglomerate bandwagon that American business had pioneered in the 1960s but about which even the Harvard group had misgivings in Europe. It investigates whether Europe also followed the United States in edging down again. It introduces the measures of strategy and strategic change. It examines the historical trends in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. It then looks at the performance, to see how various strategies perform over time and in different contexts.

This concluding chapter summarizes the major points of the preceding chapters. For the period up to World War I, it became clear that the elites of the United States, and its businessmen on the East and West coasts in particular, saw their country as a highly dynamic and modern industrial and financial power. Based on the idea of a competitive capitalism, American big business, in the wake of the great merger wave of the late nineteenth century and congressional legislation that had banned the formation of cartels and monopolies, developed in the direction of an oligopolistic market organization. These developments shaped corporate attitudes and practices toward the domestic and international economy from 1900 onward. No less important, the emergence of the United States as a major industrial power stirred Britain and Germany into responses to the American challenge.

This chapter examines why educational leaders and businessmen in the United States thought it was a good idea to establish business schools in the first place. The answer often offered at the time was that American business itself had grown so big and complex by the turn of the twentieth century that a new university-level education was now required for the new world of managerial work. However, the more powerful rationale was that businessmen wanted the social status and cultural cachet that came with a university degree. The chapter then looks at the Wharton School of Finance and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania, which was founded in 1881 and became the first business school in the United States. All of the more than six hundred business schools founded in the nearly century and a half since descend from Wharton.