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This chapter argues that a focus on big business has distorted the understanding of the legal history of the corporation. The relevant context for understanding the evolution of the form must be broadened to include two related but somewhat contradictory trends: first, the democratization of the corporate form of enterprise (that is, its adoption by increasing numbers of small businesses); and second, a growing tendency in the general culture to see enterprises as manifestations of collective action rather than individual initiative. These trends forced courts and policy makers to reconsider the nature of corporations and also created considerable confusion about how corporations differed from the other main organizational form employed by small businesses — partnerships. The end result of this reconsideration was a rigid definition of the two forms that severely limited the contractual freedom of small businesses.

This chapter describes a period when in spite of the scale and nature of British business activities and the emergence of big business (mostly through intense merger activity), there was a persistence of personal and proprietorial capitalism, as well as the extent to which firms operated in dense industrial districts that afforded extensive opportunities to externalize a wide range of activities. An analysis of the drivers, using a force-field diagram, demonstrates how the British environment was not conducive to the development of managerial capitalism.

This chapter demonstrates why economic nationalism in India both contributed to and coexists with the liberalization process initiated in 1991, a year of substantial reforms. The chapter captures the about face of India’s capitalists from seeking protection to embracing globalization by examining the outlook of the capitalist class as represented by India’s big business. The chapter argues that this transformation reflects the evolution of Indian capitalism resulting from industrialization under the older autonomous strategy. Furthermore, embracing liberalization became both possible and necessary for India’s capitalists with the Indian state also adjusting to the imperatives of national capitalist development. The state has continued to assist the capitalist class in different ways and in turn Indian capital has gained increased leverage with the state and greater visibility in the world economy. Consequently, Indian capital has expanded globally and become less industrial and more integrated into global production and financial systems.

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 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.

A narrative analysis of New Economy romanticism as a stylized genre of media hype reveals how the framing of celebrity business leaders folds individual personalities together with corporate structures in ways that mirror the persistent American confusion over the simultaneously private and public identity of the firm. Media coverage of Ted Turner, Bill Gates, and Jim Clark exhibits a progression away from traditional strategies for legitimizing corporate activity toward antimanagerialism — a romanticized assault on the legitimacy of powerful bureaucratic organizations that paradoxically legitimizes corporate power itself. This argument expands the notion of what counts as governance literature to include business biography and even pop culture narratives, and to embrace a range of broader cultural issues such as the challenge the corporation poses for the American liberal imagination, and the question of what it means to be a person in a corporate society.

This chapter starts with a discussion of the development of the highly diversified business/industrial groups that have grown in late‐industrializing countries – as exemplified by the zaibatsu in Japan, and the chaebol in South Korea. Such big businesses raise various issues, including economic performance, and their social effects, but this chapter is mainly concerned with two further issues: the magnitude and causes of concentration, of which there has been no systematic study; and the support of, and the discipline by, the government. These issues are discussed under the headings of market concentration, corporate strategy towards diversification, and the discipline of monopoly power.

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 addresses the widespread assumption that capitalism's future can best be understood as made up of more, and better, technology. The scale of scientific and technological activity today is wholly unprecedented, and guarantees a flood of new knowledge and things. A succession of “longwave theories” have tried to make sense of the long cycles of economic change, and now hint at a new kind of economy emerging from low carbon technologies, broadband, genomics, and nanotechnology. But technologies have always been as much shaped by societies as shaping them, and people should expect struggles to shape technology and science—struggles that will often pit big governments and big business against the public.

This chapter looks at Imperialism: A Study in the context of modern knowledge of the size, distribution, and ownership of foreign investment and its place in the British economy. It tests the book's argument that the costs of empire were paid by the nation as a whole, but only a very small elite got the benefits. Three brief case studies are also presented. The first is concerned with the background to the occupation of Egypt in 1882, the second with the origins of the Boer War of 1899-1902, and the third investigates the British role in the scramble for China between 1895-1914. There may be more mileage in future in developing Hobson's thoughts on the rise of big business and cartels in Imperialism: A Study and in The Evolution of Modern Capitalism than in pursuing the more traditional lines of Hobsonian thinking.

Direct Marketing principles remain the same whatever the size of the company and the advantages of big businesses are cited in this chapter. It also offers solutions to the challenges that big businesses face in the course of implementing an honest to goodness Direct Marketing strategy.

This chapter discusses social stratification in Nazi Germany. Since the abolition of all popular representation, the political decisions in Germany were reached by compromises between the leadership of the Nazi Party, the Army, the ministerial bureaucracy, and the representatives of certain powerful business groups. The economic groups usually kept in the background, although their voice in the fundamental decisions of policy-making was just as strong as, and perhaps even stronger than, that of the government (state and Party). The chapter provides an overview of five ruling groups in Nazi Germany: the leadership of the Nazi Party and affiliated organizations; the top strata of the governmental and political bureaucracy; the High Command of the Armed Forces and its representatives; the leadership of big business; and the landed aristocracy. It also looks at the ruled social groups, which include artisans, civil servants, and peasants.

This chapter reviews what the unfolding story of European big business can tell us about the three important questions in this study. It begins with the issue of effective strategies and structures. It explains that despite the rise and alleged fall of the conglomerate and notwithstanding claims for a new networked, N-form economy, it discovers that the Chandlerian model holds more or less true. It adds that it must amend and renew the original model, yet its essential principles endure. It clarifies that there has been less of a managerial revolution in Continental Europe than the original Harvard scholars might have expected, yet corporations of all sorts have steadily been adopting the common business school model. It notes that it can accept the Chandlerian model as a provisional and adaptive conception of the firm, while leaving behind the modernistic, universalism of Chandlerism.

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 focuses on Jack London's fight against the unbridled capitalism that he believed was the root cause of the pandemic of human misery and degradation during his time, along with his efforts to swing public opinion to his side in the late 1890s. Over London's lifetime, the capitalists had transformed America into an economic system that he accused of being exploitative. The last quarter of the nineteenth century—the years of London's life—was dubbed the era of Big Business, that is, the era of triumphant laissez-faire capitalism. This chapter examines how London fought this economic system by drawing on the popularity of boxing, both its figures of speech and its ideology of blows exchanged over many rounds. It also considers London's promotion of socialism that pit him against Ivy Ledbetter Lee; they waged their battle in the court—on the canvas—of public opinion.

This chapter examines whether tax reform is good for business and whether a tax reform that is good for business is also good for the country. It looks at official positions of various business organizations (big business, small business, and special interest groups) and how different businesses view various reforms compared with most academic economists. It suggests that fundamental tax reform cannot be realized unless there is significant support from the business community, and that tax policies that encourage businesses to invest and employ new workers are good for the citizenry at large. The chapter also considers the theory of tax incidence, along with the administrative and compliance costs that accompany a complex tax system.

The traditional relationship between Labour government and trade unions shifted during 1997–2007 from the ‘union‐party bonding model’ to a ‘union‐distance model’. The creation of new political spaces and democratic arenas through devolution, however, has increased the number of linkages in the democratic chain, thereby creating new conduits through which interest groups can play a role in the policy‐making process.

This concluding chapter discusses the structure and limits of stability achieved by Europe in the postwar period. It shows how a discernible equilibrium among economic interests, classes and nations finally emerged after numerous false starts. It suggests that a combination of coercion, payoffs, and exhaustion produced a broad political settlement. The conservatives' political achievement of the late 1920s cannot also be denied. Whether under liberal or authoritarian auspices, group conflict was being resolved via corporatism. From 1918 until about 1924, the primary political objective for most bourgeois forces, parties or interest groups, amounted to exclusion of the socialists from any decisive influence on the state. The chapter ends by analyzing the implications of inflation and revaluation for stability, and how the inflationary decade from 1914 to 1924 had brought together strong unions and big business in price–wage spiral at the expense of the middle strata of society.

Chapter Five discusses Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, a film based on the life of Howard Hughes, as a rare example in popular culture of a positive portrait of an entrepreneur. Most Hollywood films present people engaged in business as villains, and offer various kinds of public officials as the only way to keep business under control. By contrast, The Aviator portrays Hughes as a heroic and visionary figure, obsessed with creating a better future in both film and aviation. Scorsese presents big business negatively only when it colludes with big government. The most villainous figure in The Aviator is a U.S. Senator who conspires with Hughes's competitors to try to destroy him. As a maverick in the film business himself, Scorsese sides with Hughes as an independent in both the aviation and the entertainment industries.

This afterword discusses some of the social issues that became Jack London's unfinished business because of his death. London supported the nationwide ban on alcoholic beverages, which could be traced to his autobiography of 1913, John Barleycorn, in which he exposed the evils of alcoholism. Other unfinished business includes the chronic labor disputes, the warfare of nations, “oligarchy” and “barbarism,” and corporate Big Business. This afterword also considers Progressive and socialist plans that were swirling in the 1910s, such as the work-related pension for retirees and financial support for orphans and the disabled. Finally, it analyzes “Goliah,” a short story by London that tackled social reform. London died on the night of November 22, 1916 at the age of forty. His ashes were interred, as he wished, beneath a volcanic boulder on his Beauty Ranch property, now the Jack London California State Park.