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Chapters 1 and 2 point to the fact that the demand for protection that accompanies the spread of market transactions is met by the Russian state only in part: a significant sector of the business world does not use state-supplied protection services. A demand for alternative sources of protection is then expected to arise. Some authors, especially economists, have been quick to conclude that, since the state does not provide a service, the market inevitably will. It cannot, however, be argued that demand will inevitably be met; a supply of people trained in the use of violence and easily available weapons must also be present. This chapter focuses on the availability of people trained in the use of violence and of weapons, and the varieties of private protectors available in Russia at the time of the transition to the market, ranging from segments of the state apparatus (privately sold state protection), to private security (protection) firms, the internalized protection systems of major economic conglomerates, and criminal groups (banditskaya krysha: krysha, literally ‘roof’, is Russian slang for protection).

Over the past few years, financial regulators have devoted considerable attention to the development of consolidated capital rules for financial conglomerates. This chapter explores the theoretical justifications for these new requirements and explains that the case for consolidated capital oversight consists of four separate lines of argument: technical weaknesses inherent in traditional entity-level capital requirements; unique risks associated with financial conglomerates; additional diversification benefits that financial conglomerates enjoy; and recognition that financial firms increasingly employ modern risk management techniques that work on a group-wide basis. The specific rules for consolidated capital requirements that the Basel Committee proposed in April 2003 are reviewed, and it is argued that the Basel proposals constitute a relatively rudimentary system of consolidated capital requirements, dealing primarily with the technical weaknesses of entity level capital and making little effort to deal with more subtle issues such as unique risks of financial conglomerates, diversification benefits, and modern risk-management techniques. A number of significant practical considerations contribute to the relatively limited scope of the Basel Committee's proposal, which will likely prevent the development of a more comprehensive system of consolidated capital oversight for financial conglomerates in the foreseeable future.

This chapter assesses the evolution of international standard setting in financial markets by examining the characteristics of the various international bodies, such as the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and the International Organization of Securities Commissions, that are involved in international standard setting. Topics discussed include international financial institutions, supervisory structures for financial conglomerates, the Financial Action Task Force, and financial crises from the 1990s and onwards.

This chapter focuses on conceptual tools used for considering large contemporary media organizations like MSNBC. It examines a nonmonolithic framework for elucidating how MSNBC's digital distribution is influenced by organizational factors and shows how keeping pace with rapidly transforming production and distribution environments has altered the way that legacy media institutions are organized. It also discusses the emergence of heterarchy as a novel form of organizational structure that allows media conglomerates to cope with perpetual uncertainty. Finally, it analyzes the provincialism of Internet technologies in newsrooms by drawing on a number of theoretical frameworks from the sociology of technology. The chapter argues that large media organizations are not single actors with singular objectives, but complex and dynamic assemblages of individuals, groups, and technologies whose interrelations all influence the flow of content.

Antitrust suit against Wall Street is dismissed. A bull market develops in late 1950s and continues into 1960s. Defense stocks gain in popularity. Conglomerates dominate industrial landscape. Brokers expand their activities. Hucksterism appears on Wall Street.

The first chapter identifies why, after a century of indifference, comic books moved from the fringes of popular culture to the center of mainstream film production in the early 21^st century. It argues that comic-book movies were well suited, perhaps ideally suited, to the cultural, technological, and economic concerns that beset Hollywood production at the start of the twenty-first century, including post-9/11 concerns, digital filmmaking techniques, and conglomerate practices. That comic book adaptations could meet and surmount such demands, and achieve unprecedented levels of popularity, testifies to their importance within modern Hollywood filmmaking.

This book deals with market concentration trends in the information sector as a whole. Its thesis is that similar dynamics take place across industries, including mass media, and that they lead to further media concentration trends. It looks at the size of the major segments of the information sector: mass media, telecommunications, information technology, and the Internet. Combined, the United States information sector accounts for over one trillion dollars, not including its considerable exports to other countries. The chapter presents final averaging across all 100 information sector industries, and also across the twenty-seven mass media industries that have been investigated here. The chapter gives an interpretation of this. National concentration, horizontal concentration, and vertical concentration as well as media conglomerates and ownership are discussed.

This chapter explores the idea that the diversification of the firm proceeds according to certain design rules or principles, particularly in relation to the establishment of consistency or balance within the pattern of links exploited by the firm. The idea of consistency of pattern in strategy is implicit in the notion of coherence of strategies. The chapter begins by exploring the notion of coherence and pattern in corporate strategy. There are four major categories that could display coherence: specialized, related-constrained, related-linked, and conglomerate strategies. The implications for design of corporate strategy are also examined and compared with actual patterns of diversification.

In the later twentieth century, winning prizes in global film festivals became a focus of production effort and financing motivation, with many filmmakers and financing agents articulating their national differences from the West while seeking integration through direct investment in Western film industries, sometimes by disarticulating Japan's purported cultural “uniqueness” and contributing to the conglomerization of US and European media and film industries. Meanwhile, Japan's domestic markets were gradually opening to more Western products and symbols. Case studies in this chapter include interviews with younger generation filmmakers who started their careers after the demise of the Japanese studio production system, and who played key parts in the globalization of Japanese film finance.

This chapter discusses media industry consolidation in the 1980s. During this decade nearly all the Hollywood majors became subsidiary divisions within giant corporations seeking to diversify their investments. One of the most significant examples of media conglomeration came in 1989 when the publishing company Time Inc. merged with Warner Communications Inc. in a $14 billion deal. The chapter also includes the study, ‘Return to Oz: The Hollywood Redevelopment Project, or Film History as Urban Renewal’ by Josh Stenger, which examines the means by which the city of Los Angeles has appropriated images from Hollywood's past in the name of urban renewal.

The identification of the American commercial film industry with ‘Hollywood’ has always been a convenient shorthand masking a complex network of institutions, practices and conventions. That network has changed radically over the past seven decades. Commentators have been writing Hollywood's obituary, alongside that of the film industry, since the early 1950s. The rise of television, the shift towards independent and runaway production, the layoffs of contact personnel and shrinking of the old studio lots, the absorption of the movie studios themselves into larger conglomerates, have all provoked premature declarations of Tinseltown's demise. Yet Hollywood has not died, but evolved; as an industry, an image, and even as a physical location Hollywood remains a tangible reality, albeit a very different one from what it was sixty-five years ago. Today Hollywood is the location of the corporate offices of the filmed entertainment divisions of the giant media conglomerates, while the production process itself is widely dispersed across a huge range of territories and specialist service providers located not only in the United States but also worldwide.

This chapter discusses the emergence of the foreign ministry, using the history of the Norwegian foreign service as an example. It first details how the Danish conglomerate state evolved a separate foreign ministry in 1772. It then introduces the Swedish–Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) in its capacity as the main point of departure for the foundation of the Norwegian MFA in 1905. Norway is typical of the great majority of the world's 203 states in having gained its sovereignty and formed a foreign ministry only in the twentieth century. Thus, the genealogy of the Norwegian MFA should also throw light on the general emergence of foreign ministries and the effects on the conduct of diplomacy.

This conclusion reconsiders the role of horizontal integration and multimedia conglomerates in the process of stylistic remediation and the industrial motivation behind stylistic remediation, both in films and comics. It shows that horizontal integration and conglomeration have become more influential over the past three decades, as seen in the case of Time Warner. It also discusses the ways in which stylistic remediation can serve as a research and development function by allowing multinational conglomerates to experiment with computer-generated imagery (CGI) and form that can be spread across multiple properties (like “bullet time” in The Matrix). Finally, it examines whether the remediation of comic book stylistics into films is fundamentally a by-product of technologies and an indication of a Manovichian shift from cinema to digital cinema.

This chapter focuses on the Marmon Group. The Marmon Group is a diverse conglomerate comprised of hundreds of different companies in numerous sectors, including financial services, transportation, energy, construction, manufacturing, and so on. The businesses are low-tech and unglamorous but are leaders in their industries. The companies were acquired at different times without any master plan. The conglomerate’s aging chairman and vice-chairman have guided the company during the four decades since its inception. They made essentially all important corporate decisions, with scant oversight from the board of directors. Adhering to a hands-off management policy emphasizing individual autonomy, all other decisions were made by managers of the various subsidiaries. In the mid-1990s the fate of the conglomerate was uncertain after Jay and Robert Pritzker passed away. Many analysts thought that the Marmon Group was too unwieldy for any but the Pritzkers to run and predicted it would perish soon after they left. However, the analysts were wrong. In 2008, the Marmon Group became a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, and it continues to operate pretty much as it had for decades. The Marmon Group can be called a mini-Berkshire, possessing the same cultural traits as Berkshire and its sister subsidiaries. These common traits explain why Marmon, one of Berkshire’s largest and most profitable subsidiaries, fit right in at Berkshire.