Big Business and the State

Harland Prechel is Associate Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University, and the author of Corporate and Class Restructuring.

"With its broad sweep, this book … will challenge and inform sociologists and business historians." — CHOICE"This book is essential reading for sociologists interested in state theory or organizational theory. Also, the author's integration of historical case method and quantitative analysis and his ability to move easily between micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis make this book a model of sociological research that any sociologist would gain from reading." — Contemporary Sociology"Harland Prechel, in Big Business and the State, helps move beyond embeddedness to develop an account of precisely how the relationship between corporations and the state actually shapes each of them. He synthesizes the classical organization theory concept of dependence with the foundational concept of political economy, capital, as the centerpiece of this important and potentially influential book … Prechel's empirical discussion of the difference between rationalization and efficiency is one of the best I've seen, making the book one of the sharpest critiques of efficiency theory in recent years." — Administrative Science Quarterly"This book tackles a complex set of historical, economic, political, and sociological issues with great energy and enthusiasm. The two things I like best are the author's attention to issues of law, legislation, and the legal form of corporations, and his explicit awareness and treatment of the historical differences between nineteenth-century dynamics of economic-corporate development and the contemporary phase of economic globalization." — Wolf Heydebrand, coauthor of Rationalizing Justice: The Political Economy of Federal District Courts"This volume takes on large and important questions. Well-written and compelling, this is good sociology. I think it has the potential to be a very important book; it's a fine piece of scholarship." — David Bills, editor of The New Modern Times: Factors Reshaping the World of Work

• List of TablesList of FiguresList of AbbreviationsAcknowledgments 1. Capital Dependence, Historical Transitions, and Corporate Transformations Part I: Corporate Transformation in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries 2. The Federalist State and the Emergence of the Modern Corporation 3. Restructuring the Business Enterprise to Obtain Market Control, 1890–1905 4. Political Capitalism: The Rise and Demise of the Industrial Holding Company Part II: Transformation of the Managerial Process 5. From Product Cost Controls to Financial Controls 6. The Management of Managers at American Steel, 1920–1970s Part III: Historical Transitions in Corporations' Institutional Arrangements, 1940s–1990s 7. More Political Capitalism: Changing Economic Conditions and Corporate Political Behavior, 1940–1985 8. Transformation of the Managerial Process, 1980s 9. Changing Institutional Arrangements and Transformation to the Multilayered Subsidiary Form 10. Tranformation to the Multilayered Subsidiary Form among the Largest Industrial Parent Companies 11. Conclusion: Historical Transitions and Corporate Transformations AppendixNotesReferencesIndex