Constructing Corporate America: History, Politics, and Culture (review)

Rationality, efficiency, meritocracy, productivity, innovation, professionalism: the people who have built, operated, and championed American corporations have claimed these goals and means in order to explain how and why limited liability firms evolved in the United States. Such powerful constructions of ideas—no less than of steel—have seduced generations of analysts and citizens into accepting once contested corporate forms as the inevitable outcomes of irresistible economic processes.

The great achievements of Constructing Corporate America lie in its compelling demonstrations that U.S. corporations' forms, functions, and discourses evolved—and still change—as products of their cultural, social, legal, and political environments. Editors Kenneth Lipartito and David B. Sicilia and nine other scholars show that economic logic alone can explain neither the concrete nor the ideational shapes of corporate constructions. These authors do not try to deny the importance of firms to history. Instead, they treat firms as composite actors operating in a complex environment with many other types of actors. In keeping with the last decade of scholarship, they complicate once straightforward narratives.

Lipartito and Sicilia's well-crafted introduction and afterword will prove to be important resources for students and scholars alike. The editors review canonical explanations for the rise of the corporation, then offer alternative strategies for thinking about how corporate ownership, production, and management have developed. They build on, rather than reject, approaches. Applying insights and analytical tools from economics, sociology, and history, Lipartito and Sicilia target interactions between individuals and organizations, highlighting the meanings that these actors build about themselves, each other, and their environments. In a sense, corporations evolved at the hubs of these interactions, both absorbing and radiating pressures and values.

Eleven well-researched chapters uncover some of the ways by which U.S. corporations have institutionalized structures, practices, and values. The struggles between advocates and foes of corporate aggrandizement played out in national and regional arenas, in closed chambers, and in public debates, including hard-fought court battles that marked forks in the nation's paths. With impressive creativity and clarity, the authors wield wide-ranging evidence from centuries of telling engagements.

The first section, "The Corporate Project," will especially stimulate rethinking of the traditional corporate creed. Its four chapters probe alternatives for corporate structure, governance, purpose, and regulation—including alternatives now lapsed that once seemed quite reasonable. Thus, the modern corporate form only gradually and unevenly became distinguished from partnerships, as Naomi Lamoreaux makes clear by examining over two centuries of legal decisions and other documents. Delving into records from four countries, Colleen Dunlavy proves that large-scale industrialization did not alone determine corporations' internal governance conventions. One-share/one-vote practices superseded more democratic forms in the mid-nineteenth century, which concentrated the power of large shareholders in ways distinctive to the United States. Lipartito then reaches back to pre–Civil War reformers to locate roots of the modern corporate values of efficiency and order. Utopians' voluntary associations experimented with formal organizational structures and methods as the means to "redirect individual behavior toward some larger collective purpose" (pp. 96–97). Concluding this section, Gerald Berk explicates pragmatist Louis Brandeis's failed attempt to apply scientific management to regulatory interactions between public and private spheres.

The second part, "Corporate-State Interdependencies," examines large-scale interactions between public and private forces. Louis Galambos surveys a century of antitrust policies and their results to contrast the 1890s with the 1980s. Sicilia excavates patterns in how post–World War II social movements, courts, firms' public relations, and regulatory pressures have engaged each other in reciprocating actions around issues of public safety. David Hart details mechanisms by which the state has shaped firms' technological innovation systems in ways that markets could not. Part III, "The Business of Identity," completes the book's cases with chapters by Charles Delheim, Juliet Walker, Melissa Fisher, and Eric Guthey. Using a variety of scholarly approaches, they...