How can one best grasp the social transformations of the nineteenth century? Social historians have tried training their sights on an exemplary city, a particular social group, an illustrative historical incident, or a single life. Lenard Berlanstein's novel approach is to focus on the microcosm...

Otis Graham's Losing Time is an ode, in three parts, to industrial policy. In the first part, Graham reviews the U.S. "industrial policy" debate of the early 1980s, culminating in Congress's 1984 decision against national industrial planning, which was reinforced by Reagan's landslide...

Ever since the rise of modern organizational forms in the mid nineteenth century, social scientists have treated organizations and bureaucracies as instrumental social structures that are little affected by culture. Most organizations were thought to conform to general rules of efficiency rather...

This study uses longitudinal data on nearly 300 American employers over the period 1955-85 to analyze the adoption of disciplinary hearings and grievance procedures for nonunion salaried and hourly employees. Hypotheses are developed from an institutional perspective that focuses, first, on...

How did the American system of private, employment-related pension and health insurance arise? Data on corporate fringe-benefit programs during the second quarter of the 20th century contradict the received wisdom that benefits rose in response to wartime federal policy changes and industrial...

In this rich history of management ideology and practice, Mauro Guillen charts the diffusion of scientific management, human relations, and "structural analysis" in the United States, Germany, Spain, and Great Britain during the 20th century

Recent neoinstitutional analyses have associated the rapid diffusion of due-process governance mechanisms in the American workplace with government pressure for equal employment opportunity and affirmative action

The Employment Relationship reports the results of an ambitious research project begun in the early 1980s, in which some 2,000 randomly sampled Chicago-area employees and their employers were surveyed about employment policies and conditions