What does globalization mean for the modern corporation? There is a lot of theory out there. Many have taken the intrepid step of speculating about the implications for the firm. Few have gone to the trouble to look into the matter. Looking at how a multinational actually operates is not for the...

Students of economic behavior have long subscribed to the common sense view that natural laws govern economic life. In the discipline of economics, the prevailing view is that economic behavior is determined exogenously, by a force outside of society,rather than endogenously, by forces within....

This book at first appears to be Perrow's own history of the modern corporation, but it turns out to be a critique of the canon and a fresh look at the historical material presented by others. As such, it is a lot closer in format and goals to Perrow's classic Complex Organizations (New York:...

In 1950, T. H. Marshall suggested that "social citizenship" rights were the last frontier in formal citizenship protections. First came civil rights and basic freedoms in the eighteenth century, second came political rights with the extension of suffrage during the nineteenth century, and third...

IN RECENT years, sociologists have returned to study the field's first subject, economic behavior. Beginning in the 1840s, Karl Marx tried to understand the economic underpinnings of class relations and political activity. Forty years later, Émile Durkheim explored how work was divided up in...

Howard Aldrich's tour de force illustrates the potential of the evolutionary approach to explain change within organizations, within sectors, and across sectors. His 1979 Organizations and Environments set the stage for this new piece, but Organizations Evolving represents a major leap forward,...

During the nineteenth century, very different templates for organizing the economy emerged in Europe and North America. Perhaps the single most important difference across countries concerned the roles of public and private action. Is the state a legitimate and rational participant in decisions...

In Bold Relief, Edwin Amenta sets aside the conventional wisdom that the American welfare state was destined to be backward. He asks what might have been had the New Deal system of jobs provision and relief survived World War II. To do this he rejects the current view of the 1930s, as a time...

At the American Sociological Association meetings in August, Contexts sponsored a forum on recent trends in how corporations are run and for whom. The panelists were Frank Dobbin, Harvard University; Nicole Biggart, Dean of the Management School at the University of California at Davis; and Neil...

How do new business models emerge? Neoinstitltionalists argue that the process often begins when a policy shift undermines the status quo; groups then vie to define the best alternative. The authors explore the role of power in selecting between two alternative business models available to...