Kathleen Thelen. How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xv + 333 pp. ISBN 0-521-83768-5, $75.00 (cloth); ISBN 0-521-54674-5, $29.99 (paper).

Kathleen Thelen has written an incredibly fascinating book thatshould be obligatory reading for anyone interested in the historyof skill formation or the evolution of institutions in general.For those working on the "varieties of capitalism," path-dependency,punctured equilibrium, or historical institutionalism, thistext should feature prominently in their work. Thelen’sgoal in this book is to discover why Germany, Britain, the UnitedStates, and Japan pursued different "paths" of skill formation.She traces the origin of each path     

Frank Dobbin, ed. The New Economic Sociology: A Reader. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. vii + 565 pp. ISBN 0-691-04905-X, $65.00 (cloth); 0-691-04906-8, $27.95 (paper).

This volume is designed to ease the entry of advanced sociologystudents into the growing literature in their discipline aboutmarkets and the organizations and individuals who operate withinthem. It can serve this useful function for business historiansas well, although it will take some tenacity on the part of"splitters" to make sense of what the "lumpers" are gettingat. The collection’s twenty chapters include articles fromleading journals and book excerpts and are organized around     

Robert G. Angevine. The Railroad and the State: War, Politics, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004. xvii + 351 pp. ISBN 0-8047-4239-1, $65.00 (cloth).

Robert Angevine’s excellent monograph offers valuableinsights for historians of technology, business, and the military.This book details the "symbiotic" relationship of railroadsand the military, showing how the relationship evolved duringthe nineteenth century. Angevine lays out his story chronologically. The fact that theUnited States was going to need some sort of transportationinfrastructure in order to move troops in a timely manner wasfirst realized after the War of 1812. As a result,     

Richard Sennett. The Culture of the New Capitalism. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006. 214 pp. ISBN 0-300-10782-X, $25.00 (paper).

Richard Sennett is among the most prominent sociologists ofwork and labor in the English-speaking world, and he has writtenanother in his recent series of books on how major changes incorporate culture are effecting the personal experience andsocial outlook of workers of various kinds. Given the importanceof his focus on human impacts in a time when most economic discussionis about technology and money, it is hard to pass up this book.At the same time, it is equally hard to believe that one willlearn anything new. We     

Elisabeth Koll. From Cotton Mill to Business Empire: The Emergence of Regional Enterprises in Modern China. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. xvi + 422 pp. ISBN 0-674-01394-8, $49.50 (cloth).

Elisabeth Köll has written more than a book about ZhangJian (1853–1926), a pioneer of modern business in China.This is an important study of enterprise organization, managementpractice, and the means by which Zhang’s Dasheng enterprisegroup changed the political economy of provincial Nantong, aYangzi River city near Shanghai. The author is focused firstlyon control and accountability in the management of the enterpriseand secondly on the institutional transfer—"the interpretation,adaptation and application" (p. 4)—of Western corporatestructures, such as the limited liability firm, to the Chinesebusiness     

Mary Frank Fox, Deborah G. Johnson, and Sue V. Rosser, eds. Women, Gender, and Technology

This book adds a series of essays to the burgeoning theoreticaland empirical work on women, gender, and technology. Its intentionis to "encourage, facilitate and bring to an interdisciplinaryaudience such a range of theory, research and applications onwomen, gender and technology" (viii). In her introduction, DeborahG. Johnson maintains that a "co-creation" model frames the bookand that each chapter "explores how gender and technology workand are at work in     

Todd A. Knoop. Recessions and Depressions: Understanding Business Cycles. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. xv + 289 pp. ISBN 0-275-98162-2, $49.95.

This book covers "the empirics, the theory, and internationalcase studies of recessions and depressions" as a "contributionto the ongoing debate over the nature and causes of recessionsand depressions" (p. xiv). It does this with non-technical narrativesthat can be understood by upper-level undergraduates and thegeneral reader with some economics background: a welcome goalthat the author achieves. Chapters include useful data tablesand charts without being overwhelming and conclude with furtherreading suggestions.     

John V. C. Nye. War, Wine, and Taxes: The Political Economy of Anglo-French Trade, 1689-1900

This is not a long book: an introduction and eight chaptersamounting to 120 pages with additional appendices. However,it eruditely covers and raises a wide variety of intriguingissues that give it far greater impact than the slim volumemight at first suggest. The book is fundamentally about challenging the assertion thatBritain was a free trader in the nineteenth century and wasa free trader when compared specifically with France. From theoutset, John Nye sets     

Karen Olson. Wives of Steel: Voices of Women from the Sparrows Point Steelmaking Communities. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. x + 216 pp. ISBN 0-271-02685-5, $40.00.

In her introduction to Wives of Steel, Karen Olson warns thatthe book is "not a business or labor history of the SparrowsPoint steel complex," stressing that it is instead a genderedanalysis of an industrial community (p. 13). Yet historiansof business and labor should find much of interest in this book.By placing women at the center of her history of Sparrows Point,Maryland, and the neighboring communities of Dundalk and TurnerStation, Olson highlights the     

Kaoru Sugihara, ed. Japan, China, and the Growth of the Asian International Economy, 1850-1949. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. xv + 295 pp. ISBN 0-19-829271-6, $140.00.

This important cluster of perspectives on the growth of theAsian international economy originates from a 1993 workshopheld in Osaka on the role of China and overseas Chinese networksin the Asian international economy. It is the first volume inthe series of "Japanese Studies in Economic and Social History"edited by Osamu Saito and Kaoru Sugihara. As the title suggests,this book does not deal with issues concerning commodity productionand consumption; it focuses instead on matters     

Youseff Cassis. Capitals of Capital: A History of International Financial Centres, 1780-2005

The book presents a history of the most influential financialCenters, "the capitals of capital." Youseff Cassis evaluatesthe significance of these Centers by examining their concentrationof financial services, their capacity to process surplus capital,particularly its export, and their role in the intermediationof financial transactions. Their history, from 1780 to the presentday, is covered chronologically in six chapters. Each chapterestablishes a hierarchy of Centers and reasons for changes inthe hierarchy are analyzed as the story unfolds.     

Gordon Boyce. Over Half a Million Careful Owners: A 75-year history of PSIS, 1928-2003. Wellington, NZ: Dunmore Publishing, 2005. 326 pp. ISBN 0-476-0129-29, NZ$29.95 (paper).

Gordon Boyce traces the history of New Zealand’s PSIS,the Public Service Investment Society, in a book commissionedby the company. Boyce, now Professor of International Businessat Queensland University of Technology after thirteen yearsof teaching business and economic history at Victoria Universityof Wellington, is well qualified for the project. His recentpublications include Co-operative Structures in Global Business(2002). Boyce fulfills his commission well, narrating an engagingstory. "Vignettes" provide personal and anecdotal details thatformer staff     

Sarah Elvins. Sales and Celebrations: Retailing and Regional Identity in Western New York State, 1920-1940. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2004. 222 pp. ISBN 0-8214-1549-2, $42.95 (cloth).

Elvins’s book is part of a growing body of historicalscholarship that interrogates the lived experience of consumersociety in the twentieth-century United States. Beginning whereWilliam Leach’s Land of Desire (1993) left off, Elvinsseeks to complicate "top-down" narratives of the homogenizationof American consumer culture into a national mass market. Takingher cue from Lizabeth Cohen’s early work on consumptionin Chicago, Elvins examines consumption on the local level in     

Arjan van Rooij. Building Plants: Markets for Technology and Internal Capabilities in DSM's Fertiliser Business, 1925-1970. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Aksant Academic Publishers, 2004. 279 pp. ISBN 90-5260-138-0, $34.95 (paper).

In spite of the central role that specialized engineering firms(firms that focus on the design and construction of industrialplants) have been playing since the end of World War II as makersand traders of the latest technology in many sectors throughoutthe world, historians have largely neglected them. For justfor this reason, we should welcome this book by Arjan van Rooij,whose main concern is precisely the historical contributionof such firms     

Ernesto R. Gantman. Capitalism, Social Privilege and Managerial Ideologies. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2005. viii + 185 pp. ISBN 0-7546-4186-4, $99.95.

Is management a science or an ideology? Do management theoriesexplore the best way to maximize society’s welfare byefficiently coordinating inputs to produce the most output?Or are they window dressing concealing the exploitation of labor? An Argentinean professor, Ernesto Gantman surveys two centuriesof American management theory to argue that ideology trumpsscience. (Though the book purports to be a study of managementideology generally, it is almost exclusively about the UnitedStates.) Gantman quickly     

Peter Hayes. From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xx + 373 pp. ISBN 0-521-78227-9, $40.00.

Over the past few years, many histories of German companiesduring the Third Reich have been published. They are a responseto the attempts by survivors to obtain restitution from firmsinvolved in the commission of crimes against humanity duringthat period. Peter Hayes’s portrayal of one of the enterprisesthat was most deeply involved, Degussa, is among the best. Hayes begins his work with a disclaimer that "this book is designednot as an all-embracing     

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., and Bruce Mazlish, eds. Leviathans: Multinational Corporations and the New Global History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xiii + 249 pp. ISBN 0-521-84061-9, $65.00 (cloth); ISBN 0-521-54993-0, $22.99 (paper).

The advertising extract, which is this book’s first sentence,reads "Leviathans represents a path-breaking effort to lookat multinational corporations in the round, emphasizing especiallytheir scope, history, development, culture and social implication,and governance problems" (p. i). Given the appropriately globalprestige of the editors and of several of the chapters’authors, one’s curiosity is unavoidably piqued. Whilefew readers will ultimately judge the book to be path-breaking,many will welcome its contribution to     

Richard Perren. Taste, Trade and Technology: The Development of the International Meat Industry since 1840

This is a very British book about the international meat industry.A volume in Ashgate's Modern Economic and Social History series,its principal contribution is charting the relationships betweencountries engaged in the meat business, especially the nationsin Latin America, plus Australia and New Zealand that exportedmost of their production to the United Kingdom. The author notes several times that Britain was "the largestmarket for internationally traded meat." His analysis throughmuch of the volume is     

John Landers. The Field and the Forge: Population, Production, and Power in the Pre-industrial West. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2003. xiii + 440 pp. ISBN 0-19-924916-4, {pound}60.00 (cloth); 0-19-927957-8, {pound}22.50 (paper).

This book recalls literature that emanated from the Annalesschool of historians, for, like the annalistes, Landers is fascinatedby the longues durées of history. His subject is preindustrialEurope from roughly the second century (with occasional forays back to the Iron and Bronze Ages) to the nineteenthcentury . He takes his thesis from E. A. Wrigley: preindustrial Europe relied overwhelmingly on organicsources for food, heat, energy, crafts, manufactures, commerce,and the means     

Christopher A. Reed. Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876-1937. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004. xvii + 391 pp. ISBN 0-7748-1040-8, $85.00.

In this pioneering study Christopher A. Reed addresses majorissues concerning the modernization of Chinese printing andpublishing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.The book’s most significant contribution is its focuson technology and business organizations. While the historyof print and publishing in China has drawn enthusiastic attentionfrom scholars over the last decade, Reed’s work breaksnew ground by studying the cultural hardware behind the writtenword—printing machines and publishing businesses. Previoushistorical and literary approaches preoccupied with