Robert Shogan. Backlash: The Killing of the New Deal

The title of this book, bringing to mind several recent politicalpolemics, might lead one to expect an indictment of recent presidentialadministrations for attempting to dismantle cherished New Dealprograms. Robert Shogan has a different "killing of the NewDeal" in mind, however, namely that of the New Deal's zeitgeistof policy activism and "bold, persistent experimentation." ByAugust 1935, virtually all of the landmark New Deal programshad been enacted, and Franklin D. Roosevelt himself declaredthat     

Henry S. Rowen, Marguerite Gong Hancock, and William F. Miller, editors. Making IT: The Rise of Asia in High Tech

General Electric is an international high-tech icon that beganwith Thomas Edison and the first electrical revolution, andthrived through every one since. Like many global giants, ithas firm American roots. Yet on June 1, 2007, the New York Timescould publish a headline in the business section entitled "ChiefSays G.E. Aims to Match the Growth Pace Set by India." In     

Price V. Fishback et al. Government and the American Economy: A New History

In Government and the American Economy: A New History, a distinguishedpanel of economic historians chronicles and evaluates how governmenthas shaped U.S. economic development and growth from the colonialperiod to the present. The volume is dedicated to Robert Higgs,whose seminal thesis on the growth of government—thatit is a crisis-induced and persistent process—is one ofthe volume's underlying themes (and the subject of Higgs’chapter titled, "The World Wars"). The other is that government     

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     

Nixon’s jump into the cold water

Although at first publlc reaction to President Nixon’s Economic New Deal was very positive, criticism has been increasing during the last weeks. The most controversial issue at the moment in the USA Is without doubt the wage and price freeze imposed for 90 days.     

Colston E. Warne Lecture: Is It Time for Another Round of Consumer Protection? The Lessons of Twentieth-Century U.S. History

The first year of Barack Obama's presidency has returned consumer issues to center stage, with several contentious struggles over consumer protection. This moment can be viewed as a fourth wave of the twentieth-century consumer movement, and a comparison with the first three waves (during the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the 1960s–1970s) offers instructive insights. In particular, the contemporary battle over the Consumer Financial Protection Agency bears striking similarities to the failed campaign for a Consumer Protection Agency in the 1970s.     

Simon Middleton. From Privileges to Rights: Work and Politics in Colonial New York City. Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. 320 pp. ISBN 0-8122-3915-6, $45.00 (paper)

The idea of a transition from small producer to capitalist productionin late eighteenth-century America, a popular topic in 1980sand 1990s, is wrong. This is the message of Simon Middleton’sFrom Privileges to Rights, a study of New York City artisansin the colonial era. Using records from the Mayor’s Court(roughly equivalent to municipal courts today), and variousother sources, Middleton finds possessive individualism to bea growing force among New York City artisans at least     

Victoria E. Dye. All Aboard for Santa Fe: Railway Promotion of the Southwest, 1890s to 1930s. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. xi + 163 pp. ISBN 0-8263-3657-4, $24.95 (cloth).

All Aboard covers the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe (AT&SF)railroad’s attempts to promote tourism in the Southwest.The emphasis is on New Mexico, particularly Santa Fe and, asa separate narrative, Albuquerque. Interestingly, the AT&SFdid not pass through Santa Fe. In the 1870s, when the companyplanned a route from Dodge City, Kansas, to Colorado, whereabundant fuel could be loaded, to New Mexico then to California,the foothill town of     

John Storey, ed. The Management of Innovation. 2 vols. Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2004. xxxi + 734 pp. (vol. 1); ix + 570 pp. (vol. 2). ISBN 1-84376-429-6, $495.00 (cloth).

Edited by John Storey of Open University Business School inthe United Kingdom, The Management of Innovation (MoI) consistsof fifty-three of the most important social science works onorganizational and technological innovation. Predominantly journalarticles with some book chapters, the contents of the twin volumesare organized into nine sections that, as Storey says in hisintroduction, shift from overviews and general issues to morenarrowly focused topics. In the former category are three sections:Theoretical Perspectives and Overviews; National Systems, Diffusionand Historic Trajectories; and Business Strategy, Entrepreneurshipand Innovation. In the latter category are the remaining sixsections: Technology Strategy and New Product Development; Barriersand Enablers; Managing Innovation through     

Justin Kaplan. When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods and and Hotels in a Gilded Age

Justin Kaplan's When the Astors Owned New York is a probingaccount of how and why the two cousins—William WaldorfAstor and John Jacob Astor IV—spent much of their livesdecorating Manhattan's skyline with grand hotels. Kaplan, aPulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Mark Twain, draws on personalpapers, contemporary press accounts, and various literary worksto locate the Astors in Gilded Age New York high society. TheAstors built hotels not simply to make money, Kaplan contends,but also     

David M. Henkin. The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America

David Henkin is a student of the development of popular literacyand mass communications in the nineteenth century. His firstbook, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in AntebellumNew York (1998), is a highly original, intriguing study of theways in which a broad array of ubiquitous, ordinary public texts(newspapers; paper currency; handbills; outdoor signage) wereexperienced by New Yorkers of different social groups and degreesof literacy. The present study extends the author's     

"Business Responsibilities in a Divided World": The Cold War Roots of the Corporate Social Responsibility Movement

Both business executives and management scholars have, in recentyears, focused a great deal of attention on the theme of corporatesocial responsibility (CSR). Calls for business leaders to expendresources on behalf of "social good" tend to downplay, if notignore, what is fundamentally an ideological question: justwhat is a "good" society and who defines "goodness"? The ideologicalunderpinnings of social responsibility and its relationshipto the "good" society can be explored through an historicalperspective. The roots of the CSR movement trace back to theearly years of the Cold War. Led by Donald K David, Dean ofthe Harvard Business School and supported by other academicsand executives given voice on the pages of the Harvard BusinessReview, advocates urged expanded business social responsibilityas a means of aligning business interests with the defense offree-market capitalism against what was depicted as the clear-and-presentdanger of Soviet Communism. Today's enthusiastic calls for businessto "do well by doing good" could benefit from a similar criticalanalysis not just of the goals of CSR but also the ideologicalassumptions, often unacknowledged, that underlie those goals.     

John Brewer and Frank Trentmann, eds. Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges

This collection of eleven essays examines consumer culturesfrom different eras and different countries in transnationalcontexts. The essayists cover a broad chronological swath, startingwith the porcelain trade in Britain and China during the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries and concluding with a case study ofglobal water welfarism in present-day South Africa and New Zealand.Consuming Cultures also offers a rich sampling of disciplinaryapproaches, featuring work by historians, anthropologists, sociologists,geographers, and media scholars. Despite such diversity, theessays generally     

论记账式国债柜台交易业务对我国金融市场的影响

20 0 2年 4月 3日央行颁布了《商业银行柜台高账式国债交易管理办法》。记账式国债柜台对银行和国债市场的发展均有很大的促进作用 ,它丰富了投资者的投资渠道 ,增强了投资者的资方流动性 ,对国债市场的健康发展 ,起到了推波助澜的作用。     

Jarol B. Manheim. Biz-War and the Out-of-Power Elite: The Progressive-Left Attack on the Corporation. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004. xii + 216 pp. ISBN 0-8058-5068-6, $34.50 (cloth).

Over the past ten years a large, diverse, and increasingly sophisticatedliterature has emerged to explain the decline—indeed thedeath—of liberalism and the rise of the New Right to politicaldominance. Jarol Manheim argues that the death knell for liberalismand the left has been rung too soon. While conservatism currentlyis the dominant American ideology, Biz-War contends that itfaces a real threat from a reinvigorated left now known by anew, less pejorative name, the Progressive movement. Manheim’s     

Robert M. Collins. Transforming America: Politics and Culture during the Reagan Years

Robert Collins has written two superb books treating modernAmerican business history—The Business Response to Keynes(1981), and More: The Politics of Growth in Postwar America(2000). In this, his most recent and elegantly written book,he takes on the rather more slippery, amorphous cultural historyof the period. He even dives undaunted into that most murkyphenomenon, "postmodernism." There, he has some delightful thingsto say about "the therapeutic culture" and the "self-esteem"fad that it produced. In his treatment     

国外政府购买公共就业服务研究综述

通过对历史文献的整理,部分理清了政府购买公共就业服务模式的发展脉络,发现经济危机、新政以及劳动力市场的变化与就业服务供给制度的创新联系密切;通过围绕政府购买公共就业服务核心问题——效率展开研究,归纳与总结国外文献在政府购买公共就业服务理论、绩效考核、比较研究等方面的成果,旨在为我国经济发展提供参考。     

Thomas J. Watson and the Business-Government Relationship, 1933-1956

The precise nature of the relationship between the Americanbusiness community and the New Deal has been a lively topicof debate in recent years. This article looks at an importantfigure and firm in that relationship (Thomas J. Watson of IBM)to increase our understanding of it. This article focuses chronologicallyon the period from the early 1930s through the mid-1950s, whenNew-Deal-era public policy innovations were most influential.The overall picture that emerges from this study of the U.S.business-government relationship during those years is one ofbusiness accommodation of major changes in social conditionsand public policies rather than a view of business as the primaryleader of change.     

Chandler in a Larger Frame: Markets, Transaction Costs, and Organizational Form in History

In 1977, when Alfred D. Chandler's pathbreaking book The VisibleHand appeared, the large, vertically integrated, "Chandlerian"corporation had dominated the organizational landscape for nearlya century. In some interpretations, possibly including Chandler'sown, The Visible Hand and subsequent works constitute a triumphalistaccount of the rise of that organizational form: the large,vertically integrated firm arose and prospered because of itsinherent superiority, in all times and places, to more decentralized,market-oriented production arrangements. A quarter century later,however, the Chandlerian firm no longer dominates the landscape.It is under siege from a panoply of decentralized and market-likeforms that often resemble some of the "inferior" nineteenth-centurystructures that the managerial enterprise had replaced.     

‘Madison Avenue puts on its best hair shirt’: US advertising & its social critics

This paper examines how the American advertising industry responded to its critics in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Criticism of advertising was not new. Advertising had come under scrutiny during the Progressive era and the New Deal years. What made this wave of criticism novel was that it occurred during a period of economic affluence and relative social stability. Although recent academic scholarship from authors such as Michael Schudson (1984) and Jackson Lears (1994) has challenged the social critics, popular discourse in the English-speaking world concerning advertising's social impact still reflects the views of Vance Packard (1957) and John Kenneth Galbraith (1958). Likewise, the arguments put forward by leading advertising practitioners almost four decades ago are still found in public relations initiatives on behalf of the industry.