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Kenneth Lipartito and David B. Sicilia, eds. Constructing Corporate America: History, Politics, and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. xii + 369 pp. ISBN 0-19-925189-4, $99.50 (cloth); 0-19-925190-8, $29.95 (paper).*
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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
University of Colorado, Denver