1,037 research outputs found

    Reproducing women in the awkward age

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    Elektronische Version der gedr. Ausg. 199

    The state and the structure of the business community: Mark Mizruchi interviewed by Pierre François

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    \u3cem\u3eThe Modern Corporation\u3c/em\u3e as Social Construction

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    Classic works, Mark Mizruchi and Lisa Fein argued, share a particular fate. Authors often cite classic works without reading them—or without reading them carefully. . . . Yet perhaps no single work fits the above description better than one of the most important books on the large corporation ever published: Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means’s The Modern Corporation and Private Property. One can speculate that few works in the social sciences have been as often cited and as little read. As a consequence, we would expect The Modern Corporation to be a good candidate for either selective interpretation or outright misinterpretation. And as we shall demonstrate, the book did indeed receive such treatment. . . . First, we present what we see as Berle and Means’s primary contributions in The Modern Corporation. Second, we describe various interpretations of this classic and situate these interpretations in their historical contexts. Third, we discuss the extent to which these interpretations provided an accurate account of the state of the American corporation and American business in the post-World War II period. We argue that these interpretations can be reconciled when we take into account the countervailing forces of the state, labor, and the financial community that created the conditions for a moderate, pragmatic approach to corporate governance. Finally, we discuss the changes that have occurred since the postwar period, from the 1970s on, and assess the fate of The Modern Corporation in light of those changes

    \u3cem\u3eThe Modern Corporation\u3c/em\u3e as Social Construction

    Get PDF
    Classic works, Mark Mizruchi and Lisa Fein argued, share a particular fate. Authors often cite classic works without reading them—or without reading them carefully. . . . Yet perhaps no single work fits the above description better than one of the most important books on the large corporation ever published: Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means’s The Modern Corporation and Private Property. One can speculate that few works in the social sciences have been as often cited and as little read. As a consequence, we would expect The Modern Corporation to be a good candidate for either selective interpretation or outright misinterpretation. And as we shall demonstrate, the book did indeed receive such treatment. . . . First, we present what we see as Berle and Means’s primary contributions in The Modern Corporation. Second, we describe various interpretations of this classic and situate these interpretations in their historical contexts. Third, we discuss the extent to which these interpretations provided an accurate account of the state of the American corporation and American business in the post-World War II period. We argue that these interpretations can be reconciled when we take into account the countervailing forces of the state, labor, and the financial community that created the conditions for a moderate, pragmatic approach to corporate governance. Finally, we discuss the changes that have occurred since the postwar period, from the 1970s on, and assess the fate of The Modern Corporation in light of those changes

    Cohesion, equivalence, and similarity of behavior: a theoretical and empirical assessment

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    Network analysts have debated the extent to which cohesion versus structural equivalence serves as a source of similar behavior among actors. More recently, role equivalence has emerged as an alternative to structural equivalence. Using data on the contribution patterns of corporate political action committees, I examine the effect of various indicators of cohesion, structural equivalence, and role equivalence on the extent to which firms behave similarly. Although various operationalizations of all three concepts are correlated with similar behavior, the most consistent predictor is the joint prominence of two firms in the network. I argue that this common location in central positions is a form of role equivalence, but one that is distinct from conventional definitions of the concept. I then suggest a distinction between what I term `central' and `peripheral' role equivalence.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/30604/1/0000241.pd

    Berle and Means revisited: The governance and power of large U.S. corporations

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    In The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932), Berle and Means warned of the concentration of economic power brought on by the rise of the large corporation and the emergence of a powerful class of professional managers, insulated from the pressure not only of stockholders, but of the larger public as well. In the tradition of Thomas Jefferson, Berle and Means warned that the ascendance of management control and unchecked corporate power had potentially serious consequences for the democratic character of the United States. Social scientists who drew on Berle and Means in subsequent decades presented a far more benign interpretation of the rise of managerialism, however. For them, the separation of ownership from control actually led to an increased level of democratization in the society as a whole. Beginning in the late 1960s, sociologists and other social scientists rekindled the debate over ownership and control, culminating in a series of rigorous empirical studies on the nature of corporate power in American society. In recent years, however, sociologists have largely abandoned the topic, ceding it to finance economists, legal scholars, and corporate strategy researchers. In this article, I provide a brief history of the sociological and finance/legal/strategy debates over corporate ownership and control. I discuss some of the similarities between the two streams of thought, and I discuss the reasons that the issue was of such significance sociologically. I then argue that by neglecting this topic in recent years, sociologists have failed to contribute to an understanding of some of the key issues in contemporary business behavior. I provide brief reviews of four loosely developed current perspectives and then present an argument of my own about the changing nature of the U.S. corporate elite over the past three decades. I conclude with a call for sociologists to refocus their attention on an issue that, however fruitfully handled by scholars in other fields, cries out for sociological analysis.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43654/1/11186_2004_Article_5383516.pd

    Bringing Nanda forward, or acting your age in The Awkward Age

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    Henry James’s 1899 novel, The Awkward Age posits the adolescent girl’s movement forward into the future as an acute problem for the fin-de-siùcle. The novel’s titular pun equates the awkward, individual, in-between time of adolescence with the awkward, collective, in-between time of the fin-de-siùcle, leading us both towards the turn-of-the-century ‘invention’ of the modern adolescent, and towards James’ exploration of the culturally constructed nature of age as an identity category. The conflation of individual ages with historical ones is significant; James’s novel appeared on the cusp of a new century, at a moment when adolescence was in the process of being consolidated as a modern identity category by medical authorities, educators, and psychologists. The novel’s deploying of technologies such as the telegraph and the photograph, that mediate presence, speed time up, slow it down, and freeze it, posits the adolescent girl as cognate with modernity; both of her time and ahead of it. In the novel, adolescence is an awkward, unnerving presence, and a significant absence: an identity in the process of being formulated, and an age category to come. In this article I explore the ways in which the rhetoric of modernity that resonates throughout the book relates to the awkward age of the adolescent. If we refocus our attention on age in The Awkward Age, we can begin to see the ways in which age itself becomes a creation of James’s, a staging of possible relations (sexual, conversational, economic, theatrical, performative, even utopian-collective) between older and younger interlocutors who swing between being ‘adults’ and ‘children,’ with the fin-de-siùcle invention of the adolescent as a hinge for this process

    Social Network Analysis: Recent Achievements and Current Controversies

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    Network analysis has grown rapidly over the past two decades, but criticisms of the approach have increased as well This article focuses on several accomplishments and unresolved problems of the network approach In the first section. I illustrate the value of the network model in several substantive areas. focusing on studies of centrahty and power, network subgroups, and interorganizational relations I then discuss three issues over which the approach has provoked controversy the relation between network analysis and rational choice theory; the role of norms and culture, and the question of human agency I conclude with some examples of how network theorists are addressing these problemsPeer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68023/2/10.1177_000169939403700403.pd

    Networks of corporate power revisited

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    This paper examines developments through the quarter century since the publication of Stokman, Ziegler and Scott's (1985) iconic ten-nation study of the structure of interlocking directorships. The surprising decline of research in the area following the publication of Networks of Corporate Power is in part testimony to the rigour of the comparative methods used, raising the standard of evidence required for subsequent director interlock studies. But it also reflected a critical weakness in director interlock research to that point, the limited ability to answer what Mark Mizruchi has called the “So what?” question. While replicated studies found clear structures in director interlocks, varying from country to country, and there was some speculative fit with the distinctive political economies of these countries, there was little evidence of any effect of these structures on firm performance or activity. The more recent resurgence in director interlock research is in some ways rooted in a second generation of the original drivers; the ready availability of now large masses of data on firm governance and firm level performance and further advances in social network analytical techniques. Where Stokman and his colleagues manually compiled lists of directors scoured from company reports, these data are now routinely collected and compiled in accessible databases by government agencies and business information services in many countries. And there has been a gradual accumulation of advances in addressing the “so what” question
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