Download or read book Chrome Colossus written by Ed Cray and published by New York : McGraw-Hill. This book was released on 1980 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the enormous influence General Motors has exerted on American values, culture, politics, and society over the past seventy years, focusing on the six strong-willed men who shaped the company and its fortunes.
Download or read book Making and Selling Cars written by James M. Rubenstein and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2003-04-01 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the creation of fast food, to the design of cities, to the character of our landscape, the automobile has shaped nearly every aspect of modern American life. In fact, the U.S. motor vehicle industry is the largest manufacturing industry in the world. James Rubenstein documents the story of the automotive industry . . . which despite its power, is an industry constantly struggling to redefine itself and assure its success. Making and Selling Cars: Innovation and Change in the U.S. Automotive Industry shows how this industry made adjustments and fostered innovations in both production and marketing in order to remain a viable force throughout the twentieth-century. Rubenstein builds his study of the American auto industry with care, taking the reader through this quintessentially modern history of production and consumption. Avoiding jargon while never over simplifying, Rubenstein gives a detailed and straightforward account of both the production and merchandising of cars. We learn how the industry began and about its methods for building cars and the modern American marketplace. Along the way there were many missteps and challenges—the Edsel, the fuel crisis, and the ascendancy of Japanese cars in the 1980s. The industry met these types of problems with new techniques and approaches. To demonstrate this, Rubenstein gives the reader examples of how the auto industry used to work, which he alternates with chapters showing how the industry has reinvented itself. Making and Selling Cars explains why the U.S. automotive industry has been and remains a vigorous shaper of the American economy.
Download or read book The Dog Bone Portfolio written by Margret Kopala and published by BPS Books. This book was released on 2015-06-01 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like so many of us, Margret Kopala lost a significant portion of her life savings in the stock market crash of 2008. Unlike us, however, she went on a long and intense financial odyssey to find out what caused the losses and what she could do to protect herself in the future. Armed with her skills as a journalist and public policy analyst, fueled by equal measures of fear and determination, and mentored by successful investment strategist and financial broadcaster John Budden, Kopala researched and wrote this magisterial analysis of how Russian economist Nikolai Kondratieff’s long-wave theory is playing out in what many today describe as a financial Winter. Along the way, she is introduced to financial experts familiar with Kondratieff scholarship. John Budden’s interviews in the book with Dean LeBaron, J. Anthony Boeckh, Ian Gordon, Larry Jeddeloh, Don Lindsey, the late Lord William Rees-Mogg, Jim Rogers, Eric Sprott, and Ronald-Peter Stöferle show how investors must put a new spin on asset allocation and security of their assets: like a dog that buries bones in different places, we would be advised to allocate our assets to different parts of the world – and to ensure that a good portion of those assets include gold, the only continuous basis of wealth across history and around the world. Kopala explores the global, national, and personal effects of: overconsumption; underproduction; energy and innovation; the printing of money to "save" the economy; competitive devaluations; deflation, reflation, and inflation; and war (the ultimate economic crisis). She documents those technologies that seeded previous New Economy Spring seasons -- from the era of canals to those of railroads, automobiles, and infotech -- and probes today’s innovations most likely to seed the Next New Economy that we desperately need if we are to escape the doldrums of the current financial Winter. With trenchant explanations of how individuals can achieve portfolio strength by first preserving capital then being vigilant about the financial effects of politics, economic theory, culture, and our own choices, The Dog Bone Portfolio is a gift to investors, policy-makers, and, ultimately, nations everywhere.
Download or read book Militancy Market Dynamics and Workplace Authority written by James R. Zetka and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an account of the political economy of labor relations in the U.S. automobile industry from the end of World War II to the 1970s. Zetka develops a sophisticated paradigm of hegemonic and competitive market conditions that challenges dominant theories of postwar industrial relations, linking rates of workplace militancy to product market fluctuations, variations in work organization, and differences in authority systems legitimated on the shop floor. He then uses this model to interpret in historical detail the complex market and workplace relationships that unfolded in the industry. Zetka traces the postwar struggles between management and militant auto workers over the definition of a fair days work. He argues that managements selective use of a quota-based authority system for occupational groups that had been the most militant during the 1940s and 1950s was primarily responsible for the decline of wildcat strike activity in the auto industry, and that this system was made possible by the emergence in the 1960s of a distinctive market structure that regulated competition between the surviving auto firms.
Download or read book Bad Old Days written by Alan J. Levine and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on 2011-12-31 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many, especially those on the political left, the 1950s are the "bad old days." The widely accepted list of what was allegedly wrong with that decade includes the Cold War, McCarthyism, racial segregation, self-satisfied prosperity, and empty materialism. The failings are coupled with ignoring poverty and other social problems, complacency, conformity, the suppression of women, and puritanical attitudes toward sex. In all, the conventional wisdom sees the decade as bland and boring, with commonly accepted people paralyzed with fear of war, Communism, or McCarthyism, or all three. Alan J. Levine, shows that the commonly accepted picture of the 1950s is flawed. It distorts a critical period of American history. That distortion seems to be dictated by an ideological agenda, including an emotional obsession with a sentimentalized version of the 1960s that in turn requires maintaining a particular, misleading view of the post-World War II era that preceded it. Levine argues that a critical view of the 1950s is embedded in an unwillingness to realistically evaluate the evolution of American society since the 1960s. Many--and not only liberals and those further to the left--desperately desire to avoid seeing, or admitting, just how badly many things have gone in the United States since the 1960s. Bad Old Days shows that the conventional view of the 1950s stands in opposition to the reality of the decade. Far from being the dismal prelude to a glorious period of progress, the postwar period of the late 1940s and 1950s was an era of unprecedented progress and prosperity. This era was then derailed by catastrophic political and economic misjudgments and a drastic shift in the national ethos that contributed nothing, or less than nothing, to a better world.
Download or read book The Automobile Age written by James J. Flink and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1990-07-19 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this sweeping cultural history, James Flink provides a fascinating account of the creation of the world's first automobile culture. He offers both a critical survey of the development of automotive technology and the automotive industry and an analysis of the social effects of "automobility" on workers and consumers.
Download or read book Auto Opium written by David Gartman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This much needed book is the first to provide a comprehensive history of the profession and aesthetics of American automobile design. The author reveals how the appearance of the automobile was shaped by the social conflicts arising from America's mass production system. He connects the social struggles of American society with the organizational struggles of designers to create symbol-laden substitutes for the American dream. Theoretically sophisticated, lucid and compelling, Auto-Opium will appeal to all interested in the American obsession with the car.
Download or read book Sloan Rules written by David Farber and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2002-11-15 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alfred P. Sloan Jr. became the president of General Motors in 1923 and stepped down as its CEO in 1946. During this time, he led GM past the Ford Motor Company and on to international business triumph by virtue of his brilliant managerial practices and his insights into the new consumer economy he and GM helped to produce. Bill Gates has said that Sloan's 1964 management tome, My Years with General Motors, "is probably the best book to read if you want to read only one book about business." And if you want to read only one book about Sloan, that book should be historian David Farber's Sloan Rules. Here, for the first time, is a study of both the difficult man and the pathbreaking executive. Sloan Rules reveals the GM genius as not only a driven manager of men, machines, money, and markets but also a passionate and not always wise participant in the great events of his day. Sloan, for example, reviled Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal; he firmly believed that politicians, government bureaucrats, and union leaders knew next to nothing about the workings of the new consumer economy, and he did his best to stop them from intervening in the private enterprise system. He was instrumental in transforming GM from the country's largest producer of cars into the mainstay of America's "Arsenal of Democracy" during World War II; after the war, he bet GM's future on renewed American prosperity and helped lead the country into a period of economic abundance. Through his business genius, his sometimes myopic social vision, and his vast fortune, Sloan was an architect of the corporate-dominated global society we live in today. David Farber's story of America's first corporate genius is biography of the highest order, a portrait of an extraordinarily compelling and skillful man who shaped his era and ours.
Download or read book Clarence Dillon written by Robert C. Perez and published by Madison Books. This book was released on 1995-06-06 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of a Polish immigrant who rose to the top of Wall Street in the Roaring Twenties and abandoned it after the Crash.
Download or read book Sixty to Zero written by Alex Taylor and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-04 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collapse of General Motors captured headlines in early 2009, but as Alex Taylor III writes in this in-depth dissection of the automaker's undoing, GM's was a meltdown forty years in the making. Drawing on more than thirty years of experience and insight as an automotive industry reporter, as well as personal relationships with many of the leading players, Taylor reveals the many missteps of GM and its competitors.
Download or read book Alfred P Sloan written by John Cunningham Wood and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2003 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This two-volume collection looks at the life and work of Alfred Pritchard Sloan, Jr. (1875-1966), chief executive of General Motors from 1923 to 1946, whose unique and ahead-of-its-time management style left an indelible mark on business and management studies.Also featuring an extensive bibliography, this set will prove valuable to business students and researchers alike.
Download or read book Auto Mania written by Tom McCarthy and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twentieth-century American experience with the automobile has much to tell us about the relationship between consumer capitalism and the environment, Tom McCarthy contends. In Auto Mania he presents the first environmental history of the automobile that shows how consumer desire (and manufacturer decisions) created impacts across the product lifecycle--from raw material extraction to manufacturing to consumer use to disposal. From the provocative public antics of young millionaires who owned the first cars early in the twentieth century to the SUV craze of the 1990s, Auto Mania explores developments that touched the environment. Along the way McCarthy examines how Henry Ford’s fetish for waste reduction tempered the environmental impacts of Model T mass production; how Elvis Presley’s widely shared postwar desire for Cadillacs made matters worse; how the 1970s energy crisis hurt small cars; and why baby boomers ignored worries about global warming. McCarthy shows that problems were recognized early. The difficulty was addressing them, a matter less of doing scientific research and educating the public than implementing solutions through America’s market economy and democratic government. Consumer and producer interests have rarely aligned in helpful ways, and automakers and consumers have made powerful opponents of regulation. The result has been a mixed record of environmental reform with troubling prospects for the future.
Download or read book Transforming Culture written by E. Briody and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-11 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transforming Culture offers a discussion and exploration of American work culture that can serve as a guide for organizational-culture change through the description and explanation of a model for change used at GM. The book describes the model, discusses culture-change tools that were derived from it and descriptions of how the tools work.
Download or read book Manufacturing written by David O. Whitten and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1990-09-27 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Overall, this first volume in the series should render business research in manufacturing a good deal easier by bringing together insightful industry histories and detailed critical bibliographies. This series has much to recommend it. Future volumes will be eagerly awaited. Reference Books Bulletin This historical and bibliographical reference work is the first volume of Greenwood Press's Handbook of American Business History, a series intended to supplement current bibliographic materials pertaining to business history. Devoted to manufacturing, this work uses the Enterprise Standard Industrial Classification (ESIC) to divide the subject into distinct segments, from which contributors have developed histories and bibliographies of the different types of manufacturing. Though authors were given sets of guidelines to follow, they were also allowed the flexibility to work in a format that best suited the material. Each contribution in this volume contains three important elements: a concise history of the manufacturing sector, a bibliographic essay, and a bibliography. Some contributions appear in three distinct parts, while others are combined into one or two segments; all build on currently available material for students and scholars doing research on business and industry. The contributors, who include business, economic, and social historians, as well as engineers and lawyers, have covered such topics as bakery products, industrial chemicals and synthetics, engines and turbines, and household appliances. Also included are an introductory essay that covers general works and a comprehensive index. This book should be a useful tool for courses in business and industry, and a valuable resource for college, university, and public libraries.
Download or read book Culture Class and Critical Theory written by David Gartman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Culture, Class, and Critical Theory develops a theory of culture that explains how ideas create and legitimate class inequalities in modern society. This theory is developed through a critique and comparison of the powerful ideas on culture offered by Pierre Bourdieu and the Frankfurt School thinkers, especially Theodor Adorno. These ideas are illuminated and criticized through the development of two empirical cases on which Gartman has published extensively, automobile design and architecture. Bourdieu and the Frankfurt School postulate opposite theories of the cultural legitimation of class inequalities. Bourdieu argues that the culture of modern society is a class culture, a ranked diversity of beliefs and tastes corresponding to different classes. The cultural beliefs and practices of the dominant class are arbitrarily defined as superior, thus legitimating its greater share of social resources. By contrast, the thinkers of the Frankfurt School conceive of modern culture as a mass culture, a leveled homogeneity in which the ideas and tastes shared by all classes disguises real class inequalities. This creates the illusion of an egalitarian democracy that prevents inequalities from being contested. Through an empirical assessment of the theories against the cases, Gartman reveals that both are correct, but for different parts of modern culture. These parts combine to provide a strong legitimation of class inequalities.
Download or read book Technical Innovation in American History 3 volumes written by Rosanne Welch and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-02-22 with total page 1489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the invention of eyeglasses to the Internet, this three-volume set examines the pivotal effects of inventions on society, providing a fascinating history of technology and innovations in the United States from the earliest European colonization to the present. Technical Innovation in American History surveys the history of technology, documenting the chronological and thematic connections between specific inventions, technological systems, individuals, and events that have contributed to the history of science and technology in the United States. Covering eras from colonial times to the present day in three chronological volumes, the entries include innovations in fields such as architecture, civil engineering, transportation, energy, mining and oil industries, chemical industries, electronics, computer and information technology, communications (television, radio, and print), agriculture and food technology, and military technology. The A–Z entries address key individuals, events, organizations, and legislation related to themes such as industry, consumer and medical technology, military technology, computer technology, and space science, among others, enabling readers to understand how specific inventions, technological systems, individuals, and events influenced the history, cultural development, and even self-identity of the United States and its people. The information also spotlights how American culture, the U.S. government, and American society have specifically influenced technological development.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of White Collar and Corporate Crime written by Lawrence M. Salinger and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2013-06-14 with total page 1212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the first edition of the Encyclopedia of White Collar and Corporate Crime was produced in 2004, the number and severity of these crimes have risen to the level of calamity, so much so that many experts attribute the near-Depression of 2008 to white-collar malfeasance, namely crimes of greed and excess by bankers and financial institutions. Whether the perpetrators were prosecuted or not, white-collar and corporate crime came near to collapsing the U.S. economy. In the 7 years since the first edition was produced we have also seen the largest Ponzi scheme in history (Maddoff), an ecological disaster caused by British Petroleum and its subcontractors (Gulf Oil Spill), and U.S. Defense Department contractors operating like vigilantes in Iraq (Blackwater). White-collar criminals have been busy, and the Second Edition of this encyclopedia captures what has been going on in the news and behind the scenes with new articles and updates to past articles.
