Download or read book The Origins of Corporations written by Germain Sicard and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fully modern corporations appeared in fourteenth-century Toulouse, much earlier than previously believed Germain Sicard proves that Europe's first corporations were fourteenth-century mill companies operating in Toulouse, rather than seventeenth-century English and Dutch trading companies as commonly believed. He shows that the corporate form derives from a unique ownership contract from Medieval Europe called pariage, and a culture of strong property rights and municipal self-governance. Based on archival research, Sicard's 1952 thesis has been translated into English with an introduction that places the work in the context of new institutional economics and legal theory. It is an important contribution to research on the history and legal origins of the corporation.
Download or read book Corporations and American Democracy written by Naomi R. Lamoreaux and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-08 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Citizens United and other high-profile cases have sparked passionate disagreement about the proper role of corporations in American democracy. Partisans on both sides have made bold claims, often with little basis in historical facts. Bringing together leading scholars of history, law, and political science, Corporations and American Democracy provides the historical and intellectual grounding necessary to put today’s corporate policy debates in proper context. From the nation’s founding to the present, Americans have regarded corporations with ambivalence—embracing their potential to revolutionize economic life and yet remaining wary of their capacity to undermine democratic institutions. Although corporations were originally created to give businesses and other associations special legal rights and privileges, historically they were denied many of the constitutional protections afforded flesh-and-blood citizens. This comprehensive volume covers a range of topics, including the origins of corporations in English and American law, the historical shift from special charters to general incorporation, the increased variety of corporations that this shift made possible, and the roots of modern corporate regulation in the Progressive Era and New Deal. It also covers the evolution of judicial views of corporate rights, particularly since corporations have become the form of choice for an increasing variety of nonbusiness organizations, including political advocacy groups. Ironically, in today’s global economy the decline of large, vertically integrated corporations—the type of corporation that past reform movements fought so hard to regulate—poses some of the newest challenges to effective government oversight of the economy.
Download or read book We the Corporations How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights written by Adam Winkler and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2018-02-27 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award for Nonfiction Finalist National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Finalist A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year A PBS “Now Read This” Book Club Selection Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Economist and the Boston Globe A landmark exposé and “deeply engaging legal history” of one of the most successful, yet least known, civil rights movements in American history (Washington Post). In a revelatory work praised as “excellent and timely” (New York Times Book Review, front page), Adam Winkler, author of Gunfight, once again makes sense of our fraught constitutional history in this incisive portrait of how American businesses seized political power, won “equal rights,” and transformed the Constitution to serve big business. Uncovering the deep roots of Citizens United, he repositions that controversial 2010 Supreme Court decision as the capstone of a centuries-old battle for corporate personhood. “Tackling a topic that ought to be at the heart of political debate” (Economist), Winkler surveys more than four hundred years of diverse cases—and the contributions of such legendary legal figures as Daniel Webster, Roger Taney, Lewis Powell, and even Thurgood Marshall—to reveal that “the history of corporate rights is replete with ironies” (Wall Street Journal). We the Corporations is an uncompromising work of history to be read for years to come.
Download or read book A History of Corporate Governance around the World written by Randall K. Morck and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 700 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many Americans, capitalism is a dynamic engine of prosperity that rewards the bold, the daring, and the hardworking. But to many outside the United States, capitalism seems like an initiative that serves only to concentrate power and wealth in the hands of a few hereditary oligarchies. As A History of Corporate Governance around the World shows, neither conception is wrong. In this volume, some of the brightest minds in the field of economics present new empirical research that suggests that each side of the debate has something to offer the other. Free enterprise and well-developed financial systems are proven to produce growth in those countries that have them. But research also suggests that in some other capitalist countries, arrangements truly do concentrate corporate ownership in the hands of a few wealthy families. A History of Corporate Governance around the World provides historical studies of the patterns of corporate governance in several countries-including the large industrial economies of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States; larger developing economies like China and India; and alternative models like those of the Netherlands and Sweden.
Download or read book The Origins of Business Money and Markets written by Keith Roberts and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-28 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To understand business and its political, cultural, and economic context, it helps to view it historically, yet most business histories look no further back than the nineteenth century. The full sweep of business history actually begins much earlier, with the initial cities of Mesopotamia. In the first book to describe and explain these origins, Roberts depicts the society of ancient traders and consumers, tracing the roots of modern business and underscoring the relationship between early and modern business practice. Roberts's narrative begins before business, which he defines as selling to voluntary buyers at a profit. Before business, he shows, the material conditions and concepts for the pursuit of profit did not exist, even though trade and manufacturing took place. The earliest business, he suggests, arose with the long distance trade of early Mesopotamia, and expanded into retail, manufacturing and finance in these command economies, culminating in the Middle Eastern empires. (Part One) But it was the largely independent rise of business, money, and markets in classical Greece that produced business much as we know it. Alexander the Great's conquests and the societies that his successors created in their kingdoms brought a version of this system to the old Middle Eastern empires, and beyond. (Part Two) At Rome this entrepreneurial market system gained important new features, including business corporations, public contracting, and even shopping malls. The story concludes with the sharp decline of business after the 3rd century CE. (Part Three) In each part, Roberts portrays the major new types of business coming into existence. He weaves these descriptions into a narrative of how the prevailing political, economic, and social culture shaped the nature and importance of business and the status, wealth, and treatment of business people. Throughout, the discussion indicates how much (and how little) business has changed, provides a clear picture of what business actually is, presents a model for understanding the social impact of business as a whole, and yields stimulating insights for public policy today.
Download or read book Corporate Conquests written by Charles Patterson Giersch and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Muleteers -- Families -- The revolutionaries -- The excluded -- Mining -- The technocrat -- Corporations, the state, and ethnic difference.
Download or read book The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History c 1550 1750 written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-12-10 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William A. Pettigrew and David Veevers put forward a new interpretation of the role Europe’s overseas corporations played in early modern global history, recasting them from vehicles of national expansion to significant forces of global integration. Across the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Indian Ocean and Pacific, corporations provided a truly global framework for facilitating the circulation, movement and exchange between and amongst European and non-European communities, bringing them directly into dialogue often for the first time. Usually understood as imperial or colonial commercial enterprises, The Corporation as a Protagonist in Global History reveals the unique global sociology of overseas corporations to provide a new global history in which non-Europeans emerged as key stakeholders in European overseas enterprises in the early modern world. Contributors include: Michael D. Bennett, Aske Laursen Brock, Liam D. Haydon, Lisa Hellman, Leonard Hodges, Emily Mann, Simon Mills, Chris Nierstrasz, Edgar Pereira, Edmond Smith, Haig Smith, and Anna Winterbottom.
Download or read book Making the Market written by Paul Johnson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-04 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Corporate capitalism was invented in nineteenth-century Britain; most of the market institutions that we take for granted today - limited companies, shares, stock markets, accountants, financial newspapers - were Victorian creations. So were the moral codes, the behavioural assumptions, the rules of thumb and the unspoken agreements that made this market structure work. This innovative study provides the first integrated analysis of the origin of these formative capitalist institutions, and reveals why they were conceived and how they were constructed. It explores the moral, economic and legal assumptions that supported this formal institutional structure, and which continue to shape the corporate economy of today. Tracing the institutional growth of the corporate economy in Victorian Britain and demonstrating that many of the perceived problems of modern capitalism - financial fraud, reckless speculation, excessive remuneration - have clear historical precedents, this is a major contribution to the economic history of modern Britain.
Download or read book The Modern Corporation and Private Property written by Adolf Augustus Berle and published by . This book was released on 1937 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Organizing America written by Charles Perrow and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American society today is shaped not nearly as much by vast open spaces as it is by vast, bureaucratic organizations. Over half the working population toils away at enterprises with 500 or more employees--up from zero percent in 1800. Is this institutional immensity the logical outcome of technological forces in an all-efficient market, as some have argued? In this book, the first organizational history of nineteenth-century America, Yale sociologist Charles Perrow says no. He shows that there was nothing inevitable about the surge in corporate size and power by century's end. Critics railed against the nationalizing of the economy, against corporations' monopoly powers, political subversion, environmental destruction, and "wage slavery." How did a nation committed to individual freedom, family firms, public goods, and decentralized power become transformed in one century? Bountiful resources, a mass market, and the industrial revolution gave entrepreneurs broad scope. In Europe, the state and the church kept private organizations small and required consideration of the public good. In America, the courts and business-steeped legislators removed regulatory constraints over the century, centralizing industry and privatizing the railroads. Despite resistance, the corporate form became the model for the next century. Bureaucratic structure spread to government and the nonprofits. Writing in the tradition of Max Weber, Perrow concludes that the driving force of our history is not technology, politics, or culture, but large, bureaucratic organizations. Perrow, the author of award-winning books on organizations, employs his witty, trenchant, and graceful style here to maximum effect. Colorful vignettes abound: today's headlines echo past battles for unchecked organizational freedom; socially responsible alternatives that were tried are explored along with the historical contingencies that sent us down one road rather than another. No other book takes the role of organizations in America's development as seriously. The resultant insights presage a new historical genre.
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Business History written by John Wilson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Business History is a definitive work of reference, and authoritative, international source on business history. Compiled by leading scholars in the field, it offers both researchers and students an introduction and overview of current scholarship in this expanding discipline. Drawing on a wealth of international contributions, this volume expands the field and explores how business history interacts theoretically and methodologically with other fields. It charts the origins and development of business history and its global reach from Latin America and Africa, to North America and Europe. With this multi-perspective approach, it illustrates the unique contribution of business history and its relationship with a range of other disciplines, from finance and banking to gender issues in corporations. The Routledge Companion to Business History is a vital source of reference for students and researchers in the fields of business history, corporate governance and business ethics. "This collection is an excellent starting point for understanding the field and finding areas where business history, management theory, and social science can intersect." Canadian Business History Newsletter, January 2019
Download or read book The Origin and Evolution of New Businesses written by Amar Bhide and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a field dominated by anecdote and folklore, this landmark study integrates more than ten years of intensive research and modern theories of business and economics. The result is a comprehensive framework for understanding entrepreneurship that provides new and penetrating insights. This clearly and concisely written book is essential for anyone who wants to start a business, for the entrepreneur or executive who wants to grow a company, and for the scholar who wants to understand this crucial economic activity.
Download or read book American Enterprise written by Andy Serwer and published by Smithsonian Institution. This book was released on 2015-05-26 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to be an American? What are American ideas and values? American Enterprise, the companion book to a major exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, aims to answer these questions about the American experience through an exploration of its economic and commercial history. It argues that by looking at the intersection of capitalism and democracy, we can see where we as a nation have come from and where we might be going in the future. Richly illustrated with images of objects from the museum’s collections, American Enterprise includes a 1794 dollar coin, Alexander Graham Bell’s 1876 telephone, a brass cash register from Marshall Fields, Sam Walton’s cap, and many other goods and services that have shaped American culture. Historical and contemporary advertisements are also featured, emphasizing the evolution of the relationship between producers and consumers over time. Interspersed in the historical narrative are essays from today’s industry leaders—including Sheila Bair, Adam Davidson, Bill Ford, Sally Greenberg, Fisk Johnson, Hank Paulson, Richard Trumka, and Pat Woertz—that pose provocative questions about the state of contemporary American business and society. American Enterprise is a multi-faceted survey of the nation’s business heritage and corresponding social effects that is fundamental to an understanding of the lives of the American people, the history of the United States, and the nation’s role in global affairs.
Download or read book One Nation Under God written by Kevin M. Kruse and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2015-04-14 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The provocative and authoritative history of the origins of Christian America in the New Deal era We're often told that the United States is, was, and always has been a Christian nation. But in One Nation Under God, historian Kevin M. Kruse reveals that the belief that America is fundamentally and formally Christian originated in the 1930s. To fight the "slavery" of FDR's New Deal, businessmen enlisted religious activists in a campaign for "freedom under God" that culminated in the election of their ally Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. The new president revolutionized the role of religion in American politics. He inaugurated new traditions like the National Prayer Breakfast, as Congress added the phrase "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance and made "In God We Trust" the country's first official motto. Church membership soon soared to an all-time high of 69 percent. Americans across the religious and political spectrum agreed that their country was "one nation under God." Provocative and authoritative, One Nation Under God reveals how an unholy alliance of money, religion, and politics created a false origin story that continues to define and divide American politics to this day.
Download or read book Creating the Corporate Soul written by Roland Marchand and published by Taylor & Francis US. This book was released on 2001 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of the 20th century, America's giant corporations underwent an astonishing change, from being reviled as dangerous leviathons, to being respected, and somethimes revered. This text examines the reasons for this tranformation.
Download or read book Concentrated Corporate Ownership written by Randall K. Morck and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Standard economic models assume that many small investors own firms. This is so in most large U.S. firms, but wealthy individuals or families generally hold controlling blocks in smaller U.S. firms and in all firms in most other countries. Given this, the lack of theoretical and empirical work on tightly held firms is surprising. What corporate governance problems arise in tightly held firms? How do these differ from corporate governance problems in widely held firms? How do control blocks arise and how are they maintained? How does concentrated ownership affect economic growth? How should we regulate tightly held firms? Drawing together leading scholars from law, economics, and finance, this volume examines the economic and legal issues of concentrated ownership and their impact on a shifting global economy.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Corporation written by Thomas Clarke and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-21 with total page 708 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of the Corporation assesses the contemporary relevance, purpose, and performance of the corporation. The corporation is one of the most significant, if contested, innovations in human history, and the direction and effectiveness of corporate law, corporate governance, and corporate performance are being challenged as never before. Continuously evolving, the corporation as the primary instrument for wealth generation in contemporary economies demands frequent assessment and reinterpretation. The focus of this work is the transformative impact of innovation and change upon corporate structure, purpose, and operation. Corporate innovation is at the heart of the value-creation process in increasingly internationalized and competitive market economies, and corporations today are embedded in a world of complex global supply chains and rising state and state-directed capitalism. In questioning the fundamental purpose and performance of the corporation, this Handbook continues a tradition commenced by Berle and Means, and contributed to by generations of business scholars. What is the corporation and what is it becoming? How do we define its form and purpose and how are these changing? To whom is the corporation responsible, and who should judge the ultimate performance of corporations? By investigating the origins, development, strategies, and theories of corporations, this volume addresses such questions to provide a richer theoretical account of the corporation and its contested future.
