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International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 13, No. 3, 2000
I. Political Economies and Transformations of Capitalism
Social Theory and the Transformation of
Capitalism in the Twentieth Century*
Gary Herrigel
The notion that there is a unitary trajectory associated with capitalist
industrialization is identified with many of the great theorizers of economic
development in the twentieth century: Schumpeter, Veblen, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Keynes, Rostow, Gerschenkron, Chandler, Galbraith, and Schonfield. Each of these thinkers, while differing amongst themselves on a broad
array of issues of theory, shared in common the view that there was an
epochally specific social system of capitalism, founded on private property
and free markets for labor power. In its early phases, this system operated
according to a very specific logic of task- and product-specialization, guided
by rational market exchange, that led to increases in the scale of production.
This dynamic yielded a process of centralization and concentration in the
organizational and property forms governing the social division of labor
which, as the system matured, ultimately led to the displacement of market
rationality by a rationality of hierarchy and bureaucracy. Naturally, these
unitary theorists of capitalism held that different societies would experience
this common process in different ways, owing to the contingencies of timing
and the greater and lesser tractability of tradition. But that there was one
process and that it had a single and determinable directionality was never
doubted. Indeed, it was taken to be one of the great discoveries of modern
economic science.
This unitary view of capitalism and its trajectory of development was
also a core part of classical social theory as it emerged in the first fifty years
of the twentieth century—in particular in the work of Weber, Polanyi,
Parsons, Aron, Bell and the neo-Marxian tradition of critical social theory
represented most notably by Horkheimer, Marcuse, Pollock and Neumann.
*A review essay of Harry F. Dahms Transformations of Capitalism: Economy. Society, and
the State in the Twentieth Century. Main Trends in the World Series. New York: New York
University Press, 1999.
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© 2000 Human Sciences Press. Inc.
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These theorists examined the broader social, political and cultural consequences of capitalism's movement from market to bureaucratic rationality
that the unitary political economists described. In particular, they focused
on the way in which that development conditioned (and was conditioned
by) the organization of social and political power, itself increasingly bureaucratic, in modern societies. Further, their work linked this analysis of bureaucratic organization and control to the development of (increasingly
truncated) subjective senses of individual and collective possibility in modern life. As with their counterparts in political economy, these thinkers
were sensitive to national difference stemming from contingencies in timing
and tradition. But, despite their many substantive and theoretical differences, none disputed that "modern capitalism" [or "industrial society"] was
a unitary historical form that profoundly shaped the way that all societies
grappled with modernity.
The theoretical achievements of the above traditions—which are in
part excerpted, collected and summarized in the new reader Transformations of Capitalism: Economy, Society, and the State in the Twentieth Century
edited by the social theorist Harry Dahms1 have been formidable. Indeed,
as Dahms's extensive introduction notes, they have produced the contemporary disciplines of sociology and political economy and have constructed
extremely powerful understandings of contemporary reality in industrial
democracies. To the first group of political economists, we owe core paradigms for understanding innovation, combined, uneven and late development, corporate organization in the firm, the joint stock enterprise and
state led macroeconomic governance. To the social theorists, we owe a
critical appreciation of the affinity between the acquisitiveness, instrumentalism and individuality of capitalist commodity production and the formal,
hierarchical and instrumentally rational forms of bureaucratic organization
and hierarchical control that historically accompany them in political and
social realms.
I have no intention in what follows of denying the validity or significance of the theoretical accomplishments of the classic twentieth century
traditions that the Dahms volume celebrates. I will, however, argue that
they are not as generally helpful or broadly relevant for analyzing and
constructing explanations of the developmental experience of industrial
societies in the twentieth century as they, or Dahms, maintain. The general
and unitary theoretical ambition that defines the tradition results in a selfblinding dynamic in which theorists are unable to recognize the highly
particular character and context dependence of what they take to be general
developmental dynamics in industrial societies. Indeed, in my view, this
unitary tradition's linear and homogenizing conception of capitalist development has led to a profound underestimation of a wide array of perfectly
Social Theory and Capitalism in the Twentieth Century
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viable forms of organization, control, struggle and governance that have
been constitutive of the various developmental experiences of industrial
societies throughout the twentieth century. The unitary tradition's failure
to appreciate alternative forms of organization is a great limitation. At
best, it creates a sense of false necessity in the interpretive orientation
of the theorist. At worst, it shackles the transformative imagination in
social theory.2
ALTERNATIVE NON-UNITARY TRADITIONS
The first point to be made is that the unitary tradition represented in
the Dahms volume has always been only one voice among many competing
ones in the collective effort to comprehend the industrial transformations
of society in the modern age. Even as it was emerging in the nineteenth
century (in the writings of Marxian and classical economists and Darwinian
social theorists), the unitary conception of capitalism's trajectory was opposed by (among others): catholic corporatist thinkers who believed in a
fragmented social order of organic and customary communities of vocation
and belief;3 pragmatic conservatives in the Burkean tradition who believed
in the piecemeal, uneven, locally reflective and gradual nature of social
evolution;4 nationalist economists such as Friedrich List who denied that
there was a common logic in industrialization and insisted on (nationally
empowering) local economic peculiarity;5 and, finally, anarchist and mutualist writers, such as Proudhon and Kropotkin who believed that the centralizing and concentrating vision of the Marxian and classical economists sat
poorly with the numerous and demonstrable ways in which human beings
flourished and created in decentralized, local and smaller scale productive
environments.6 In the twentieth century, especially on the left, opposition
to the unitary view of capitalism has been found in the experimentalist
inclinations of pragmatic philosophers and social critics such as John Dewey,
who believed in the radically historically specific, contingent, provisional
and imminently revisable character of organization and practice in modern
life.7 Opposition also came from pluralist writers who viewed tendencies
toward centralization and bureaucracy as one form of modern control and
governance among many alternatives, including, not least, the extremely
strong and attractive experiments in modern societies in group and associational governance.8
Though this debate has never been settled entirely in favor of one side
or the other, in recent decades the unitary traditions have come under very
significant attack—empirically, theoretically and politically—from a broad
array of practical and academic locations. The catalyst for the critiques has
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been the massive transformations in the organization of industrial production, in corporate organization and in state finance and services that have
been occurring in industrial societies all over the world. These transformations are awkwardly explained by the unitary traditions, not only because
different companies, regions and national governments are responding to
similar pressures in very different institutional, political and strategic ways.
The unitary narratives are also being rendered problematic, theoretically,
because their core explanatory mechanisms are being falsified in practice.9
For example, industrial production in a broad array of manufacturing industries is being spread out away from a central firm location and distributed
across a wide array of independent property holders in the social division
of labor.10 In other words, instead of the unitary logic of concentration and
centralization of capital, we see increasingly—in many different ways!!—
spatial decentralization in production and a decoupling of the development
of the division of labor from property. This picture is then further complicated when one views the organization of work within production in such
contexts. Here the unitary strategy of separating conception from execution
is in many factories being abandoned for forms of organization—
multifunctional teams, simultaneous engineering—that self-consciously
seek to reintegrate conception and execution in the interest of flexibility
and manufacturing quality."
These attacks in the empirical world by real agents on bureaucratic
control and hierarchy, finally, are not confined to business enterprise. State
bureaucracies are also being leveled through efforts to make organizational
decision making more efficient, to unburden responsibility from centers of
authority and to enhance the flexibility of organizations by locating decision
making authority closer to the origin of the problem (i.e., by reintegrating
policy conception and execution).12 Moreover, in the same process of debureaucratization, functional specialization and the division of authority
between government and citizens is frequently being replaced by multifunctional community and government groups in which decisional authority is
shared by the disparate members of the group and decision making capacity
is exercised through discussion among the members of the group.13 Here
again, instead of unitary instrumentalism, hierarchical control and atomization, regulatory governments are in this way introducing practical reflection
and explicit ideas of mutual dependence into policy making.
By pointing to these examples (and there are many others), contemporary critics of the unitary tradition in economic history,14 economic sociology,15 economic geography,16 evolutionary economics,17 political science,18
and social theory19 have not, for the most part, intended to suggest that
the unitary conception of capitalism's trajectory is utterly wrong or indeed,
being replaced by an alternative one. Everyone admits some historical
Social Theory and Capitalism in the Twentieth Century
409
significance, under the proper conditions, for the forms of organization and
control identified by the unitary tradition. Moreover those critics writing
on the contemporary period acknowledge that it is still possible, in partial
agreement with the later essays in Dahms's volume (e.g., by Bluestone and
Harrison, Zysman and Cohen, Kolko, Stallings and Streeck et al.) to find
examples in the world that seemingly correspond to the unitary expectations: hierarchy, bureaucracy, and Taylorism still exist and are being reproduced in all advanced industrial societies. The criticisms, however, are
not about suggesting an alternative trajectory or an alternative holistic
conception of capitalism. Rather, they are about moving away from the
idea that there needs to be a unitary trajectory at all and developing a
theoretical language that makes it possible to account for what appears to
be enduring developmental, and organizational heterogeneity in industrial
societies, polities and economies.
Seen in this light, it is striking that Dahms has chosen to celebrate the
unitary position in a volume that is supposed to chronicle voices on the
transformation of capitalism in the twentieth century. No critics of the
unitary conception are included and, to the extent that their arguments are
addressed (largely in passing in the editor's introduction and epilog), it is
only to dismiss them as superficial interpretations of economic change
that miss "deeper," "underlying" "dominant" and "more fundamental"
features of capitalist continuity and development. This is an odd move,
given the very profound tension between the developmental expectations
generated by the explanatory mechanisms in the unitary view and the
variety of observed forms of "non-unitary" organization and control unearthed by the alternative critical tradition. How can this one sided representational strategy be explained? I think it comes from the self blinding
logic of the unitary conception of capitalism itself: When confronted with
empirical evidence that is in tension with the trajectory of organization and
control predicted by the coherence of the unitary notion of capitalism, the
impulse is to make that evidence into something exogenous to fundamental
process e.g., intractable tradition or organizational forms that have to do
with the lack of synchrony in the unfolding of the deeper unitary logic. I
will elaborate on this point below, but before doing so it is important to
turn to the more detailed picture of twentieth century capitalism that the
unitary Dahms volume presents.
THE UNITARY VIEW OF CAPITALISM IN THE
TWENTIETH CENTURY
Dahms's portrait of twentieth century capitalism has two framing large
claims. The first is that the twentieth century saw the triumph of bureau-
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cracy, in the form of the corporation and the welfare state, in capitalist
society. By this he means that the principles of hierarchical organization
and control replaced the market as the dominant mode of governance for
capitalism and that they pervade contemporary political and industrial
experience: "Focusing on structural shifts in advanced political economies,
this volume brings to light the fundamental trends that operate "below"
the surface of economic activity, conveying the central importance of organization and control . . . [T]hese trends constitute crucial aspects of economic decision-making processes in bureaucratic capitalism" (page 7). In
the twentieth century, control is hierarchical and organization bureaucratic
for Dahms. The second claim is that the United States is the historical
embodiment or realization of bureaucratic capitalism as a pure type. "Since
the late nineteenth century," Dahms writes, "the United States may well
have been the most capitalistic society" (page 9). The trends toward pervasive bureaucratization in the economy and the polity "manifested themselves more distinctly and clearly" in the U.S. than elsewhere (page 9).
Using these two framing arguments, Dahms arranges his unitary theorists to construct the following narrative about the emergence and evolution
of twentieth century bureaucratic capitalism. Guided by a pervasive capitalist instrumental rationality and calculation, hierarchical and bureaucratic
principles in the form of the industrial corporation (Chandler) triumphed
completely over all traditionalist non-capitalist/non-bureaucratic opposition in the early twentieth century United States economy. These hierarchical and bureaucratic principles were extended and consolidated through
the spread of joint stock enterprise and the increasing separation of ownership and control (Veblen, Berle & Means). The absolute hegemony of
these principles of control and organization in the broader society as a
whole was consolidated at mid century with the growth of the bureaucratic
welfare state, military industrial complex and American dominated international monetary and trade apparatus of the post war Golden Age (Keynes,
Schumpeter, Polanyi, Kindleberger, Adams, Galbraith, Aron, Jordan). For
the Europeans and Japanese during this period, Dahms writes, "the concept
as well as the reality of capitalism [was] tempered to a greater extent than
in the United States by political, social and cultural factors and preconceived
notions that imposed limits on the importance of the economy and its role
in the society" (page 9).
According to Dahms, the dominance of hierarchical control and bureaucratic organization became even stronger and more pervasive (and
more reactionary) in the United States with the deep crisis of the 1970s
and eighties. This capitalist crisis was accompanied by the collapse of the
Bretton Woods system (Block), and initiated the decimation of the organized labor movement (Bluestone & Harrison, Kolko), and attacks on the
Social Theory and Capitalism in the Twentieth Century
411
welfare state (Offe, Bensman & Vidich). Out of the crisis, bureaucratic
capitalism in the U.S. emerged in the 1990s even stronger with the global
growth of the massively controlling and bureaucratic multinational (Gilpin),
supported by the huge unchecked power of finance capital (Fligstein, Helleiner). Despite the neo-liberal ideology that accompanied the reaction
against the welfare state and the labor movement, bureaucracy was actually
expanding (not retreating) in the state realm as well, as states increasingly
sought to circumvent the market and foster innovation and technological
development in their economies (Zysman and Cohen). Naturally, owing
to differences in tradition and timing of the crisis, major capitalist powers
manifested the dominance of bureaucracy in their economies and polities
in different ways (Stallings & Streeck).
Dahms freely acknowledges that the authors he has assembled to
construct this narrative do not all agree on theoretical first principles or in
all of the details of the transformation of capitalism in the twentieth century
(although he does not acknowledge that they all adhere to the unitary
notion of capitalism). He believes, legitimately, that despite this pluralism,
it is nonetheless "possible to arrive at an intelligible narrative of the transformations of capitalism in the twentieth century" with this assemblage of
thinkers (page 24). This, in turn, gives him hope that it will one day be
possible to arrive at a grand and massive theoretical synthesis that will
enable us to grasp contemporary capitalism as a unitary whole. He writes:
"This collection ought to be understood as an attempt to prepare the kind
of comprehensive perspective without which we cannot hope to address
effectively any issues pertaining to capitalism in general. . . This is, after
all, the promise of modern times: that we can move beyond the narrow
definitions of 'reality' (whether political, economic, ideological, religious, or
theoretical), to arrive at a better sense of the whole by means of unimpeded
intellectual and practical exchange" (page 26). Dahms believes that moving
toward the construction of a general, holistic conception of unitary capitalism will make it more likely for societies to be able to solve the problems
that such a capitalism generates.
AN ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVE
From my point of view, which is frankly sympathetic to the opponents
of the unitary conception, this is both a highly flawed portrait of twentieth
century capitalism and a chimerical theoretical hope. The alternative nonunitary tradition objects to both of the core framing themes of Dahms'
twentieth century: It does not construct the United States as the embodiment of a pure capitalist type, nor does it view hierarchical bureaucracy
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as the dominant form of organization and control in the century. Further,
the alternative tradition takes the ambition to achieve unity and wholeness
as an obstacle to the invention of solutions to problems generated in contemporary historical contexts rather than as a necessary step toward such
solutions. The character of the alternative position can best be grasped by
looking first at core theoretical differences between the alternative theorists
and the unitary theorists. Once these have been specified, it will also be
possible to show how the alternative tradition reconceives the activity of
social criticism and facilitates practical problem solving capacity. Finally,
it will be possible to show how the problem of the development of industrial
societies in the twentieth century can be framed very differently.
DIFFERENCES IN THEORY
The core difference in theory, from which all others follow, between
the unitary conceptions of capitalism and contemporary critics concerns
the way in which each tradition understands the historical specificity of the
processes and institutions being observed. For the unitary tradition, history
has a linear directionality in which the human condition either becomes
better and better or in which tensions between forms of human potential
and given possibilities become increasingly acute.20 The line of unitary
history is marked by an ordered and hierarchical sequence of epochs of
fundamentally different but internally unitary and systematically integrated
forms of social, economic and political order (agrarian empires, feudalism,
capitalism, etc.), each of which themselves contain linearly arranged substages of development (competitive capitalism, bureaucratic or corporate
capitalism, globalization, etc.). Historical specificity within this tradition,
then, involves placing ideas, events, processes and institutions within this
elaborate linear and hierarchical structure. Naturally, social reality is extremely heterogeneous, but the normative hierarchy and the ideal types
(and sub-types) of historical systems make it possible to separate progressive from reactionary (or backward or irrelevant) phenomenon at any point
in time.
In unitary theory, moreover, the causal analytic and the normative
dimensions of theory depend on and reinforce one another: Without a line
of progressive development, and a systematically interconnected matrix of
ideal typical relations and processes that produce it, the specific normative
ends of the theory would have no general, transhistorical authority. They
would just be one normative position among many in a given present. On
the other side, without the authority of a norm of progress, the analytical
procedures of unitary theory would have no grounds for separating so
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413
decisively progressive from reactionary or backward dimensions of heterogeneous reality—especially if the "backward" elements tended to reproduce themselves over time. This very modern union of universal norms
with rational analytic concepts is notably resistant to empirical disconfirmation, not least because inconvenient pieces of data can be dismissed as
superficial or out of step with the "underlying" forces of development. To
an outsider, who does not accept the unitary theory's coupling of universal
norm and systematic theory, this resistance to evidence appears as a kind
of blindness. Their normative confidence blinds them both to the possibility
of alternative trajectories and to the particularity of their own analytical
and normative claims.21
The alternative tradition, on the other hand, denies that history has
any inherent directionality or trajectory at all. Human potential is taken
to be effectively limitless, and as a consequence indescribable as a whole.
Without a conception of the whole, however, it is not possible to construct
a general normative ordering of progress with transhistorical validity, as
the unitary tradition does. For the contemporary alternative tradition, all
norms and practical understandings of individual and collective possibility
are local and historically specific.22
This difference from the unitary tradition has consequences in three
areas: 1.) for the way in which this alternative tradition conceives of social,
political and economic order and the role of choice and action in the way
that an order changes; 2.) for the way it relates the past to the present; and
3.) for the understanding it has for the critical role of social theory. Each
of these areas further distinguish the alternative tradition of social theory
from the unitary.
Social, Economic, and Political Order and the Role of Choice:
Because it rejects the notion of a transhistorical normative anchor by
which local constellations of human potential can be ordered (as progressive
or backward etc.) the alternative tradition also rejects the analytical strategy
of constructing an overarching, abstract, interconnected model of social,
economic and political order—such as "bureaucratic capitalism." Instead,
this non-unitary tradition approaches the analysis of a given moment of
heterogeneous social life with the expectation that it will have order and
not be chaotic, but that it will also be full of multiple possibilities for
individual and collective' enhancement as well as multiple forms of constraint. Transformation and liberation is continually occurring within the
various particular realms of a given social order while being blocked or
constrained in others. Any particular historical social order will likely be
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governed by multiple principles of order, contain an array of organizational
forms and be subject to numerous and competing forms of control. Moreover, in most cases, the governing, organizing and controlling principles and
their relation to one another will be either contested, ambiguous or both.
Conceiving of the social order in this way tends to cede structure
less causal or shaping power and give strategic agency, deliberation and
creativity more importance in the process of social transformation than is
typical of the unitary tradition. Contestation and ambiguity in the realms
of control and organization creates the possibility for agents to reshape the
context in which their interactions are ordered. This possibility for effective
agency is enhanced by the absence of a privileged global position from
which all of the possibilities and constraints can be identified: local players
will see possibilities and constraints that are not apparent to others, creating
congenital uncertainty in systems and the possibility for unforeseeable
occurrences. Struggle, conflict and deliberation among different perspectives and locations, as well as surprise, play crucial roles in the construction
of organizational forms and governance mechanisms that come to constitute
a given social economic and political order.
Different theorists in the alternative tradition describe this non-unitary
conception of social, economic and political order in different ways. Geoffrey Hodgson, for example, has suggested that non-unitary evolutionary
theories are governed by what he calls the "impurity principle," by which
he means that "there must always be a coexistent plurality of modes of
production, so that the social formation as a whole has the requisite structural variety to cope with change."23 Hodgson and the evolutionary economists, however, place less emphasis on creative agency than other theorists
within the alternative tradition. Jonathan Zeitlin, for example, denies that
there really are coherent modes of production that interpenetrate, in reality.
Instead, he suggests that reflexive agents draw distinctions, in thought,
between modes of production—in his parlance, epochs—that facilitate the
creation of hybrid forms of organization in practice. In his view the
The interpenetration of strategies and practices within industries and national economies at any one time resulting from actors' efforts to hedge their organizational
and technological bets about future changes in the environment casts inevitable
doubt on the possibility of drawing sharp distinctions between epochs or periods
such as the "age of Fordism" or the "era of flexibility." From this vantage point, it
seems more useful to distinguish historical epochs according to changing orientations
towards the ideas of political and economic regarded as normal or paradigmatic
than to divide history into periods where social life was in fact thoroughly organized
according to one or another master principle. This notion of changing orientations
towards paradigmatic or normal ideas faithfully conveys both a sense of changing
constraints on historical actors and that of continuing scope for localized strategic
choice insofar as ideas of normality tend to magnify and thus to increase the
importance of dominant conceptions without reflecting or constraining anything
like the totality of behaviour they purportedly characterize.24
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415
On either of the alternative views, however, the result is that at
any given time, the social political and economic order is understood
to be composed of highly contingent constellations of institutional and
ideological compromises and provisional solutions to common problems.
They are newly created admixtures of possibility and constraint forged
out of problems and struggles that antecedent admixtures fostered.
Specific forms of institutional organization and conceptions of authority
and control as well as whole complexes of them at the level of large
societies will, on this alternative view, never achieve the kind of tight
interconnected coherence and power that they are given within unitary
theories. Non-unitary theory holds as unrealistic, overly simplistic or
even implausible notions of organization and control such as a formally
rational bureaucracy or a social order dominated through and through
by instrumental rationality. The normative hierarchy that encourages
such a way of conceiving social order and its component institutions is
absent in non-unitary theory. In the unitary conception, social orders
follow lines of development; in the alternative non-unitary conception,
social orders transform themselves from what they were through the
creative local strategies of reflexive agents.
Relation Between the Present and the Past
Conceiving of the social, political and economic order as a highly
contingent congery of possibility and constraint, characterized by the continuous, unpredictable local lifting of constraint, realization of possibility and
(inevitably) creation of new constraint has consequences for the way that
the relationship between the past and the present are thought of in the
alternative theories of industrial transformation. In the unitary tradition,
where history moves along a path, the past is in all positive practical senses
useless. The present has moved beyond the organizational forms, technologies, and mechanisms of the past to more "developed" forms. The past is
useful only in an analytical sense, as a way of identifying the specificity of
the present along the development path. The only practical role that the
past plays in the present is an obstructive and polluting one in the form of
"tradition." Advocates of outmoded and backward modes of practice and
organization can use structural power to disrupt the forward march of
unitary progress. But over time, such traditions tend to give way to the
acid of unitary capitalist progress. The present literally destroys the past
in unitary theories.
In the alternative tradition, where there is no path toward a beyond,
merely contingent constellations of possibilities and constraints on human
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potential, the past can be extremely useful in a practical sense. It can
serve as a reservoir of information involving past institutional experiments,
viable but abandoned organizational forms, technologies, production
arrangements, forgotten possibilities for human improvement, and so
forth, from which those in the present can learn. Thus, the alternative
present is understood as a congery of problems and possibilities for
liberation, while alternative history is viewed as a reservoir of ideas,
beliefs, practices, understandings, organizational forms, and so forth that
can be drawn on in the effort to solve problems, lift constraints and
make liberation possible.25 In the alternative theoretical frame, tradition
is understood in an utterly different way than it is in the unitary tradition:
Not as a barrier to change, but as contingently ordered congeries of
thought and/or practice from the past that continues to have value in
the present and that can be applied, abandoned, ignored or deconstructed
as a whole or piecemeal by problem solving actors in the present. The
alternative tradition rejects the unitary view of tradition as a barrier to
change and social, economic or political transformation.
Alternative Critical Theory
Understanding the social political and economic order as a heterodox
constellation of contingently related social arrangements (possibilities and
constraints), and the past as a reservoir of information that can have practical value for problem solving in the present, makes for a very different
conception of the role of social theory and of "critical" analysis. In the
unitary tradition, "critical theory" set itself the task of using reason (properly understood) to identify ways in which the structure of the social order—
capitalism—systematically stifled or repressed the realization of a very
particular transhistorical conception of human potential. In the alternative
view, critical analysis tries to point to ways in which active and present
possibilities for the development of human capacity might be realized,
either through the elimination of constraint or through the identification
of possibility. The social theorist can also be publicly useful by marshalling
knowledge of the organization of other contexts, both in the present and
in the past, that not only identify possibility, but that can contribute to real
problem-solving and transformation in the social order. Naturally there
will be normative and analytical disagreements among analysts as to the
character of problems and on the possibility and desirability of their solution. There is no transhistorical norm that makes it possible to order the
importance of social problems or prioritize them. Such ordering must be
done through local and historically specific debate, collective argument,
Social Theory and Capitalism in the Twentieth Century
417
struggle and experimentation. The alternative tradition expects the evolution and transformation of the social world to be driven by politics and
struggle and for all outcomes to be provisional and subject to revision.
A NON-UNITARY ACCOUNT OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
In light of these theoretical differences between the unitary tradition
and the alternative tradition, it is easy to see how the latter tradition might
present a different narrative of the industrial experience in the twentieth
century. In fact, writers in the non-unitary tradition present a host of different narratives of the experience of industrial development in the twentieth
century.26 I do not intend to outline all the narrative variants. Instead, I
will highlight how they collectively reject the main empirical claims of the
unitary narrative, in particular the two most central claims in the unitary
account as represented by Dahms: that twentieth century industrial society
has been dominated by hierarchy and bureaucratic organization and that the
experience of the United States corresponds to the most pure capitalist type.
Bureaucracy: Whatever it is, it's not the Whole Picture, Only Part of it
A major critique of the unitary idea of bureaucratic domination as
a system of control based on hierarchy and instrumental or means/ends
rationality comes from organization theory and empirical studies of bureaucracy itself. Most studies show organizations of the sort that the unitary
thinkers theorize rarely exist in such a unitary form in reality.27 Moreover,
Hans Joas, after summarizing a vast array of empirical objections to the
view that bureaucracy dominates modern organizations, notes that
there are equally numerous objections to the notion that the most rational form
of organization is one with a hierarchical command structure. Arguments which
have been brought forward to refute the reality and viability of the commandhierarchy model include reference to the specialized expert knowledge of subordinates, to their independent interaction with the outside world, to the stimulation
of their ability to learn, to horizontal cooperation and to the need to encourage
autonomous action.28
Each of those capacities in subordinate locations within a hierarchy,
Joas emphasizes, significantly diffuses and refracts the capacity of those at
the top of a hierarchy to achieve or implement their ends. The degree of
control in bureaucracy is thus, as an empirical matter, considerably less
powerful than is represented in unitary views of the corporation or of
state agencies. The alternative tradition is therefore highly skeptical of
arguments, especially from the unitary left, that attribute tremendous coher-
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ence and power to bureaucratic or corporate capital as an actor.29 There
is little evidence that such coherent actors exist. So, before the question
of the degree to which bureaucracy was or was not a "dominant" form of
control and organization in the twentieth century is even posed, the nonunitary tradition casts doubt upon the idea that bureaucratic organization
and hierarchical control ever existed in any actual form reminiscent of the
way they are described in the abstract unitary conception.
Non-unitary theorists have provided other forms of counter evidence
to the claim that the twentieth century was a bureaucratically dominated
century as well. Business historians and historical political economists, for
example, have done a lot of historical work showing that forms of industrial
production that did not take place within large vertically integrated corporations existed all over the industrial world throughout the twentieth century.30
To take only the work on the United States, Philip Scranton has shown
that small and medium sized producers in machinery, textiles, furniture
and jewelry making and other sectors, in a broad array of industrial regions,
prospered in the US economy in the period between the end of the nineteenth century when the Chandlerian industrial corporation first emerged
and World War II, when Scranton's narrative stops.31 The historical economic sociologists, Schwartz and Fish, have done extensive research on
early twentieth century Detroit showing that during the period of the
invention of "Fordism" and the creation of the multidivisional enterprise
by the Ford Motor Company and General Motors, the region was densely
populated by small and medium sized supplier firms upon whom the larger
assemblers were symbiotically related and dependent.32 Gerald Berk, an
historical political economist, has extensively documented how even in
national anti-trust law and industrial regulation the power of large corporations was by no means completely determining of state policy in the first
part of the twentieth century in the U.S. Indeed, much of the regulatory
discussion was preoccupied with the proper way to govern highly specialized
small- and medium-sized firm-dominated industries.33
Claims of bureaucratic dominance in the post-War period have also
been radically relativized. Critics of the unitary view emerged already in the
1950s, sixties, and seventies among labor market economists and sociologists
who pointed out that the growth of large scale production did not lead to
a unitary process of concentration and centralization. Rather, they pointed
out that mass production growth seemed to be accompanied by the development of a "dual labor market" for less skilled labor and a "secondary
sector" of smaller firms acting both as suppliers and competitors of large
firms during boom times.34 Not only that, others pointed out that the growth
of the large mass production firm tended also to cultivate the development
of sectors of craft production based specialists in capital goods who supplied
Social Theory and Capitalism in the Twentieth Century
419
mass producers with production technology. These sectors were, on the
whole, dominated by small- and medium-sized—often family-owned firms.35
Finally, in the 1980s and 1990s, as producers of all sizes began to seek
greater flexibility in production, numerous scholars in political economy,
economic geography and economic sociology (as discussed earlier in this
essay) pointed to both a growing vibrancy of small and medium sized firm
production in many sectors and breathtaking efforts on the part of formerly
large vertically integrated producers to dis-integrate their production and
extend their sub-contracting ties. This literature, moreover, placed great
emphasis on the significant regional variation of institutions, strategies and
governance structures within the U.S. that these trends revealed.36 Given
all of this historical evidence, it seems prudent to claim that even where
corporate bureaucracy did exist in the twentieth century U.S. economy, it
was never a general phenomenon, but rather always a particular facet of
the U.S. experience, coexisting (and colliding) with alternative forms of
organization, control and regional peculiarity.
Another way in which non-unitary theory has attempted to relativize
the significance of bureaucracy within the modern economy has been to
indicate that hierarchy is only one of a wide array of empirically identifiable
and theoretically coherent forms of governance in contemporary industrial
economies. To chose only one argument from an array of competing ones
among non-unitary schools of thought, this point is developed well in the
recent book by Michael Storper and Robert Salais, Worlds of Production:
The Action Frameworks of the Economy.37 Storper and Salais thoroughly
deconstruct the core categories of unitary economic analysis—individual
self-interested action, markets, hierarchies, preferences, growth—as well
as its core dualisms and constitutive distinctions—structure and action,
state and market, economic and non-economic behavior—such that rather
than acting as points of theoretical departure, those categories are understood as conditioned outcomes of prior cognitive and behavioral processes.
Ultimately they suggest that there are four quite distinct possible worlds
of production in the contemporary world economy, governed by different
frameworks of action, different kinds of rationality, different institutions,
different standards of profitability, different ways of dealing with labor and
different propensities to innovation. The four worlds, the Interpersonal
World, Market World, Intellectual World and Industrial World are ideal
types, but the authors show that they are found in various interpenetrated
combinations in actual practice ("real worlds") in all contemporary advanced economies.38 The point to be emphasized here is that in the Storper/
Salais typology the bureaucratic organization and hierarchical control that
the Dahms volume regards as dominant in twentieth century capitalism is
confined by Storper and Salais to the Industrial World. In their view then,
420
Herrigel
in a conceptual sense, bureaucratic governance is only one of four possible
contemporary forms of organization and control in the economy. And,
further, this ideal form, they show, is actually nowhere realized in its pure
form in historical and actual practice.
All of these examples have been presented simply to point out that
there are very many sound empirical, conceptual and theoretical arguments
against the view, represented by the thinkers in the Dahms volume, that
hierarchical bureaucracy was/is the dominant form of organization and
control in industrial societies during the twentieth century. Surely the elements of bureaucratic capitalist order noted by Dahms and his authors—
hierarchy, the separation of ownership and control, financial pressure on
management, etc.—were/are dimensions of the twentieth century experience. But, to call them dominant or to argue that they shaped (or continue
to shape) the development of whole national industrial orders, even in the
United States, is to be blind to the wide variety of alternative forms of
order and strategies for transformation that characterize the experience of
development in advanced industrial countries in the twentieth century.
THE UNITED STATES AMONG A VARIETY OF CAPITALISMS
The examples of alternative, non-bureaucratic forms of development
within the United States during the twentieth century may also serve as
pieces of evidence for why the alternative tradition does not regard the
United States as the practical embodiment of a pure model of capitalism.
There are simply too many contending, competing, regionally dispersed
and contradictory forms of governance and development within the U.S.
economy to be able to represent the whole economy in a unitary way—much
less as somehow dominated by the corporate bureaucratic form or finance
capitalism. The U.S. is a congery of many forms of capitalism.
For the non-unitary tradition, this is no surprise, for it is highly skeptical
of the very idea of a single or pure type of capitalism. Indeed, conceiving
of social, economic and political order as a historically specific congery of
practices and institutions, leads the alternative tradition to be very fascinated with and preoccupied by the whole problem of variety among industrial societies. In the non-unitary tradition, the other industrialized countries
are not viewed as lesser variants of the U.S. case. Rather, they are viewed
in the same way the U.S. is: as distinctive, nationally bounded, congeries
of organization and control, compose by reflexive actors confronted by
similar but not identical world market pressures, and capable of drawing
on different historical resources. When the comparative process of industrialization is viewed in this way, interesting questions then become: How
Social Theory and Capitalism in the Twentieth Century
421
well do these systems compete against one another at any one point in
time? What are the relative transformational possibilities and constraints
that each face in the context of a new global dynamic of exchange and
competition? European and Japanese (and all other) industrialisms are
different and, from a U.S. perspective, are competitors, but also possible
exemplars for alternative practice, and sources of inspiration for those
grappling with local problems and/or seeking change. Such reflective and
competitive engagements among varieties of industrial society are what in
the end drive global change, not any underlying unitary logic of capitalism.
Dahms and the unitary tradition hang a lot of their argument for
viewing the U.S. as a pure type on the importance of traditional beliefs
and institutions in economies outside the U.S. acting as a barrier to industrial
development. But a considerable body of alternative empirical work exists
showing that so-called traditional elements in industrializing countries have
either been irrelevant to the adoption of new forms of industrial technology,
organization and mechanisms of control, or they have actually contributed
to highly innovative new forms that result in highly competitive new arrangements. An example of the irrelevance of tradition to the industrialization process is the Japanese encounter with Taylorism in the twentieth
century.39 In his recent book on the subject, William Tsutsui writes: "Scientific Management was smoothly aligned with Japanese conceptions of tradition".40 More specifically: "Taylorite doctrines . . . were rooted in 'tradition' and almost effortlessly recast as 'Japanese-style management' when
they were imported and applied in Japan. In the end, extensive crossfertilization by American ideas and a broad parallelism with Western practice, rather than culturally specific and autonomous course of development,
characterized the Japanese experience with Scientific Management." 41 Tradition in this case, was an accommodating interlocutor for the new form
of organization; not a force of opposition. An example of how tradition
can contribute actively to the construction of new and highly competitive
arrangements is the German system of workplace codetermination. This
system, which enforces dialogue between labor and capital inside of plants,
was forged during the American occupation of Germany out of a set of
compromises between social catholic, socialist, bourgeois conservative, and
liberal American ideas about property and the proper limitation of its social
power.42 The system has been widely praised for its flexibility and positive
contribution to German manufacturing success.43
CONCLUSION
It would be possible to go marshalling empirical example after empirical example to show how overdrawn or incorrect the claims of the unitary
422
Herrigel
tradition of social theory are. But I think the point has been made. In
committing itself to a single, abstract, tightly interconnected and linear
conception of capitalism and its development, the unitary traditions in
social theory and political economy have blinded themselves to the great
variety of social, political and economic organization that have consistently
reproduced themselves in advanced industrial societies throughout the
twentieth century. Their preoccupation with corporate and bureaucratic
power, in particular, causes them to vastly overestimate its coherence and
ultimately its significance in social life. It is, moreover, worth it to point
out that this preoccupation with a particular form of power in social organization has, in its critical and left variants, produced a form of social theory
primarily concerned with constraints on the capacity of human beings to
extend and develop their potential. The critical and reflective capacity to
identify transformative possibilities in social organization, in other words,
has been undermined by the false necessity invested in the constraints of
bureaucratic power.
The alternative non-unitary tradition, on the other hand, is concerned
with identifying practical possibilities for human improvement in social life.
For this tradition, the extent of bureaucratic and corporate power in social
life is an empirical question, unconnected to a set of commitments to
the nature and trajectory of capitalism. In an effort to unearth as many
possibilities for transformation as possible, the tradition has preoccupied
itself with identifying the broad variety of organizational forms and mechanisms of control that contemporary industrial societies are producing. For
the alternative tradition, the critical project is to try to learn from this
variety and to communicate this learning in the interests of the practical
lifting of constraint and the enhancement of human possibility.
ENDNOTES
1. Harry F. Dahms TRANSFORMATIONS OF CAPITALISM: ECONOMY, SOCIETY,
AND THE STATE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (Main Trends in the World
Series) (New York: NYU Press, 1999).
2. On false necessity in social theory, see Roberto Unger, False Necessity, (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1987).
3. Birke, A. (1971). Bischof Ketteler und der deutsche Liberalismus. Mainz, Griinewald.
4. Uday Mehta, (1999) Liberalism and Empire. A Study in Nineteenth Century British Liberal
Thought, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
5. Friedrich List, (1904), The National System of Political Economy, English edition, (London: Longman).
6. K. Steven Vincent, (1984) Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican
Socialism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
7. John Dewey, 1927, The Public and its Problems, (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1954);
id. (1931), Individualism. Old and New, (London: George Allen & Unwin); id. 1939,
Freedom and Culture, (New York: GP Putnam's Sons).
Social Theory and Capitalism in the Twentieth Century
423
8. Paul Hirst, (1989) The Pluralist Theory of the State: selected writings of GDH Cole, JN
Figgis and HJ Laski, (London: Routledge); Mary Parker Follett, 1926, The New State.
Group Organization and the Solution of Popular Government, (New York: Longmans,
Green & Co.) and David P. Mandell, "The Promise of Pluralism: Pragmatism, Pluralism
and Civil Society," Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Political Science, University of
Chicago (March 1999).
9. For a systematic critical discussion of additional unitary economic explanatory mechanisms that I do not mention in my list that follows, see G. Dosi, C. Freeman, and S.
Fabiani, "The process of economic development: Introducing some stylized facts and
theories on technologies, firms and institutions" in Industrial and Corporate Change,
Volume 3, Number 1, 1994, pages 1-46.
10. For a general description of these new systems, see Charles Sabel, "Learning by Monitoring" in Neil Smelser and Richard Swedberg, eds., The Handbook of Economic Sociology,
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) pages 137-165; for a wide range of case
studies of such systems in the automobile industry, see Robert Boyer. Elsie Charron,
Ulrich Jurgens and Steven Tolliday, eds. Between Imitation and Innovation: The transfer
and hybridization of productive models in the international automobile industry, (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998); Thomas A. Kochan, Russell D. Lansbury, and John Paul
MacDuffie (eds.), After Lean Production: Evolving Employment Practices in the World
Auto Industry (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1997); John Paul MacDuffle and Susan Helper,
"Creating Lean Suppliers: Diffusing Lean Production through the Supply Chain" in
California Management Review. Vol. 39, No. 4, Summer 1997, pages 118-151.
11. For German examples, see Michael Schumann, "New Concepts of Production and Productivity" in Economic and Industrial Democracy, 1998, vol. 19: 17-32; Michael Schumann,
"The German Automobile industry in Transition" in The Economic and Labour Relations
Review, 1998: 221-247; Michael Schumann, "The Development of Industrial LabourNew Inconsistencies" lecture to Arbetslivsinstitutet in Stockholm, May 1998; Michael
Schumann and Detlef Gerst, "Innovative Arbeitspolitik—Ein Fallbeispiel. Gruppenarbeit in der Mercedes Benz AG" in Zeitschrift fttr Arbeits- u. Organisationspsychologie
(1997) 41 (N.F. 15) 3: pages 143-156; for US examples, John Paul MacDuffie, "The
Road to 'Root Cause': Shop Floor Problem-Solving at Three Auto Assembly Plants" in
Management Science, Vol. 43, No. 4, April 1997 pages 479-502.
12. See Philip Cooke and Kevin Morgan, The Associational Economy, (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998) Michael Storper, The Regional World, (New York: Guilford
Press, 1998).
13. see Archon Fung, "Street Level Democracy; A Theory of Popular Pragmatic Deliberation
and Its Practice in Chicago School Reform and Community Policing, 1988-1997," Ph.D.
dissertation, Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
February 1999; Ulrich Mueckenberger, "Zivilgesellschaft und Politische Theorie. Bezug
zum Ansatz Eurexcter/Zeiten und Qualitat der Stadt" ms, Hamburg; Michael C. Dorf
and Charles F. Sabel, 'A Constitution of Democratic Experimentalism', Columbia Law
Review 98, 2 (1998).
14. Charles Sabel & Jonathan Zeitlin, World of Possibilities. Flexibility and mass production in
western industrialization, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Philip Scran ton,
Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 3865-1925
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), esp. ch. 13, Rudolf Boch,, "Zunfttradition
und friihe Gewerkschaftsbewegung. Ein Beitrag zu einer beginnenden Diskussion mil
besonderer Berucksichtigung des Handwerks im Verlagssystem," Prekitre Selbstiindigkeit,
Zur Standortbestimmung vom Handwerk, Hausindustrie und Kleingewerbe im Industrialisierungsprozess, ed. Ulrich Wegenroth. (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1989) Rudolf Boch, Die
Entgrenzung der Industrie. Zur Industrialisierungsdebatte im rheinischen Wirtschaftsbilrgertum, 1814-1857, (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991); Boch, Rudolph, Handwerker Sozialisten gegen die Fabrikgesellschaft, (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1985).
15. Grannovetter, Mark, "Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness," American Journal of Sociology 91.3 (1985): 481-510; Walter W. Powell and
424
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
Herrigel
Paul J. DiMaggio, eds., The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1990).
Michael Storper and Allen Scott, eds. Pathways to Industrialization and Regional Development, (London: Routledge, 1992), Michael Storper and Robert Salais, Worlds of Production. Collective Action and the Economic Identities of Nations and Regions, (Cambridge
MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), Allen Scott, New Industrial Spaces: Flexible Production and Regional Economic Development in the USA and Western Europe. (London:
Pion, 1988); Anna Lee Saxenian, Regional Advantage, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Cooke & Morgan, The Associational Economy.
G. Dosi, R Nelson, G. Silverberg and L. Soete, eds., Technical Change and Economic
Theory, (London: Pinter, 1988); Geoffrey Hodgson, Economics and Evolution. Bringing
Life back into Economics, (Cambridge: Polity, 1993).
Gerald Berk, Alternative Tracks, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993);
Victoria Hattam, Labor Visions and State Power, (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1992); Richard Locke, Remaking the Italian Economy, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Unversity
Press, 1995).
Dorf & Sabel, "A Constitution of Democratic Experimentalism;" Unger, False Necessity,
Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996).
The tradition is divided in what it thinks: those closer to classical economics believe the
former while those closer to Marxism believe the latter.
For a very thorough elaboration of this critique, see Unger's, False Necessity.
A good example of the position elaborated at this level of theory is John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957) and The Public and its Problems
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 1954). Contemporary elaborations, from slightly different
perspectives within the alternative tradition, are Geoffrey Hodgson, Economics and
Evolution, and Unger, False Necessity. Also on the very broad understanding of "local"
and "historically specific" within pragmatism, see Eric MacGilvray, "The Task Before
Us: Pragmatism and The Narratives of Liberal Democracy," Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Political Science, University of Chicago, December 1999.
Geoffrey Hodgson, "Varieties of capitalism and varieties of economic theory" in Review
of international political economy, Vol. 3, No. 3, Autumn 1996, pages 380-433, quote page
403; This principle is also extensively discussed in Hodgson, The Democratic Economy:
A New Look at Planning, Markets and Power, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), esp.
pp. 85-109.
Jonathan Zeitlin, "Productive Alternatives: Flexibility, Governance, and Strategic Choice
in Industrial History" To appear in Franco Amatori and Geoffrey Jones (eds.), Business
History Around the World at the End of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University
Press, forthcoming). Further elaboration of this perspective may be found in the introductions to Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, eds., World of Possibilities, pages: 4-5, 2933 and Jonathan Zeitlin and Gary Herrigel, eds., Americanization and Its Limits: Reworking US Technology and Management in Postwar Europe and Japan (Oxford University Press, 2000).
This poses the problem of how to narrate the relationship between events and organizations in the past to those in the present, an area that is receiving increasing attention in
alternative social theory. This will not be addressed in the text, but see the discussion
in the introduction to Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, eds., World of Possibilities,
as well as the literary theoretical work of advocates of more "open" and non deterministic
narrative forms: Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom, (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1994) and Michael Andre Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions. Against Apocalyptic
History, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
Examples of various non-unitary takes on the industrial experience of the last century:
Michael Piore and Charles Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide. Possibilities for Prosperity,
(New York: Basic Books, 1984); Michael C. Dorf and Charles F. Sabel, 'A Constitution
of Democratic Experimentalism'; Steven Tolliday and Jonathan Zeitlin (eds.), Between
Fordism and Flexibility: The Automobile Industry and Its Workers (2nd ed., Oxford: Berg,
1992; orig. 1986); Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity, (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
Social Theory and Capitalism in the Twentieth Century
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
425
1994); Gary Herrigel, Industrial Constructions. The sources of German industrial power,
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Steven Tolliday and Jonathan Zeitlin,
eds.). The Power to Manage? Employers and Industrial Relations in Comparative-Historical Perspective (London: Routledge, 1991); Philip Scranton, Endless Novelty; Michael
Schwartz, 'Markets, Networks, and the Rise of Chrysler in Old Detroit', forthcoming in
Enterprise and Society 1 (2000); idem and Andrew Fish, 'Just In Time Inventories in Old
Detroit', Business History 40 (1998); Michael A. Cusumano, The Japanese Automobile
Industry: Technology and Management at Nissan and Toyota (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1985); Koichi Shimokawa, 'From the Ford System to the Just-in-Time
Production System: A Historical Study of International Shifts in Automobile Production
Systems, their Connection, and their Transformation', Japanese Yearbook on Business
History 10 (1993), 84-105; Steven Tolliday 'The Diffusion and Transformation of Fordism:
Britain and Japan Compared', in Robert Boyer et al Between Imitation and Innovation
pages 57-95; Michael Storper and Robert Salais, Worlds of Production. Collective Action
and the Economic Identities of Nations and Regions, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 1997).
in addition to the studies in Powell and DiMaggio, The new institutionalism in Organizational analysis; such basic doubts about the unitary rationality of bureaucracy are expressed
in classic works of post war sociology: Alvin Gouldner, Patterns of Bureaucracy, (New
York: Free Press, 1954); and James March and Herbert Simon, Organizations, (New
York: John Wiley & Sons, 1958).
Joas, The Creativity of Action, pages 150-151.
Dahms invokes a lot of this work to defend his view, set out in his epilog, that bureaucratic
multinationals are extending their tentacles of control deeper into society. Examples he
gives are Bennett Harrison, Lean and Mean. The Changing Landscape of Corporate
Power in the Age of Flexibility (New York: Guilford Press, 1997; much of this unitary
literature on Globalization can be found summarized in Manuel Castells, The Rise of
Network Society, Vol. I of The Information Age: Economy Society and Culture, (Maiden
Mass: Blackwell, 1996).
For a survey of historical work on other advanced economies, see the article by Zeitlin
"Productive Alternatives. . . ."
Philip Scranton, Endless Novelty esp. chapter 13.
Michael Schwartz, 'Markets, Networks, and the Rise of Chrysler in Old Detroit', forthcoming in Enterprise and Society 1 (2000); idem and Andrew Fish, 'Just In Time Inventories
in Old Detroit', Business History 40 (1998), 48-71.
Gerald Berk, "Neither Competition Nor Administration: Brandeis and the Anti-trust
Reforms of 1914" in Studies in American Political Development, 9,1994, pages 24-59 and
idem, "Communities of Competitors: Open Price Associations and the American State,
1911-1929" in Social Science History, 20, 3, 1996, pages 375-400. For an overview of US
anti trust debate in the 20th century, see Rudolph Peritz, Competition Policy in America,
1888-1992, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
see the essays by Michael Piore in Susanne Berger and Michael Piore, Dualism and
Discontinuity in Industrial Society, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
see Gary Herrigel, "Industry as a form of order: A historical comparison of the development of the machine tool industry in the United States and Germany" in JR Hollingsworth,
Wolfgang Streeck and Philippe Schmitter, eds., Governing Capitalist Economies, (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1986).
see Michael Piore and Charles Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide, (New York: Basic
Books, 1984); Allen Scott, New Industrial Spaces; Anna Lee Saxenian, Regional Advantage; Michael Storper and Allen Scott, eds. Pathways to Industrialization and Regional Development.
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
The authors survey the entire advanced industrial world, but present detailed case studies
of interpenetrated "real worlds" in Italy, France and the US. While recognizing that the
ideal types are not found in ideal form in reality, the various worlds can be illustrated
here with the following examples: The intellectual world emphasizes the kind of dynamic
426
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
Hcrrigel
personal interaction and compulsive networking one observes in dynamic regions such as
Silicon Valley; the market world is a world based on largely on exchange and competition
between relatively fixed entities, such as are represented in neo-classical textbooks; the
Industrial world is intended to describe the unitary Chandlerian world of hierarchical
mass producers and the interpersonal world is intended to describe the constant circulation
and exchanges of skill and market knowledge that one observes in traditional industrial districts.
William Tsutsui, Manufacturing Ideology: Scientific Management in Twentieth Century
Japan, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
ibid. p. 239.
ibid. p. 240.
see the discussion of the formation of this law from this perspective in my own "American
Occupation, Market Order and Democracy: Reconfiguring the Japanese and German
Steel industries after World War II" in Jonathan Zeitlin and Gary Herrigel, eds. Americanization and its Limits, pages 340-400, esp. 375-380.
for praise, see Kathy Thelen, Union of Parts, (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1992);
Lowell Turner, Democracy at Work, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), David
Soskice, "Divergent production regimes: Coordinated and Uncoordinated Market Economies in the 1980s and 1990s" in Herbert Kitschelt, Peter Lange, Gary Marks & John
Stephens, eds.. Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999) pages 101-133.