This book takes a variety of theoretical and empirical approaches to the issue of organization and authority in the modern corporation and includes contributions from scholars in the US, Germany and Japan.

Introduction Paul L. Robertson 1. The rise of the factory system in Britain: Efficiency of exploitation? S.R.H. Jones, University of Dundee, UK 2. The co-evolution of technology and organisation in the transition to the factory system Richard N. Langlois, University of Connecticut, USA 3. Class structures and the firm: The interplay of workplace and industrial relations in large capitalist environments Thomas Welskopp, Freie Universitat Berlin, Germany 4. Knowledge, information and organisational structures P.P. Saviotti, Universite Pierre Mendes,-France, Grenoble, France 5. Technological change, transaction costs and the industrial organisation of Cotton Production in the US South: 1950-1970 Lee J. Alston, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA 6. The maintenance of professional authority: the case of physicians and hospitals in the United States Deborah A. Savage, Southern Connecticut State University, USA and Paul L. Robertson 7. Men and monotony: Fraternalism as a managerial strategy at the Ford Motor Company Wayne A. Lewchuk, McMaster University, Ontario, Canada 8. Management and labour in German Chemical Companies before World War I Sachio Kaku, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan 9. Buddenbrooks revisited: The firm and entrepreneurial family in Germany during the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries Dirk Schumann, Universitat Bielefield, Germany

'The essays are stimulating, thought-provoking and indicative of what a lively subject business and economic history can be when it is not held in the cold embrace of quantitative analysis.' - Roger Lloyd Jones, Sheffield Hallam University'...this is a volume that supplies a good variety of ideas and empirical studies for the business historian.' - Roger Lloyd Jones, Sheffield Hallam University'This collection offers a valuable resume of recent radical thinking on the history of enterprise and management.' - Joseph Melling, Economic History Review 2000