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National Organizing Principles of Work and the Erstwhile Dominance of the American Multinational Corporation

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Organization and Strategy in the Evolution of the Enterprise

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Abstract

Did American development of the largest corporations in the world drive its dominance of world markets in the first three-quarters of this century? The evolution of the large diversified firm and the internationalization of the firm across national borders clearly rank as two of the most important economic developments in the twentieth century. To many, these two developments are linked. In the influential and seminal works of Chandler, the modern corporation arose to exploit fully the new technologies of transport and communication. In his most recent study Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (1990), Chandler develops the thesis that entrepreneurs gave way to the professional management of firms which succeeded in building, as first movers, three interrelated sets of investments: production, distribution, and management to achieve advantages of scale, scope, or both.

I would like to acknowledge the able research assistance of Jaideep Anand and Dong Jae Kim and the comments of Ned Bowman. Alfred Chandler, Giovanni Dosi and Stephen Kobrin. The research for this paper was funded by a fellowship from the German Marshall Fund and subsequently by the Reginald H. Jones Center of the Wharton School.

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Authors
  1. Bruce Kogut
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universitá La Sapienza, Rome, Italy

    Giovanni Dosi (Professor of Applied Economics) (Professor of Applied Economics)

  2. Bocconi University, Milan, Italy

    Franco Malerba (Associate Professor of Industrial Economics) (Associate Professor of Industrial Economics)

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© 1996 Associazione di Storia e Studi sull’Impressa

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Kogut, B. (1996). National Organizing Principles of Work and the Erstwhile Dominance of the American Multinational Corporation. In: Dosi, G., Malerba, F. (eds) Organization and Strategy in the Evolution of the Enterprise. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13389-5_11

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