Sampson (The Midas Touch, 1990, etc.) draws on his experience as a student of the international business scene, and on a wealth of unconventional sources, to trace the evolution/revolution of life in great corporations, from the British East India Company through Microsoft. In detailing the frequently convulsive transition of family firms and state-franchised concerns into modern corporations, the author is as apt to refer to the arts, from Buddenbrooks to Working Girl, as to cite the private-sector record. By the middle of the 20th century, Sampson observes, organization men and their female secretariats appeared to have become socioeconomic fixtures not only in America but also throughout Europe and Japan. As he makes clear, however, those who banked on stability were in for a series of shocks. Raiders imposed harsh commercial discipline on US and UK corpocracies not performing up to their perceived potential; Asian rivals were helping themselves to once unassailable domestic markets; computers began to displace hosts of middle managers; and career women mounted a determined effort to crack the glass ceiling that keeps them from upper-echelon posts. As companies everywhere moved to make themselves more cost-competitive, job security evaporated at such onetime havens as GE, GM, Imperial Chemical, IBM, and even Japan's Toyota. Concurrently, advances in telecommunications allowed increasing numbers of employees to work from their cars or homes (in some sense, a return to yesteryear's cottage industries). While the company's surviving men and women were obliged to become more productive, Sampson points out, their executive masters have been ever more handsomely rewarded, even when they fail. Conceding the story is far from over, he predicts accountability will be a central issue in future debates on capitalism's contribution to the common weal. A quickstep but generally rewarding tour of the West's assembly lines, boardrooms, offices, and service centers that suggests, among other things, that history indeed repeats itself.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8129-2631-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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