|
|
|
Book Review
Canada and the United States
Stephen B. Adams and Orville R. Butler. Manufacturing the Future: A History of Western Electric. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1999. Pp. xi, 270. $34.95.
|
This history of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company's (AT&T) production subsidiary, Western Electric, touches upon most of the great themes of business history but never quite gets to the bottom of any of them. Many of the issues that make business history interesting todaythe process of innovation, urban history, overseas expansion, welfare capitalism, labor relations, race relations, geography of production, gender, and the role of the statemake recurring appearances in this study but hardly build toward rigorous analytic themes. Even the famous Hawthorne Experiments on worker motivation and productivity, perhaps the most significant scholarly issue ever to leave the gates of a Western Electric plant, are covered in such a cursory fashion as to shed no new light on a subject that has been at the center of intellectual controversy for decades. |
. . . |
There are about 519 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|