| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Charles Perrow. Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2002. Pp. vii, 259. $34.95.

Organizational sociologist Charles Perrow is concerned with "why it happened that the most important feature of our social landscape is the large organization" (p. 1). He finds the answer in the emergence of the bureaucratically organized corporation in the nineteenth century. Perrow traces the emergence of late nineteenth-century corporate capitalism with its characteristics—"formalization, standardization, centralization, hierarchy" (p. 19)—through a close and selective review of mainly secondary literature. He focuses on two central phases of that century's bureaucratic trajectory: the growth and evolution of the textile industry of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts in the first half of the century, and, more important, the emergence of behemoth national railroad networks later on. In both stages of economic centralization, Perrow emphasizes alternative efficient paths to economic development that were cast by the wayside—mainly, he argues, because organizational elites actively worked against them and sought to centralize and bureaucratize production and distribution of goods and services. The quest for power lies at the root of his explanatory model.

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