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Опубликовано на портале: 12-11-2007
Charles Perrow
Изд-во: Princeton University Press, 2005, 272 с.
American society today is shaped not nearly as much by vast open spaces as it is
by vast, bureaucratic organizations. Over half the working population toils away
at enterprises with 500 or more employees--up from zero percent in 1800. Is this
institutional immensity the logical outcome of technological forces in an all-efficient
market, as some have argued? In this book, the first organizational history of nineteenth-century
America, Yale sociologist Charles Perrow says no. He shows that there was nothing
inevitable about the surge in corporate size and power by century's end. Critics
railed against the nationalizing of the economy, against corporations' monopoly powers,
political subversion, environmental destruction, and "wage slavery." How did a nation
committed to individual freedom, family firms, public goods, and decentralized power
become transformed in one century?
Bountiful resources, a mass market, and the industrial revolution gave entrepreneurs
broad scope. In Europe, the state and the church kept private organizations small
and required consideration of the public good. In America, the courts and business-steeped
legislators removed regulatory constraints over the century, centralizing industry
and privatizing the railroads. Despite resistance, the corporate form became the
model for the next century. Bureaucratic structure spread to government and the nonprofits.
Writing in the tradition of Max Weber, Perrow concludes that the driving force of
our history is not technology, politics, or culture, but large, bureaucratic organizations.
Perrow, the author of award-winning books on organizations, employs his witty, trenchant,
and graceful style here to maximum effect. Colorful vignettes abound: today's headlines
echo past battles for unchecked organizational freedom; socially responsible alternatives
that were tried are explored along with the historical contingencies that sent us
down one road rather than another. No other book takes the role of organizations
in America's development as seriously. The resultant insights presage a new historical
genre.
Charles Perrow is Research Scholar and Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Yale University.
Two of his six books are prizewinners: Normal Accidents (Princeton) and The AIDS
Disaster. Complex Organizations (McGraw Hill) is in its third edition. He has written
seventy articles and book chapters. Perrow has been a visiting professor at the London
Graduate School of Business Studies, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in
the Behavioral Sciences, and a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and
the Institute for Advanced Study.


