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An eye-opening portrait of global capitalism spanning 150 years, told through the history of the Tata corporation. Nearly a century old, the grand faade of Bombay House is hard to miss in the historic business district of Mumbai. This is the iconic global headquarters of the Tata Group, a multinational corporation that produces everything from salt to software. After getting their start in the cotton and opium trades, the Tatas, a Parsi family from Navsari, Gujarat, ascended to commanding heights in the Indian economy by the time of independence in 1947. Over the course of its 150-year history Tata spun textiles, forged steel, generated hydroelectric power, and took to the skies. It also f...
An eye-opening portrait of global capitalism spanning 150 years, told through the history of the Tata corporation. Nearly a century old, the grand façade of Bombay House is hard to miss in the historic business district of Mumbai. This is the iconic global headquarters of the Tata Group, a multinational corporation that produces everything from salt to software. After getting their start in the cotton and opium trades, the Tatas, a Parsi family from Navsari, Gujarat, ascended to commanding heights in the Indian economy by the time of independence in 1947. Over the course of its 150-year history Tata spun textiles, forged steel, generated hydroelectric power, and took to the skies. It also f...
The prospects for industrial development in the early years of independent India were plagued by a number of interrelated issues. Indian industrialists of the post-Independence era had either evolved from the ranks of merchants and moneylenders of the colonial period or from wartime speculators and hoarders. In general, their interests lay in short-term speculative gains rather than in sustained industrial growth. In addition, the impoverished condition of the peasantry resulted in the prospects of attractive returns through the diversion of urban resources to the rural moneylending market. Let alone preventing fresh industrial investment, this diversion bled the industrial sector of funds t...
More than any other single group of individuals, the Boston Associates were responsible for the sweeping economic transformation that occurred in New England between 1815 and 1861. Through the use of the corporate form, they established an extensive network of modern business enterprises that were among the largest of the time. Their most notable achievement was the development of the Waltham-Lowell system in the textile industry, but they were also active in transportation, banking, and insurance, and at the same time played a major role in philanthropy and politics. Evaluating each of these efforts in turn and placing the Associates in the context of the society and culture that produced t...
When Steven Burd, CEO of the supermarket chain Safeway, cut wages and benefits, starting a five-month strike by 59,000 unionized workers, he was confident he would win. But where traditional labor action failed, a novel approach was more successful. With the aid of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, a $300 billion pension fund, workers led a shareholder revolt that unseated three of Burd’s boardroom allies. In The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder: Labor's Last Best Weapon, David Webber uses cases such as Safeway’s to shine a light on labor’s most potent remaining weapon: its multitrillion-dollar pension funds. Outmaneuvered at the bargaining table and under cons...
Gentlemen Bankers investigates the social and economic circles of one of America’s most renowned and influential financiers to uncover how the Morgan family’s power and prestige stemmed from its unique position within a network of local and international relationships. At the turn of the twentieth century, private banking was a personal enterprise in which business relationships were a statement of identity and reputation. In an era when ethnic and religious differences were pronounced and anti-Semitism was prevalent, Anglo-American and German-Jewish elite bankers lived in their respective cordoned communities, seldom interacting with one another outside the business realm. Ironically, t...
Ai Hisano exposes how corporations, the American government, and consumers shaped the colors of what we eat and even the colors of what we consider “natural,” “fresh,” and “wholesome.” The yellow of margarine, the red of meat, the bright orange of “natural” oranges—we live in the modern world of the senses created by business. Ai Hisano reveals how the food industry capitalized on color, and how the creation of a new visual vocabulary has shaped what we think of the food we eat. Constructing standards for the colors of food and the meanings we associate with them—wholesome, fresh, uniform—has been a business practice since the late nineteenth century, though one invisib...
This paper presents a brief historical overview of Enron's rise and fall and summarizes what the authors currently know about (1) the evolution of Enron's business model, (2) those organizational processes relied upon by senior Enron officials to drive and monitor the business, (3) emergent behavior related to the structuring, management, and valuation of major partnerships, and (4)oversight provided by Enron's management and board of directors. It concludes by posing the question of how Enron's story as anew, post-deregulation corporate model could have escaped critical analysis by the financial community, the business press, and other observers for so long. As such, this paper is an exerci...
This book offers a deparochial account of global justice and addresses disenchantment stemming from its West-centricity and provincial theoretical formulations. As the recurring global poverty debate restricts the duties of alleviating poverty and inequality to the developed world, this book attempts to broaden the spectrum of duties to the superrich of the developing world. Drawing from the case study of India's superrich as an exemplar of the potent agency of rising powers, the book examines the structural relationship between unbridled affluence and the (un)realisation of the human rights of the poor. It contends that India's superrich, like their counterparts in other powerful developing countries, both contribute as well as benefit from the highly decentralised global economic order that (re)produces affluence of the few and deprivation of the many within these countries. In doing so, this book argues that the superrich have a positive duty to alleviate poverty and reduce inequality beyond their free-standing moral responsibility for philanthropy.
A Spectator Book of the Year “Brilliant, ambitious, and often surprising. A remarkable contribution to the current global debate about empire.” —William Dalrymple, author of The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire “Remarkable...The richness of detail and evidence that Stern...brings to his subject is [new]—as is the lucidity with which he organises his material over six long chapters that stretch from the mid-16th century almost to the present.” —Linda Colley, Financial Times “[A] commanding history of British corporate imperialism.” —Michael Ledger-Lomas, London Review of Books Across four centuries and multiple continents, B...