The Vanishing American Corporation ─ Navigating the Hazards of a New Economy

In an era of Citizens United and 8-figure paychecks for CEOs, most of us imagine that corporations have never been more powerful. Yet public corporations—companies that sell shares to the public, rather than being privately owned—are in retreat in the US, while alternative ways of organizing business, are on the rise.

To many this will sound like good news—but Gerald Davis points out that there's a considerable downside. In their heyday public corporations provided good salaries, benefits, training, lifetime employment, and retirement pensions—features that are conspicuously absent from newer models championed by companies like Uber. The consequences of corporate decline in the US are stark: greater inequality, less mobility, and a frayed social safety net.

This book explains the rise of the large American corporation, it's role in greatly expanding the middle class, and the economic pressures that are making it unsustainable. The future could see either increasing polarization, as careers turn into jobs and jobs turn into tasks, or a more democratic economy built from the grassroots. Davis explains how we got here and lays out the choices ahead of us.

Gerald F. Davis is the Wilbur K. Pierpont Collegiate Professor of Management at the Ross School of Business and professor of sociology at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Managed by the Markets (winner of the Academy of Management’s George R. Terry Book Award) and the coauthor of Changing Your Company from the Inside Out, Social Movements and Organization Theory, and Organizations and Organizing. He also serves as the editor of Administrative Science Quarterly.