Organization and Technology in Capitalist Development

by William Lazonick

For more than 20 years, William Lazonick has been one of the world's leading analysts of the dynamics of industrial development and change in international economic leadership. This impressive volume presents a coherent selection of Professor Lazonick's most important work on industrial development in Britain and the United States. The first part of the book contains articles on the decline of the British economy, including a recent summary of the debates on the British cotton textile industry and international competition. The second part focuses on labour, management and technology in the rise and recent decline of the US economy, and includes an up-to-date summary essay on organizational capabilities in American industry. Professor Lazonick's essays make historical analysis relevant to the present and put economic analysis back in touch with evolving reality. This approach, together with his unique combination of historical, statistical and theoretical methodologies, will ensure that this volume proves invaluable to economists and historians alike.

320 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1992

About the author

William Lazonick is a Canadian economist who studies innovation and competition in the global economy. His research seeks to understand how, on the basis of innovative enterprise, a national economy can achieve stable and equitable economic growth. Lazonick is the originator of "the theory of innovative enterprise", which, he argues, provides both an essential intellectual foundation for understanding economic performance and a fundamental critique of the neoclassical theory of the market economy. Much of his current work focuses on how the financialization of the U.S. industrial corporation, manifested in massive distributions of corporate cash to shareholders and the explosion of stock-based executive pay, results in employment instability and income inequity, while undermining the innovative capability of the U.S. economy. He also conducts cross-national comparative research on the social conditions that enable or proscribe innovative enterprise, focusing in particular on the economies of Britain, Japan, and China as well as the United States.