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The Power Structure of American Business

Mintz and Schwartz offer a fascinating tour of the corporate world. Through an intensive study of interlocking corporate directorates, they show that for the first time in American history the loan making and stock purchasing and selling powers are concentrated in the same hands: the leadership of major financial firms. Their detailed descriptions of corporate case histories include the forced ouster of Howard Hughes from TWA in the late fifties as a result of lenders’ pressure; the collapse of Chrysler in the late seventies owing to banks’ refusal to provide further capital infusions; and the very different "rescues" of Pan American Airlines and Braniff Airlines by bank intervention in the seventies.

348 pages | 5.875 x 9 | © 1987

Economics and Business: Business--Business Economics and Management Studies

Sociology: Formal and Complex Organizations

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
1. Constraint, Discretion, and Intercorporate Power
2. Managerial Autonomy, Corporate Unity, and the Role of Financial Institutions
3. The Structure and Functions of Unity among Financial Institutions
4. Bank Intervention, Institutional Stockholding, and Bank Control
5. The Texture of Financial Hegemony
6. Interlocking Directorates
7. The Structure of the Interlock System: The Meaning of Bank Centrality
8. Directional Interlocks and the Integration of Regional Groupings into the National Corporate Network
9. Hubs and Bridges: Unity and the Division of Labor in the Corporate Network
10. Financial Groups and Intracapitalist Competition
11. Conclusion
Appendixes: Data Collection and Analysis for the Mathematical Analysis of Corporate Networks (MACNET)
1. Data Collection: Interlocking Directorates among Major American Corporations, 1962-66
2. Fundamentals of Centrality Analysis for Networks of Interlocking Directorates
3. Refinements in Centrality Analysis
Notes
References
Index

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