Where does the Protestant work ethic come from? And how did America achieve such dominance in management for so long? "The Puritan Gift" traces the origins and the characteristics of American managerial culture which, in the course of three centuries, turned a group of small colonies into the greatest economic and political power on earth. It argues that the drive, energy and acceptance of innovation, competition, growth and social mobility, all of which lie at the root of America's manage...

From the acclaimed authors of A Future Perfect comes the untold story of how the company became the world’s most powerful institution.Like all groundbreaking books, The Company fills a hole we didn’t know existed, revealing that we cannot make sense of the past four hundred years until we place that seemingly humble Victorian innovation, the joint-stock company, in the center of the frame.With their trademark authority and wit, Economi...

Why our workplaces are authoritarian private governments—and why we can't see itOne in four American workers says their workplace is a "dictatorship." Yet that number probably would be even higher if we recognized most employers for what they are—private governments with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives, on duty and off. We normally think of government as something only the state does, yet many of us are governed far more—and far more obtrusively—by the ...

Public relations as described in this volume is, among other things, society’s solution to problems of maladjustment that plague an overcomplex world. All of us, individuals or organizations, depend for survival and growth on adjustment to our publics.Publicist Edward L. Bernays offers here the kind of advice individuals and a variety of organizations sought from him on a professional basis during more than four decades. With such knowledge, every intelligent person can carry on hi...

Britain is beset by a crisis of purpose. For a generation we have been told the route to universal well-being is to abandon the expense of justice and equity and so allow the judgments of the market to go unobstructed. What has been created is not an innovative, productive economy but instead a capitalism that extracts value rather than creates it, massive inequality, shrinking opportunity and a society organised to benefit the top 1%. The capacity to create new jobs and start-ups should n...

News and journalism are in the midst of upheaval: shifts such as declining print subscriptions and rising website visitor numbers are forcing assumptions and practices to be rethought from first principles. The internet is not simply allowing faster, wider distribution of material: digital technology is demanding transformative change. Out of Print analyzes the role and influence of newspapers in the digital age and explains how current theory and practice have to...

The blame game, with its finger-pointing and mutual buck-passing, is a familiar feature of politics and organizational life, and blame avoidance pervades government and public organizations at every level. Political and bureaucratic blame games and blame avoidance are more often condemned than analyzed. In The Blame Game, Christopher Hood takes a different approach by showing how blame avoidance shapes the workings of government and public services. Arguing that the blaming phenom...

A sweeping global history of entrepreneurial innovationWhether hailed as heroes or cast as threats to social order, entrepreneurs—and their innovations—have had an enormous influence on the growth and prosperity of nations. The Invention of Enterprise gathers together, for the first time, leading economic historians to explore the entrepreneur's role in society from antiquity to the present. Addressing social and institutional influences from a historical ...

the inability for capital, and therefore the state, to pay for the costs of producing a well educated workforce or to guarantee that investment in education will result in a more vigorous economy and increased living standards for those with qualifications. This breakdown, and the dogmatism of free market economics which seeks to alleviate it, has seen the imposition of a business rationale onto what previously had been regarded as the provision of a public service, sometimes even a public...

Combining commercial success with philanthropy and social activism, ‘Quakernomics’ offers a compelling model for corporate social responsibility in the modern world. Mike King explores the ethical capitalism of Quaker enterprises from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, testing this theory against those of prominent economists. With a foreword by Sir Adrian Cadbury, this book proves that the Quaker practice of ‘total capitalism’ is not a historically remote nicety but an immediately...

A provocative discussion of the role of technology and its accompanying rhetoric of limitless progress in the concomitant rise of joblessness and unemployment.

According to Jim Hoopes, the fundamental principles on which business is based-authority, power, control-are increasingly at odds with principles of life in a democratic society-freedom, equality, individualism. False Prophets critically examines the pioneering theories of the early management thinkers, such as Taylor, Follett, Mayo, and Deming, which intended to democratize corporate life yet have proved antithetical to the successful practice of business. Hoopes challenges popular manage...