This collection of cutting-edge research reviews the evolution of the American corporation, the dominant trends in the way it has been studied, and at the same time introduces some new perspectives on the historical trajectory of the business organization as a social institution. The authors draw on cultural theory, anthropology, political theory and legal history to consider the place of the firm in nineteenth and twentieth-century American Society.

Alexis de Tocqueville famously said that Americans were "forever forming associations" and saw in this evidence of a new democratic sociability--though that seemed to be at odds with the distinctively American drive for individuality. Yet Kevin Butterfield sees these phenomena as tightly related: in joining groups, early Americans recognized not only the rights and responsibilities of citizenship but the efficacy of the law. A group, Butterfield says, isn't merely the people who join it; it's the mechanisms and conventions that allow it to function and, where necessary, to regulate itself and its members. Tocqueville, then, was wrong to see associations as the training grounds of democracy, where people learned to honor one another's voices and perspectives--rather, they were the training grounds for increasingly formal and legalistic relations among people. They were where Americans learned to treat one another impersonally.

List of members in each vol. (except vol. for 1924)

1868-1909/10, 1915/16- include the Statistical report of the secretary of state in continuation of the Annual report of the commissioner of statistics.