The Vanishing American Corporation

CHAPTER 13POSSIBLE POSTCORPORATE FUTURES

THE DECLINE OF the major American corporation has left a set of pathologies for American society, from rampant inequality and low mobility to a tangled social safety net. There is little reason to expect that large corporations are coming back, least of all in the form of large-scale employers. Zynga is not going to grow up to be Westinghouse, and Facebook will never employ as many people as AT&T did in 1970.

We are in the midst of a third industrial revolution. Each has had a characteristic technology—the steam engine, the assembly line, the smartphone—and each brought about new forms of combining people into productive organizations. But technology alone did not determine what forms these organizations ...