Achieving the American Dream became inextricably linked with career/business success after World War II, as an increasingly consumerist America learned to define the dream through possessions and status. Not surprisingly, Hollywood films in the postwar years reflected the country's preoccupation with work and career success, offering both dramatic and comedic visions of the career quest and its effects on personal fulfillment, family relations, women's roles, and the creation (or destruction) of just and caring communities.
In this book, Jack Boozer argues that the career/business film achieved such variety and prominence in the years between 1945 and 2001 that it should be considered a legitimate film genre. Analyzing numerous well-known films from the entire period, he defines the genre as one in which a protagonist strives for career success that often proves to be either elusive despite hard work, or unfulfilling despite material rewards and status. Boozer also explores several distinct subgenres of the career movie—the corporate executive films of the 1950s; the career struggles of (single, married, and/or parenting) women; the entrepreneurial film as it is also embodied in texts about immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities and business-oriented femmes fatales; the explosion of promotionalism and the corporatization of employment; and, finally, the blurring of work and private life in the brave new world of the televirtuality film.
In the growing and dynamic economy of nineteenth-century America, businesses sold vast quantities of goods to one another, mostly on credit. This book explains how business people solved the problem of whom to trust--how they determined who was deserving of credit, and for how much. In the process, a business system based largely on information circulating through personal networks became dependent on more formalized methods and institutions. First to appear in the 1830s was the credit reporting agency, whose pioneers included the abolitionist Lewis Tappan, and businessmen John Bradstreet and Robert G. Dun (whose firms merged in 1933 to form Dun & Bradstreet). Later, groups of business creditors formed interchanges and bureaus to share information on their customers' payment records. In 1896, the National Association of Credit Men was established, and by 1920, credit men had established both a national credit information clearinghouse and a bureau for American exporters.
These developments forced American businesses, large and small, to make their financial situations more transparent to creditors and credit reporting firms. Rowena Olegario traces the way resistance, mutual suspicion, skepticism, and legal challenges were overcome in the relentless quest to make information on business borrowers more accurate and available.
Occupational Mobility in American Business and Industry, 1928–1952 was first published in 1955. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Is the American occupational system rigid or flexible? How has it changed in the last twenty-five years? What factors help to influence the selection of business leaders? Questions like these are answered in this comprehensive study of occupational mobility, made by two social scientists at the University of Chicago. The study is based on information about 8,000 executives in the largest business firms of America. The rate of movement of men from various occupational backgrounds into positions of business leadership today is compared with that of 1928, as reported in the well-known study of Taussig and Joslyn, American Business Leaders. Warner and Abegglen present their complete research data, many of the findings in tabular form. The research encompasses all kinds of businesses and industries in every part of the country and persons at all levels of top management.
The role of large-scale business enterprise—big business and its managers—during the formative years of modern capitalism (from the 1850s until the 1920s) is delineated in this pathmarking book. Alfred Chandler, Jr., the distinguished business historian, sets forth the reasons for the dominance of big business in American transportation, communications, and the central sectors of production and distribution.
The managerial revolution, presented here with force and conviction, is the story of how the visible hand of management replaced what Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of market forces. Chandler shows that the fundamental shift toward managers running large enterprises exerted a far greater influence in determining size and concentration in American industry than other factors so often cited as critical: the quality of entrepreneurship, the availability of capital, or public policy.
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