Out of Thin Air: A History of Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., 1940-1990

Pernick, Ron

Yates, Ronald E

This eleventh volume derived from the Annual International High Technology Small Firms (HTSFs) Conference, and the edited book series of which it forms part, is a detailed testimony to the progress of academic research on this specialist, but highly important, area of industrial activity. In particular, research from this series is intended to provide a basis for new "evidence-based" government policy, although governments in many developed economies have often been seduced by "fads", in circumstances where policy solutions are crudely adopted without convincing evidence of their efficacy. None the less, it is most important for academics, although they may be occasionally ignored, to continue to pursue independent research of the type contained within this series in order to provide research-based policy options, and commentary on the quality of the current policy environment for HTSFs in different national contexts. As in the case of previous volumes in this series, the current collection of papers inform many issues important to policy as governments seek to promote HTSF formation and growth. In this volume individual papers are grouped into three main sections&#x3b; these are "Theory", "Strategy" and "Clustering and Spin Off Firms". Regarding Theory, all five papers grouped under this heading are concerned, either with high technology entrepreneurship in general, or academic high technology small firm entrepreneurship in particular, with four of the five papers strongly focussed on academic entrepreneurial examples. The Strategy section is again comprised of five papers, which broadly explore how diverse business ideas are operationalised in terms of strategy. A long standing interest in academic spin-offs in this book series has been more recently re-invigorated by a sudden interest in clustering which, through the related topics of incubation, science park formation and sub-regional high technology clustering has prompted linked research on the formation and growth of HTSFs in specialist locations, mainly through spin off. In the final Clustering and Spin Off section, the four individual papers are either concerned with how "spin offs" can contribute to HTSF cluster growth in industrial districts, or in the environs of major core regional universities.

Singer

Kelsall, Tim

Not since Edward Mason's classic book <em>The Corporation in Modern Society</em> appeared in 1959 has anyone compiled an authoritative overview of the American business firm. Such a survey is now clearly overdue, for in the last thirty years both the corporation and the business environment has changed radically. In <em>The American Corporation Today</em>, Carl Kaysen and other leading students of business and markets from around the country provide a much-needed analysis of American corporate life at the end of the century. <br> Here is the American corporation from every angle--its postwar history, its relation to the law, its financing, its impact on technological innovation, its role as employer and as political force, and much more. The contributors--all of whom are recognized experts in their fields--not only tackle many of the same key areas that the contributors to Mason's classic study looked at, but they also illuminate issues that have only arisen in recent years. For instance, Raymond Vernon describes the increasing globalization of American business, where the net income from operations outside the U.S. is now nearly half of that from domestic operations (as opposed to one-tenth in the 1950s). James Q. Wilson traces how the corporation has become a full-time political actor, showing how it reinvented its political strategy and tactics in the 1960s in the face of a wave of new consumer, environmental, and worker health legislation. Gregory Acs and Eugene Steuerle show how the corporation promotes the commonweal, acting as agent for the employee in purchasing pension, health, and other welfare benefit plans, while Lester Thurow casts a critical eye at the decline of median real wages of American males over the last twenty years (never before have a majority of American workers suffered real wage reductions while the real per capita gross domestic product was increasing). In other pieces, corporate finance experts Charles Calomiris and Carlos Ramirez advocate removing legal constraints on financial institutions that prevent them from providing the full range of business financing from short-term debt to equity, Michael Useem looks at the rise of education and training as a vexing corporate issue, and Barbara Bergmann discusses the increasingly diverse work force, arguing that ending bias is in the corporation's best interest. And finally Neil Harris provides a fascinating discussion of architecture, exploring how companies have become the principle patrons of important architecture since the 1950s.<br> Vital to everyone concerned with American big business today, this collection is sure to become the new standard upon which future studies of the corporation will be built.