The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite

In this intriguing book, University of Michigan sociologist Mizruchi looks at America’s corporate elites and examines their teamwork and leadership abilities. As the clunky title suggests, he warns that the absence of concerted corporate leadership can have negative consequences. America’s elite has “become fragmented, without an organized group of pragmatic leaders,” Mizruchi (The Structure of Corporate Political Action) concludes. He covers the network of financial power that ruled industrial America in the 20th century and discusses the impact of globalization. What begins as an analytical history of the National Association of Manufacturers, the Committee on Economic Development, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Business Roundtable expands into a readable and remarkable review of corporate leadership and its possibilities. According to the author, the disintegration of America’s corporate leadership began in the 1980s. Since then, the principle of moderation has given way to self-interest and extremism. Mizruchi tells us to think twice about the current denigration of the country’s corporate elite. In making his case, he recants many of his own youthful prejudices, seeing advantages in the vanished economic order elites once established. His line of thought is persuasive. Anti-elitists, corporate critics, and economic planners can all learn from his sound and sober revisionism. (May)