The Power Structure of American Business

Front Cover
University of Chicago Press, 1987 M06 30 - 352 pages
Mintz and Schwartz offer a fascinating tour of the corporate world. Through an intensive study of interlocking corporate directorates, they show that for the first time in American history the loan making and stock purchasing and selling powers are concentrated in the same hands: the leadership of major financial firms. Their detailed descriptions of corporate case histories include the forced ouster of Howard Hughes from TWA in the late fifties as a result of lenders' pressure; the collapse of Chrysler in the late seventies owing to banks' refusal to provide further capital infusions; and the very different "rescues" of Pan American Airlines and Braniff Airlines by bank intervention in the seventies.
 

Contents

Constraint Discretion and Intercorporate Power
1
The Structure and Functions of Unity among
45
Bank Intervention Institutional Stockholding and
72
The Texture of Financial Hegemony
104
Interlocking Directorates
127
The
144
Directional Interlocks and the Integration of
184
Unity and the Division of
202
Financial Groups and Intracapitalist Competition
224
Conclusion
249
Fundamentals of Centrality Analysis for Networks
261
Refinements in Centrality Analysis
272
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About the author (1987)

Michael Schwartz, professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is the coauthor of The Business Elite as a Ruling Class and The Power Structure of American Business, the latter of which is also published by the University of Chicago Press.

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