Corporation and the Twentieth Century

There are some good nuggets here on how organizational management and strategy changed through the 20th century, but this is not the focus of a very market, technology, and policy-focused history. The economics and politics are also extremely neoliberal and unscientific, with invectives against unions, welfare and housing programs, etc. Notably absent are any criticisms or examination of segregation (despite that being more than 2/3 of the century), the failures of neoliberal policies, etc.

I also dislike how Langlois doesn't show his work, with broad statements and essentially no numbers/citations to back them up. Much of his economic arguments are also woefully out of date - for example, arguments about Walmart's positive local effects or the effects of New Deal programs are refuted by dozens of papers published in the last few years.

Lastly, there are tons of extremely contradictory arguments. Langlois regularly decries government funding of research, insisting that it never leads to good outcomes. Sometimes on the next page (in the case of the internet, for example), he then explicitly talks about how the government funded that fundamental research that led to huge industries. If you breeze through those sections though there is still some interesting history here.