Title: This is a highly original work spanning many disciplines.
Product review: Beniger has synthesized findings from scores of fields to produce a plausible and remarkably original view of economic change and commercial development in America. While some of his explanations are a bit murky and some of his linkages a bit half-baked, this a brilliant book. Nobody to my knowledge, saving perhaps only Alfred Chandler, has done a better job of explaining the evolution of administrative systems or the linkages between that evolution and the advances in information technology occuring in the 19th and early 20th centuries. I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in management control, competitive dynamics, or technological/economic history.I only wish the author had taken one more cut at simplifying and clarifing his basic thesis, It is also a pity that the volume was written prior to the development of transaction cost economics.
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