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Dimensions of Corporate Power, Pt.1
Epstein, Edwin M.
16/2  (Winter 1973): 9-23

The article focuses on the dimensions of corporate power in the U.S. as of 1973. The U.S. has an historical ambivalence toward its business corporations and their leaders. On the other, hand, it admires the productivity, efficiency, responsiveness and technological advances of the industrial system which has provided the majority of Americans with a standard of living unequalled elsewhere. Society has, consequently, bestowed substantial wealth, status and power upon corporate managers as recompense for the important contributions their activities have made to American. At the same time, however, a second current has persisted in the public's view of corporations and the men who run them-one of deepseated distrust, dissatisfaction and even fear concerning the underlying motives, social utility and consequences of our corporate political economy. Large business enterprises are the basic structural components of the contemporary American variant of capitalism and are properly considered as synonymous with it. Historical attitudes toward business reveal an almost cyclical fluctuation between admiration and antipathy.

 

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