The Third Industrial Revolution in Global Business Comparative Perspectives in Business History Series

The essays in this volume probe the impact the digital revolution has had, or sometimes failed to have, on global business. Has digital technology, the authors ask, led to structural changes and greater efficiency and innovation? While most of the essays support the idea that the information age has increased productivity in global business, the evidence of a 'revolution' in the ways industries are organized is somewhat more blurred, with both significant discontinuities and features which persist from the 'second' industrial revolution.

Introduction Louis Galambos; 1. Technological revolutions and the evolution of industrial structures: assessing the impact of new technologies upon the size, pattern of growth, and boundaries of firms Giovanni Dosi, Alfonso Gambardella, Marco Grazzi and Luigi Orsenigo; 2. The long-run dynamics of big firms: the one hundred largest employers from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Japan, 1907–2002 Howard Gospel and Martin Fiedler; 3. Knowledge and the changing boundaries of firms and industries Pamela Adams, Stefano Brusoni and Franco Malerba; 4. Organizing the electronic century Richard N. Langlois; 5. Aircraft and the third industrial revolution Andrea Prencipe; 6. Aluminium and the third industrial revolution Margaret Graham; 7. The role of the state in the third industrial revolution: continuity and change Andrea Colli and Nicoletta Corrocher; 8. Celebrating youth: the historical origins of the US stock market's appetite for young firms Mary A. O'Sullivan; 9. Labor in the third industrial revolution: a tentative synthesis Stefano Musso; Conclusion.

Giovanni Dosi is Professor of Economics at the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy, where he directs the Institute of Economics. He is Co-Director of the task forces on Industrial Policy and on Intellectual Property Rights at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, Columbia University, and Continental European Editor of Industrial and Corporate Change.
Louis Galambos is Professor of History and co-director of the Institute of Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise at The Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book is The Creative Society - And the Price Americans Paid for It (Cambridge University Press, 2012).