Harland Prechel Books

The book presents a conceptual framework that redefines the understanding of corporations by emphasizing the importance of corporate property rights and legal ownership. It analyzes three pivotal corporate transformations over the past 110 years, highlighting how big businesses responded to economic crises by influencing political behavior and pressuring state managers to adjust institutional arrangements. Through historical context, it reveals the interplay between corporate actions and state responses during critical periods in economic history.

"This analysis of financialization ultimately exposes weaknesses in the rentier thesis (made popular by Piketty), which assumes the inevitability of inequality as an outcome of slower economic growth in advanced societies. After demonstrating that the roots of such inequality lay in social structural arrangements of our own making, Prechel considers pre-conditions to change"--