This important reference collection examines the origins and evolution of modern big business, the forms it has taken in the world's leading economies (the United States, Japan, Germany and Britain), its implications for business administration, and its consequences for the relationship between ownership and management. Its emphasis is on the organization and rationale of big business from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. In practice, large companies have played a critical role in the development of all capitalist societies, and the various essays in this collection will assess that role. At the same time, however, it includes material which tries to explain why the corporate form has grown so important ('internalizing' many functions and transactions that might have been carried on by individual agents in the market place), and whether the emergence of large scale companies was inevitable, or simply the outcome of an institutional struggle based on power rather than efficiency.