Solidarity in Strategy: Making Business Meaningful in American Trade Associations - Softcover

Spillman, Lyn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226769577 ISBN 13: 9780226769578

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2012

Synopsis

Popular conceptions hold that capitalism is driven almost entirely by the pursuit of profit and self-interest. Challenging that assumption, this major new study of American business associations shows how market and non-market relations are actually profoundly entwined at the heart of capitalism.

In Solidarity in Strategy, Lyn Spillman draws on rich documentary archives and a comprehensive data set of more than four thousand trade associations from diverse and obscure corners of commercial life to reveal a busy and often surprising arena of American economic activity. From the Intelligent Transportation Society to the American Gem Trade Association, Spillman explains how business associations are more collegial than cutthroat, and how they make capitalist action meaningful not only by developing shared ideas about collective interests but also by articulating a disinterested solidarity that transcends those interests.

Deeply grounded in both economic and cultural sociology, Solidarity in Strategy provides rich, lively, and often surprising insights into the world of business, and leads us to question some of our most fundamental assumptions about economic life and how cultural context influences economic.

About this title

About the Author:

Lyn Spillman is associate professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame. A 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, she is also the author of Nation and Commemoration: Creating National Identities in the United States and Australia and the editor of Cultural Sociology.

Review:

"Lyn Spillman does for trade associations what Alexis de Tocqueville did for civic ones, carefully investigating a wide range of associations in the United States - with surprising results. In describing how these associations band members together and give rise to group identities, Solidarity in Strategy breaks new ground in the discussion of the cultures of capitalism." (Frederick Wherry, University of Michigan)"

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0226769577
• ISBN 13: 9780226769578
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 536