The 20th Century Corporation: Richard Langlois on the cultural and economic history of the modern American business enterprise

EPISODE 1563: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to Richard Langlois, author of THE CORPORATION AND THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, about the cultural and economic history of the modern American business enterprise

Richard N. Langlois was born and raised in eastern Connecticut. Before coming to UConn in 1983, he was affiliated with the Center for Science and Technology Policy and the C. V. Starr Center for Applied Economics at New York University. Professor Langlois’s principal research areas are the economics of organization, the economics of institutions, and business history. He is the author (with Paul L. Robertson) of Firms, Markets, and Economic Change: A Dynamic Theory of Business Institutions (London: Routledge, 1995), which articulates (among other things) the theory of dynamic transaction costs and the theory of modular technological systems. Another focus of Professor Langlois’s work has been the economic history of technology. He has written on such industries as computers, semiconductors, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, and software. His history of the microcomputer industry won the Newcomen Award as the best article in Business History Review in 1992. Recently, Professor Langlois has turned his attention to explaining the changes in corporate organization in the late twentieth century, a set of phenomena he refers to as the Vanishing Hand. His latest book, The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism: Schumpeter, Chandler, and the New Economy (Routledge, 2007), received the 2006 Schumpeter Prize of the International Joseph A. Schumpeter Society. His newest book, called The Corporation and the Twentieth Century, will appear from Princeton University Press in June 2023. He is now at work on an Advanced Introduction to the Economics of Organization, which will be part of the Advanced Introductions series of Edward Elgar Publishing.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.