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Industrial Constructions: The Sources of German Industrial Power, by Gary Herrigel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 480 pp. NPL cloth. ISBN: 0-521-46273-8.
DAVID KNOKE University of Minnesota Knoke001@maroon. tc. umn. edu
How did Germany, a politically fragmented and economically laggard nation barely more than a century ago, ascend to today's thirdranked industrial power? Have the ingredients of her past successes triggered contemporary crises of overpriced production, fractious industrial relations, and declining corporate efficiency? Gary Herrigel, a political scientist writing economic history, documents the remarkable capacity of German firms and public institutions to reorganize and adapt to new technological and market forces.
Herrigel erects his book's narrative on a scaffold of two regional industrial orders (Gewerbelandschaften, literally, industrial landscapes), spanning three centuries and four political regime changes. He challenges prevailing explanations of German industrial capitalism, popularized by Alexander Gerschenkron and Andrew Schonfield, that emphasize the unitary development of vertically integrated industries, the large firm as the most natural organizational form for production and marketing, and the strict division of labor between firms and governments. Instead, Herrigel's central claim is that, parallel to this conventional "autarkic" sector, Germany has always sustained a "decentralized" industrial order comprising small specialty producers with distinctive governance mechanisms. His book aims to avoid depicting the...