Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2002), 220.
Lance Davis and Douglass North, Institutional Change and American Economic Growth, (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1971), 140 ff.
Alfred Chandler, ed., The Railroads: The Nations First Big Business, (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965)
Perrow, Organizing America, 116-17.
A whole series of studies over the last twenty years dubbed neoinstitutionalism have stressed the interactions in various nations of politics, institutions, and economics to explain differences in development and these have considerable persuasive power, but they often suffer, as Charles Perrow has noted, from a tendency to have these factors solidify into a set of national highways to development that seem to have entrances but no exits. History becomes so path dependent, and thus seemingly inevitable, that both the actual actors -- the bankers, actors, managers, judges, politicians -- recede and the bitter conflicts that corporations provoked tend to disappear.
I would like to thank Woody Powell for this formulation.