Big Business and the State: Historical Transitions and Corporate Transformation, 1880s 1990s. By Harland Prechel. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Pp. xvi, 317. $75.50, cloth; $25.95, paper.

The history of the modern corporation is the history of institutional change and of the corporation s attempt to influence and respond to that change. In this book, Harland Prechel supplies a multilayered analysis of the development of big business from the 1880s to the 1990s. Prechel s approach is to draw linkages between the micro (individual managers), meso (corporate), and macro (institutional) levels of behavior and change. This multilayered analysis allows Prechel to expose the connections and also the inherent irrationalities between each layer of decision making.