The Corporation and the Twentieth Century

277. Cusumano, Mylonadis, and Rosenbloom (1992).

278. JVC was the Japan Victor Company, which had separated from RCA during the war,

though it was still permitted to use the Victor trademarks. During this period it was majority owned by Matsushita.

279. Nathan (1999, pp. 151–55). The audio cassette tape on which the Walkman relied had been invented in 1963 by Philips. Neil Genzlinger, “Lou Ottens, Father of Countless Mixtapes, Is Dead at 94,” New York Times, March 11, 2021.

280. Graham (1986).

281. Cusumano, Mylonadis, and Rosenbloom (1992, p. 62).

282. Sobel (1986, p. 254).

283. Graham (1986, p. 213).

284. Sobel (1986).

285. Chandler (2001, p. 37); Sobel (1986, pp. 199–209).

286. Sobel (1986, p. 259).

287. John Crudele, “G.E. Will Purchase RCA in a Cash Deal Worth $6.3 Billion,” New York

Times, December 12, 1985, p. 1.

288. Nohria, Dyer, and Dalzell (2002, p. 19). Thomson was GE’s French counterpart, also

springing from the tree of Elihu Thomson.

Notes to Chapter 9 655

289. Nohria, Dyer, and Dalzell (2002, pp. 1–14).

290. Fortune 500 Archive, https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500 _archive/assets/1980/1.html (accessed August 23, 2022).

291. Nohria, Dyer, and Dalzell (2002, p. 15).

292. Gryta and Mann (2020). In November 2021, GE announced that it was breaking what remained of the company into three more specialized pieces. Over the course of the twenty-first century, the GE shed almost half its workforce and plummeted in value from a high of $600 billion in the year 2000—the equivalent today of nearly $1 trillion, making it the most valuable company in the US that year—to $120 billion at its breakup. Thomas Gyrta, “‘The End of the GE We Knew’: Breakup Turns a Page in Modern Business History,” Wall Street Journal, Novem- ber 9, 2021.

293. Gabor (2000, pp. 314–21).

294. In 2015, through the agency of KKR (which retained a 10 percent share), GE sold the Appliance Park, along with the whole of its appliances business, to the Chinese firm Haier. An earlier proposal to sell the unit to Sweden’s Electrolux fell apart when the antitrust division threatened action. Laurie Burkitt, Joann S. Lublin, and Dana Mattioli, “China’s Haier to Buy GE Appliance Business for $5.4 Billion,” Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2016.

295. Nohria, Dyer, and Dalzell (2002, pp. 15–24).

296. Gabor (2000, p. 291).

297. Slater (1993, p. 173).

298. Leslie Wayne, “G.E. Credit: Financial Hybrid,” New York Times, October 28, 1981, p. D1. 299. Drucker (1985, p. 23).

300. Nohria, Dyer, and Dalzell (2002, p. 20).

301. Gryta and Mann (2020). After the financial crisis of the early twenty-first century, GE capital would become more a liability than an asset, and the company would slowly divest the entire operation. Joann S. Lublin, Dana Mattioli, and Ted Mann, “GE Seeks Exit from Banking Business,” Wall Street Journal, April 10, 2015.

302. Slater (1993, pp. 170–72). 303. Slater (1993, p. 161).

304. Drucker (1988, p. 3). 305. Drucker (1969, p. 43). 306. Drucker (1985, p. 12). 307. Drucker (1988, p. 11). 308. Gabor (2000, p. 322). 309. Jackson (2012a).

310. Lippmann (1937).

311. Steel (1980, p. 322).

312. Reinhoudt and Audier (2017). In one telling, the French began using the word after the

Colloque to denote those beneath the liberal tent who, like Lippmann himself, upheld some- thing close to the Ordoliberal view of an active protective state, as distinguished from the more traditional classical liberals who wanted to limit the role of the state largely to defending the rule of law (Denord 2015). Even those in the latter camp generally supported some redistributive and safety-net functions of the state.

313. Caldwell (2020).

656 Notes to Chapter 9

314. In the view of the Nobel-winning Peruvian novelist (and member of the Mont Pèlerin Society) Mario Vargas Llosa, neoliberalism is “a caricature made by its enemies,” invented “not to express a conceptual reality, but rather to semantically devalue, with the corrosive weapon of derision” (Vargas Llosa 2018, p. 153).

315. The most-cited definition is this: “Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices” (Harvey 2005, p. 2). Harvey is also a good source for the thesis that neoliberal ideology underpinned, and maybe even caused, the deregulation and globalization of the late twentieth century.

316. Mirowski (2014).