A great deal of attention has recently been focused on the extent of Japanese direct investment in the United States. In the following historical survey, Professor Wilkins details the size and scope of these investments from the late nineteenth century, showing that Japanese involvements in America have deep historical roots. At the same time, she analyzes the ways in which late twentieth century Japanese direct investment differs from the earlier phenomenon and attempts to explain why it has aroused such concern among both business leaders and the general public.

Labor policies based on age have been variously explained as benevolent, maliciously anti-union, rational, or prejudicial. Nineteenth-century devices to stabilize the work force set the stage for the Pennsylvania Railroad's 1900 program of age limits, mandatory retirement, and pensions, but its immediate cause was the conviction that the seniority system already in place seriously reduced the efficiency of older workers. As the following article shows, this economic calculation remained appealing to some executives in the twentieth century, even as the actual costs of pensions became painfully apparent. For others, the old fear of workers' unrest reappeared as a justification for ignoring the impending crisis of the 1930s.

Although the existing academic literature on management practices contrasts national styles, it does not pose or answer key questions about the effectiveness of different approaches. Industrial relations specialists and engineers both offer highly specialized work that provides little detailed analysis of the productivity and profit results of changes in production techniques or of the interaction between the two. The applied economics literature on profit and productivity is equally unhelpful, because it relates differences of output to general differences in factor input, rather than to the detailed organization of production. This article provides some tentative answers to new questions about the efficacy of different approaches to production management, and it contributes to the ongoing debate about whether the significance of the “labor problem” has been over-rated in Britain.

In Scale and Scope, Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., sets out a complex and sustained interpretation of “the dynamics of industrial capitalism.” His work, the culmination of decades of study, spanning three major economies (the United States, Great Britain, and Germany) from the 1880s to the 1940s, will undoubtedly be a central point of reference for all business historians for a very long time to come. More than that, it also makes contributions to, and has wide implications for, a great variety of fields of scholarship, research, and debate. It is hard to imagine any single book review that could do justice to the scale and the scope of Chandler's work.

I am extremely grateful for the valuable and challenging comments of the contributors to this review colloquium on Scale and Scope. Their remarks have allowed me to clarify and to define more sharply the basic concepts, focus, and aims of the book. In discussing each reviewer's comments, I attempt whenever possible to place them in the larger context of my views on the development of industrial capitalism.