The Course of Industrial Decline
The Course of Industrial Decline

Author: Laurence F. Gross

Publisher:

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13:

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Studies of American industry frequently cite Lowell, Massachusetts, as an early model for business practices. Scholars have sought to explain the city's rise to prominence, the impact of its textile mills on workers and on commerce, and its part in regional development and American prosperity. In The Course of Industrial Decline, historian Laurence Gross looks beyond these issues. Focusing on Lowell's Boott Cotton Mills, he examines the industry's struggle to maintain its prominence, the causes of its decline, and its ultimate flight south. Gross puts much of the blame for the pattern of events on the mill-owners themselves. They resisted reinvestment, so their operations became less efficient. They kept antiquated machinery running long after it was safe to do so, and they were slow to respond to issues of worker safety. The increased textile demands of World War II, Gross explains, only forestalled the mills' inevitable demise. The Course of Industrial Decline not only throws new light on the interaction of labor, business, and technology but also examines a topic of increasing timeliness. As one of many American companies that succumbed to obsolete equipment, poor management, and changing markets, the Boott Cotton Mills experienced problems that have become all too familiar as America's industrial base continues to decline.

The Face of Decline
The Face of Decline

Author: Thomas Dublin

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2016-11-15

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1501707299

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The anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania once prospered. Today, very little mining or industry remains, although residents have made valiant efforts to restore the fabric of their communities. In The Face of Decline, the noted historians Thomas Dublin and Walter Licht offer a sweeping history of this area over the course of the twentieth century. Combining business, labor, social, political, and environmental history, Dublin and Licht delve into coal communities to explore grassroots ethnic life and labor activism, economic revitalization, and the varied impact of economic decline across generations of mining families. The Face of Decline also features the responses to economic crisis of organized capital and labor, local business elites, redevelopment agencies, and state and federal governments. Dublin and Licht draw on a remarkable range of sources: oral histories and survey questionnaires; documentary photographs; the records of coal companies, local governments, and industrial development corporations; federal censuses; and community newspapers. The authors examine the impact of enduring economic decline across a wide region but focus especially on a small group of mining communities in the region's Panther Valley, from Jim Thorpe through Lansford to Tamaqua. The authors also place the anthracite region within a broader conceptual framework, comparing anthracite's decline to parallel developments in European coal basins and Appalachia and to deindustrialization in the United States more generally.

Chicago's Industrial Decline
Chicago's Industrial Decline

Author: Robert Lewis

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2020-12-15

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 1501752634

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In Chicago's Industrial Decline Robert Lewis charts the city's decline since the 1920s and describes the early development of Chicago's famed (and reviled) growth machine. Beginning in the 1940s and led by local politicians, downtown business interest, financial institutions, and real estate groups, place-dependent organizations in Chicago implemented several industrial renewal initiatives with the dual purpose of stopping factory closings and attracting new firms in order to turn blighted property into modern industrial sites. At the same time, a more powerful coalition sought to adapt the urban fabric to appeal to middle-class consumption and residential living. As Lewis shows, the two aims were never well integrated, and the result was on-going disinvestment and the inexorable decline of Chicago's industrial space. By the 1950s, Lewis argues, it was evident that the early incarnation of the growth machine had failed to maintain Chicago's economic center in industry. Although larger economic and social forces—specifically, competition for business and for residential development from the suburbs in the Chicagoland region and across the whole United States—played a role in the city's industrial decline, Lewis stresses the deep incoherence of post-WWII economic policy and urban planning that hoped to square the circle by supporting both heavy industry and middle- to upper-class amenities in downtown Chicago.

Managing Industrial Decline
Managing Industrial Decline

Author: Michael Dintenfass

Publisher: Ohio State University Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0814205690

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Managing Industrial Decline examines the dramatic decline of the British coal industry through the lens of comparative business history, challenging the prevailing belief that the industry's decline was due primarily to global economic factors and instead demonstrating that entrepreneurial failings of individual coal firms contributed significantly to the problem. Through a comparative analysis of company histories, Dintenfass shows how the full range of business operations at British coal firms, including labor management policies, technological choices, and marketing practices, affected their performance. The histories of individual firms demonstrate that the managements could improve productivity, increase sale prices, and sustain profitability, even as the coal trade succumbed to cyclical depression and secular decline. According to Dintenfass, comparisons between the individual firms and the regional coal industries to which they belonged show that neighboring firms were slow to introduce the modest innovations that the successful firms pioneered. Since there were few barriers to the implementation of these strategies, it appears that Britain's coal masters miscalculated their costs and benefits, contributing to the problem by failing to adopt inexpensive and accessible second-best solutions to production and commercial problems. Managing Industrial Decline, breaks new ground in the field of business history and restores entrepreneurship to its proper place in the analysis of industrial decline.

Beyond the Ruins
Beyond the Ruins

Author: Jefferson Cowie

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 9780801488719

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On Decline
On Decline

Author: Andrew Potter

Publisher: Biblioasis

Published: 2021-08-17

Total Pages: 72

ISBN-13: 1771963956

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A Winnipeg Free Press Top Read of 2021 What if David Bowie really was holding the fabric of the universe together? The death of David Bowie in January 2016 was a bad start to a year that got a lot worse: war in Syria, the Zika virus, terrorist attacks in Brussels and Nice, the Brexit vote—and the election of Donald Trump. The end-of-year wraps declared 2016 “the worst … ever.” Four even more troubling years later, the question of our apocalypse had devolved into a tired social media cliché. But when COVID-19 hit, journalist and professor of public policy Andrew Potter started to wonder: what if The End isn’t one big event, but a long series of smaller ones? In On Decline, Potter surveys the current problems and likely future of Western civilization (spoiler: it’s not great). Economic stagnation and the slowing of scientific innovation. Falling birth rates and environmental degradation. The devastating effects of cultural nostalgia and the havoc wreaked by social media on public discourse. Most acutely, the various failures of Western governments in their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. If the legacy of the Enlightenment and its virtues—reason, logic, science, evidence—has run its course, how and why has it happened? And where do we go from here?

The Anatomy of Industrial Decline
The Anatomy of Industrial Decline

Author: John E. Ullmann

Publisher: Praeger

Published: 1988-09-26

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13:

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This book presents a detailed industry-by-industry analysis of output and investment in American manufacturing. With imports soaring and the international indebtedness of the United States increasing, manufacturing has been the sector of the economy most threatened by outside pressures. In a growing number of products, domestic manufacture has ceased to be competitive, and in some products where American technological competence should have brought success, there are no American entries at all. The book's major chapters deal with trends and changes, from 1967 onward, in labor productivity, investment per employee, the location of manufacturing establishments, and the role and impact of imports and exports. In each case, general quantitative analysis is followed by a detailed review of the problems with the products, manufacturing processes, and markets of each industry, thus providing not only an account of the industry's current state, but an agenda for future change and improvement.