The Corporation as Family

“An engaging and well-documented analysis of both corporate and social structure in the US. . . . This appealing history will interest and benefit general readers and undergraduate and graduate students.” — CHOICE

“Provides a useful synthesis of the literature on corporate welfare and the development of corporate organization in the period. In addition, its careful treatment of the impact of gender ideologies on the emergence of middle management and subtle handling of welfare work should be of interest to scholars of business, labor, and women’s history, class relations, and the history of professionalism.” — American Historical Review

“A sparkling and original contribution. . . . [Mandell] treats corporate welfare as a three-way rather than a binary relation, and she offers a thoughtful gender analysis of the whole project.” — Journal of American History

“[Mandell’s] research is provocative and pushes the historiography of family, business, and reform in the early twentieth century in promising new directions.” — Law and History Review

“A lively portrait of the women and men who first sought to manage labor relations, adding a needed dimension to existing histories of management and contributing to a growing literature on gender and business.” — Enterprise & Society

“In this pathbreaking work, Nikki Mandell places corporate welfare workers rather than industrialists at the center of her story. In so doing, she moves well beyond usual treatments of corporate welfare programs as merely anti-union devices used by employers to undermine the legitimate grievances of their workers.” — Joe William Trotter Jr., Carnegie Mellon University