"This book makes an important contribution to an assessment of the company's role in this period of history and at the same time provides important insight into the social and economic history of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich."--BOOK JACKET.

Entrepreneur in an Age of Upheaval Carl Friedrich von Siemens was one of the significant business figures in an era filled with crises and turmoil. He became “Head of the House of Siemens” after World War I and managed the company throughout the German Great Inflation and the Great Depression, as well as during the Third Reich and into the early years of World War II. This biography provides the first comprehensive portrait of the personality and diverse accomplishments of a man who reorganized the Siemens companies, headed the Reichsbahn national railroad for ten years, and served politically as a delegate from a democracy-supporting party. The study shows how he increasingly turned away from party politics, and how his position evolved yet again during the Third Reich, from compliance with the regime to a growing personal alienation.

Special attention has been devoted in recent years to the distinctive features of Japanese economic organisation. This book brings together contributions from international scholars presenting analysis and evidence of this phenomena

The U.S. economy is the envy of the world, and the key to its success is technological innovation. In this fascinating and in-depth account reported from three continents, Robert Buderi turns the spotlight on corporate research and the management of innovation that is helping drive the economy's robust growth. Here are firsthand communiqués from inside the labs of a reborn IBM, resurgent GE and Lucent, research upstarts Intel and Microsoft, and other leading American firms -- as well as top European and Japanese competitors. It was only a few years ago that competitiveness experts -- U.S. well-wishers and naysayers alike -- concluded that America had lost its business and technological edge. The nation's companies, they asserted, couldn't match the development and manufacturing efficiency of overseas rivals. Yet now the nation is humming along, riding an unparalleled wave of innovation. Buderi tells us this turnaround has come on many fronts -- in marketing, sales, manufacturing, and the creation of start-up companies. But Engines of Tomorrow deals with a central element that has gone largely unexamined: corporate research. It's the research process that provides the technologies that spur growth. Research is behind the renaissance of IBM, the stunning growth of Lucent, and much of the steamrolling American recovery. Focusing on the fast-moving communications-computer-electronics sector, Buderi profiles some of the world's leading thinkers on innovation, talks with top inventors, and describes the exciting technologies coming down the pike -- from information appliances to electronic security and quantum computing. In the process, he examines the vital strategic issues in which central labs play a determining role, including: How IBM's eight labs around the world figure in Lou Gerstner's plans to achieve consistent double-digit growth -- and to join GE as a $100 billion concern. Why Xerox's famed Palo Alto Research Center is vying to resuscitate its company's lagging fortunes by sending anthropologists into the field to study the hidden ways people really work. What Hewlett-Packard will do without its original instrument business, recently spun off as Agilent Technologies. The business was central to HP Labs' MC2 philosophy of merging research expertise in measurement, computation, and communication -- and its departure removed a lot that was unique about HP. How the November 1999 federal court finding that Microsoft operates a monopoly hinders the Seattle giant's acquisition plans and makes it increasingly vital for nine-year-old Microsoft Research to lead the way in innovating from within. Could this be the next great lab for the twenty-first century? With authority and undaunted optimism about the underlying vitality of the research process, Buderi discusses these issues and reveals the future of some of the world's best and most powerful companies.

The role of National Socialism in the development of German society remains a central question of historical inquiry. This study presents original answers by examining the politics of inventing, a crucial but long ignored problem at the intersection of the history of technology, legal, political, and business history. The analysis of conflicts over the rights of inventors and the meaning of inventing from the 1920s to the 1950s reveals a deep chasm, reaching back to the late nineteenth century, between the forces of capital and big business on one hand and the exponents of intellectual capital - inventors, engineers, industrial scientists - on the other.

During the past decade, the role of Germany's economic elites under Hitler has once again moved into the limelight of historical research and public debate. This volume offers a brief but focused introduction to the role of German businesses and industries in the crimes of Hitler's Third Reich.