Extract: Leading U.S. food manufacturers typically produce and sell a growing array of food products. Many have also expanded into related wholesale, transportation, and food service industries, while avoiding large-scale involvement in agriculture and food retailing. Diversification by food manufacturers into unrelated product lines declined in the seventies. That decline, coupled with continued increases in diversification into food-related products, led to stabilization in average levels of diversification, after persistent increases since 1919. Successful diversification frequently depends on how readily employees' skills can be transferred to new products. Much recent diversification in the food industries has been based upon the transfer of marketing skills among consumer product industries and technical skills in commodity processing and transportation among producer goods industries.

Workers' Earnings and Corporate Economic Structure investigates the role of economic structure in determining employees' earnings and how workplace organization contributes to social inequality. The study focuses on the characteristics of the organization of capital rather than on different management styles or systems. Earnings as a key labor force outcome are examined at both the industry and company levels of economic organization. Comprised of nine chapters, this volume begins with an overview of economic explanations for the diversity of wage labor in advanced capitalist countries, and whether the labor market in the United States is structured by the organizational characteristics of capital. The discussion then turns to the dual economy model of industrial structure; an alternative resource approach to the study of organizational structure and labor segmentation; and enterprise- and industry-level sectoral models of economic structure. Subsequent chapters explore the relationship between the sectoral models and poverty, class position, and racial and gender groups; the ability of the sectoral models to explain workers' earnings and select continuous-variable models of the impact of economic structure on workers' earnings; earnings determination within economic sectors; and the impact of economic structure across class, occupational, and status groups. The final chapter offers concluding thoughts and reflections and integrates the insights derived from the study of industrial structure with themes from the broader field of social stratification. This book will be of interest to economists, sociologists, and workers and industry officials.