After reading Chapter Twelve, students should be able to:
- Explain the key trends in the American Free-Enterprise system.
- Understand the significance of corporate power for the American economy.
- Describe the shrinking marketplace, define oligopoly, and give examples of each concept.
- Understand the significance of corporate raiding and be able to define a conglomerate and give examples.
- Define multinational corporation and give examples.
- Understand and be able to describe the text's notion of the “global factory.”
- Explain the effects of the growth of corporate power on American workers.
- Explain the demographics of corporate wealth and power in America.
- Define “trickle-down” theory.
- Explain the transition from manufacturing to services in the American economy, including the key ingredients of this shift: more white-collar workers, specialization, more low-paying jobs, and changes in the age/sex composition of the workforce.
- Understand the problem aspects of work, including descriptions of unemployment in America, the intermittently and chronically unemployed, frictional unemployment, permanent displacement, the “invisible” unemployed, the “discouraged” worker, the consequences of unemployment, the notion of the underground economy, the implications and impact of automation on the workplace in America, the issue of job satisfaction and worker alienation, and occupational safety and health (including a discussion of consumers and credit).
- Explain the problems of debt entanglement.
- Understand the causes and consequences of corporate crime.
- Appreciate what corporate growth means in reference to social policy and the future of American society, with particular reference to the threat of terrorism and globalization.
