Event Date: Monday, November 22, 2021
DAN Management Distinguished Lecture in Change and Innovation
Attention Shoppers: American Retail Capitalism and the Rise of the Amazon Economy
Presented by Kathleen Thelen
Ford Professor of Political Science, MIT
November 22, 2021— 10:00 AM EST
Presented online through Zoom:
https://westernuniversity.zoom.us/j/92427477012
Passcode 245531
Please plan to log in fifteen minutes prior to the session start.
Among its rich peers, the United States stands out as the quintessential consumer society. In the United States, large-scale retailers have enjoyed forbearance and sometimes active government support as they grew in scale and scope.
This presentation tracks these processes through three distinct phases that build toward the ascendance of the Amazon economy we know today:
(1) the construction of a mass market in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries;
(2) the expansion of consumer credit alongside an explosion of chain store retailing in the 1920s;, and
(3) the advent of credit cards for the white middle class alongside the growth of big-box discount retailers for the rest in the post WWII period.
Implicitly or explicitly, policy-makers came to rely on largescale lean retailers to soften the sharp edges of American capitalism, making it possible for a growing number of groups to participate (albeit on very different terms) in its abundance while allowing the government to dodge the income redistribution that would otherwise have been required to sustain the country’s consumption driven growth model.
Kathleen Thelen is Ford Professor of Political Science at MIT and a permanent external member of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany. She is the author, among others, of Varieties of Liberalization and the New Politics of Social Solidarity (2014) and How Institutions Evolve (2004), and co-editor of Advances in Comparative Historical Analysis (with James Mahoney, 2015), and Beyond Continuity (with Wolfgang Streeck, 2005). Her current work focuses on the American political economy and the political
economy of platform capitalism.
Julian Birkinshaw, Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the London Business School will serve as discussant. Birkinshaw is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Strategic Management Society, and the (American) Academy of Management. He has PhD and MBA degrees in Business from the Richard Ivey School of Business, Western University, Canada, and a BSc (Hons) from the University of Durham, UK. Professor Birkinshaw is a recognised thought-leader on the impact of digital technology on the strategy and organsation of established companies.
The DAN Management Distinguished Lecture in Change and Innovation is made possible through the ongoing support of Aubrey Dan.