Big Business and Community Welfare英文资料.pdf

Big Business and Community Welfare Revisiting a Classic Study by C. Wright Mills and Melville Ulmer By THOMAS A. LYSON* ABSTRACT . Building on research published by C. Wright Mills and Melville Ulmer in 1946, the relationships among community welfare and civic engagement, the independent middle class, and big business are examined. Manufacturing-dependent counties are the units of analysis. Partial correlation analysis is used to identify the effects of the independent and mediated effects of big business, civic engagement, and the independent middle class on community welfare. Results show that a local economy organized around smaller-scale, diversified enterprises has more favorable outcomes than one dominated by one or more large corporations. I Introduction IN THE DECADES AFTER WORLD WAR II, American social scientists consis- tently demonstrated in their research and writing that larger-scale, capital-intensive, industrial enterprises were not only “good” for the economic health of the country as a whole (Galbraith 1967; Kerr 1960), but also enhanced the social and economic well-being of workers, families, and communities (Averitt 1968; Falk and Lobao 2003; Hodson 1983; Lobao 1990). A conceptual framework to explain the positive effects of large firms on individuals and communities was provided by labor market segmentation theorists (Doeringer and Piore 1971; Beck, Horan, and Tolbert 1978), who showed that the *Thomas Lyson is the Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of Development Sociology at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853. His research interests include the r