studies

This page highlights studies of General Electric.

There's been no comprehensive history of General Electric and much of the coverage comprises triumphalist biographies of figures such as Welch or Owen Young.

For its significance in technological development see Bernard Carlson's Innovation as a Social Process: Elihu Thomson & the Rise of General Electric, 1870-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1991), Leonard Reich's The Making of American Industrial Research: Science & Business at GE and Bell, 1876-1926 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1985) and George Wise' Willis R Whitney: General Electric & the Origins of US Industrial Research (New York: Columbia Uni Press 1985). A perpective on EBASCO is provided by Jose Gomez Ibanez' 1999 The Future of Private Einfrastructure: Lessons from the Nationalisation of Electric Utilities in Latin America, 1943-1979 (PDF) and Louis Brandeis' Other People's Money, available here.

    supremos

Ronald Kline's Steinmetz: Engineer & Socialist (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1992) is an account of the leading technocrat.

For 'Neutron Jack' Welch see Welch: An American Icon (New York: Wiley 2001) by Janet Lowe, The New GE: How Jack Welch Revived an American Institution (New York: McGraw-Hill 1992) by Robert Slater and Jack: Straight From the Gut (New York: Warner 2001) by Jack Welch & John Byrne - boys with very large toys. The view that 'winning' = dying with the most toys is expounded in Winning: the ultimate business how-to book (New York: HarperCollins 2006) by Jack Welch & Suzy Welch

There is a less ebullient account in Thomas O'Boyle's At Any Cost: Jack Welch, General Electric & the Pursuit of Profit (New York: Random 2001), for us more persuasive than Christopher Byron's breathless Testosterone Inc: Tales of CEOs Gone Wild (New York: Wiley 2004).

    marketing

David Nye's Image Worlds: Corporate Identities at General Electric, 1890-1930 (Cambridge: MIT Press 1985) and Thomas Hughes' Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1983) are exemplary.

A point of reference is provided by Astrid Zipfel's Public Relations in der Elektroindustrie - Die Firmen Siemens und AEG 1847 bis 1939 (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag 1997).

    RCA

The major history of RCA is Robert Sobel's RCA (New York: Stein & Day 1986). Benjamin Aldridge's The Victor Talking Machine Co (New York 1964) offers a view of RCA's roots. Context is provided by The Global Jukebox: The International Music Industry (London: Routledge 1996) by Robert Burnett, An International History of the Recording Industry (London: Cassell 1998) by Pekka Gronow & Ilpo Saunio and Timothy Day's A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to Musical History (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 2000).

Margaret Graham's RCA & the Videodisc (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1986) considers why RCA dropped the ball, influencing Sony's decision to create both content and hardware. It's complemented by Simon Partner's Assembled In Japan: Electrical Goods & The Making Of The Japanese Consumer (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 1999) and Alfred Chandler's Inventing the Electronic Century: The Epic Story of the Consumer Electronics & Computer Science Industries (New York: Free Press 2001). Jefferson Cowie's intelligent Capital Moves: RCA's Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labour (New York: New Press 1999) looks under the hood.

    computing

There is a similar account in Homer Oldfield's King of the Seven Dwarfs: General Electric's Ambiguous Challenge to the Computer Industry (Los Alamitos: IEEE Computer Society Press 1996), the major study of the failure of GE and other consumer giants to achieve success as computing hardware/software manufacturers.

::