This volume reports the findings of a project on the Governance of the American Economy convened at the University of Wisconsin–Madison by J. Rogers Hollingsworth and Leon N. Lindberg. The purpose of the project was to understand the forces producing major changes in the structure of the institutions of governance – or control – in individual sectors and in the production process more generally. We were interested in recording the variety of the institutional conditions of economic exchange in the American economy and how these are transformed through time. We felt a need to thereby correct some common misperceptions about the institutional characteristics of the American economy and about the relations between the state and the economy in the United States.

Initial concepts and theoretical orientations for the project were developed in a seminar cotaught by Hollingsworth and Lindberg in the Fall of 1984. These were formalized in their paper, “The Governance of the American Economy: The Role of Markets, Clans, Hierarchies, and Associative Behavior” (1985), and a paper by Lindberg, “Political Economy, Economic Governance, and the Coordination of Economic Activities” (1986). On the basis of these ideas, a Workshop on the Governance of the American Economy, consisting primarily of graduate students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (many of whom had been in the seminar) met regularly from the Fall of 1984 until the Summer of 1986. Each graduate student participant tried to analyze the history of a particular sector of the American economy with the conceptual apparatus provided.