A conversation with Richard Langlois, author of “The Corporation and the Twentieth Century: The History of American Business Enterprise”

In this conversation, Massimiliano Vatiero and Richard N. Langlois discuss the themes of Langlois’s The Corporation and the Twentieth Century: The History of American Business Enterprise. Drawing on institutional economics and organizational theory, Langlois argues that large vertically integrated corporations emerged not as an inevitable consequence of technological progress, but as contingent responses to periods of weak market-supporting institutions, economic crises, wars, and political intervention. As markets and institutional infrastructures matured, firms increasingly adopted decentralized, modular, and network-based forms of organization. The conversation concludes with future research directions, highlighting the importance of modularity, knowledge governance, and polycentric systems for understanding entrepreneurship, corporate governance, and organizational diversity.