Professor Langlois recently participated in the Janus Forum Lecture Series at Brown University, joining Tim Wu, who was President Biden’s special assistant for technology and competition policy, in conversation about the regulation of Big Tech industries.
The lectures are sponsored by the Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Brown.
The Department of Economics recently held the 2024 Spring GA Training Seminar in Herbst (formerly Oak) Room 337 on March 29, 2024. This seminar provided a crucial platform for student instructors to develop teaching skills and foster discussions on effective teaching methods. Professor Richard Langlois, Professor Olivier Morand, and Professor Tianxu Chen, shared invaluable insights with first-time student instructors in the meeting.
The seminar started with Professor Morand’s presentation, focusing on the pedagogy of teaching quantitative content. Through interactive discussions, he emphasized the importance of learning styles and clarity in teaching.
Professor Langlois primarily discussed tips for teaching writing-intensive courses (W class), drawing upon his extensive experience in the field. He shared strategies for effectively engaging students in such courses.
Lastly, Professor Chen addressed the challenges encountered by student instructors in their teaching roles. She offered insights into fostering attendance, promoting student interaction, and managing email communications adeptly.
The seminar concluded with an open discussion, providing participants with the opportunity to exchange experiences, address challenges, and seek guidance from peers and faculty mentors. Through collaborative exchanges, attendees garnered inspiration, valuable insights, and peer support to refine and elevate their teaching practices. This seminar was coordinated by Professor Chen, and it is part of ECON 6492: Teaching Economics—a recently developed course tailored for first-time student instructors.
The economic historian and UConn baseball fan talks about his new role leading the department, which he began in January.
Professor Langlois recently published an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal about the Big-Tech regulatory commission proposed by Senators Lindsey Graham and Elizabeth Warren, arguing that historical precedents from the Twentieth Century like the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Federal Communications Commission should give us pause about creating a new intendent regulatory commission.
Professor Langlois received the 2023 Goodstein-Langer Award for Honors Advising during the Honors Program’s annual medals ceremony:
Since 2017, a member of the Honors Program faculty or staff is awarded the distinction and recognition for outstanding advising. This honor is determined by nominations submitted by Honors students, providing them the opportunity to share their experience and the positive impact of the faculty or staff member they have nominated.
This award recognizes outstanding contributions to undergraduate advising by faculty or staff members to Honors Program students. Nominees for this distinction have significantly exceeded expectations by providing exceptional undergraduate advising experiences to Honors students. This fund was established by Dr. Lynn Goodstein and Dr. Peter Langer, who both have strong ties to UConn Honors. The late Lynn Goodstein served as the Associate Vice Provost and Director from 2002 to 2012, and her husband, Peter Langer is a graduate of the inaugural Honors Program Class of 1968.
A review of Professor Langlois’s recent book, The Corporation and the Twentieth Century: The History of American Business Enterprise was featured in the July 1st edition of The Wall Street Journal. Reviewer Dan Akst describes Professor Langlois’s book as “…a remarkable achievement, not least for its detailed case studies of firms and whole industries that instantiate the author’s points.”
The full review is available online at The Wall Street Journal
Professor Langlois’s book can be purchased online from Princeton Press: The Corporation and the Twentieth Century: The History of American Business Enterprise
Professor Langlois’s book The Corporation and the Twentieth Century, a “definitive reframing of the economic, institutional, and intellectual history of the managerial era,” has been published and is available through Princeton University Press:
The twentieth century was the managerial century in the United States. An organizational transformation, from entrepreneurial to managerial capitalism, brought forth what became a dominant narrative: that administrative coordination by trained professional managers is essential to the efficient running of organizations both public and private. And yet if managerialism was the apotheosis of administrative efficiency, why did both its practice and the accompanying narrative lie in ruins by the end of the century? In The Corporation and the Twentieth Century, Richard Langlois offers an alternative version: a comprehensive and nuanced reframing and reassessment of the the economic, institutional, and intellectual history of the managerial era.
Langlois argues that managerialism rose to prominence not because of its inherent superiority but because of its contingent value in a young and rapidly developing American economy. The structures of managerialism solidified their dominance only because the century’s great catastrophes of war, depression, and war again superseded markets, scrambled relative prices, and weakened market-supporting institutions. By the end of the twentieth century, Langlois writes, these market-supporting institutions had reemerged to shift advantage toward entrepreneurial and market-driven modes of organization.
This magisterial new account of the rise and fall of managerialism holds significant implications for contemporary debates about industrial and antitrust policies and the role of the corporation in the twenty-first century.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691246987/the-corporation-and-the-twentieth-century
“Sharp analysis. . . . Chock -full of sophisticated economic theory rendered in lucid prose, this adds up to a bracing evaluation of a consequential and once dominant commercial entity.”—Publishers Weekly
“A new and even better Alf Chandler has arisen, a Chandler who does not believe that the visible hand is always and everywhere the way to wealth. Langlois does the scientific job brilliantly, and does wisely, too, the political job of seeing the lessons for our collective lives.”—Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, University of Illinois at Chicago
“Richard Langlois’s The Corporation and the Twentieth Century is a major achievement and stands as the best and most important work on the history of the modern American business corporation.” —Tyler Cowen, George Mason University
“Langlois provides an erudite and wide-ranging reinterpretation of the rise and subsequent decline of large managerial corporations in American business history. His emphasis on the political economy context and contingency is important.”—Geoffrey Jones, Harvard Business School
“Langlois offers a profound, accessible, and essential revision of the economic, institutional, and intellectual history of the managerial era. His book is a magisterial, lively, provocative, and timely read.” —Amar Bhide, author of The Venturesome Economy
“In the last half century American high-tech firms and overseas new entrants have eclipsed classic twentieth-century Chandlerian corporations like General Motors and Du Pont. Richard Langlois’s masterpiece—long trailed in thoughtful articles and here distilled and rectified into fine whiskey—pulls no punches where they are necessary for his clinical deconstruction of the Chandlerian paradigm, but is properly respectful of its strengths, carefully weighing the merits of all sides of the argument.”—Leslie Hannah, London School of Economics
“This is a magnificent book. Drawing upon Coase, Williamson, Demsetz, Schumpeter, Hofstadter, and others, Langlois provides an analytical narrative of the development and adaptability of business organizations, their challenges, and responses from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries. To present this important and complex story of institutional innovation, Langlois combines economic, business, political, and legal history. Langlois’s important analysis of the past 100 years provides optimism for continuation of business enterprise adjustments to promote economic growth and the quality of life.”—Gary D. Libecap, University of California, Santa Barbara, and National Bureau of Economic Research
“Richard Langlois challenges Alfred Chander’s claim that new technologies led large firms inevitably to substitute for markets: the visible hand. Langlois argues that as markets developed more sophistication in the twentieth century, the internal structure of firms changed: the vanishing hand. A combination of markets, firms, and governments explains the rise, decline, and transformation of the corporation in the twentieth-century United States. The book is a rich economic history of the twentieth century from the corporate perspective.”—John Joseph Wallis, University of Maryland and University of Cambridge
“Richard Langlois has written a history of the corporation with three main threads. First, he offers a critique of the Chandler tradition arguing that the Chandler model becomes less applicable after 1972 or so. Second, he offers a critique of U.S. antitrust policy that highlights its liabilities. Third, he offers his own view of the evolution of the corporation, which is a major contribution to understanding the evolution of the corporation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.”—Louis P. Cain, Northwestern University and Loyola University Chicago
Professor Langlois recently published an op-ed piece in the Globe and Mail of Canada, arguing that history helps us understand why today’s inflation is — and isn’t — like inflationary episodes of the past.
Professor Langlois was quoted recently in a CNN Business report about the electric-vehicle maker Rivian.