“The 1970s and 1980s were a disaster for America’s labor movement,” as Jacoby begins his chronicle of that movement’s efforts to recover in the decades afterward, by bending the “financialization” of the U.S. economy toward labor’s interests. The results, in his telling, may not have been disastrous, but they were, at best, mixed. One foundation for Jacoby’s account is historical—the “postwar system” of industrial relations. In it, American “corporations balanced the interests of diverse stakeholders—executives, employees, and shareholders—without privileging any one of them.” Another foundation is disciplinary. Jacoby views corporations not as networks of contracts, or as “principal-agent” problems, as many scholars did in the era under study, especially those influenced by financial economics. Rather, drawing from a more interdisciplinary “industrial relations” orientation, Jacoby sees corporations as fields of power, “riven by conflict,” in which three blocs—managers, shareholders, and workers—always contest for primacy.
Undoubtedly, in the United States, the era...