This chapter summarizes the major findings of the book's chapters and their revisionist implications. Rather than seeing the corporation as the dominant economic form simply because it was more efficient, rational, and professional than competing forms - a view argued by neoclassical economists, Alfred Chandler, and other scholars - this book's authors collectively challenge this master narrative in three key ways. First, they offer an alternative periodization that highlights distinctive corporate forms and purposes in the different eras of the 19th and 20th centuries rather than a Whiggish narrative of the rise and triumph of an ideal type. Second, they argue that the boundaries between corporations and their social, political, legal, and ideological contexts were much more permeable than much traditional scholarship suggestions. Third, they emphasize the contested, rhetorical, and exclusionary nature of corporations as they have served as sites of identity construction.
