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Franchise is a sweeping account of how the fast food industry, with the franchise model as its business model, first spurned, then partially embraced/co-opted Black America to further its growth. Chatelain covers this from multiple angles: the strategy of the large corporate fast food companies, the franchisees who invest in and run the restaurants, and the socio-political changes happening in the decades since the advent of fast food.

What emerges is a complex story - of how franchising made a small number of Black Americans extremely rich and provided establishments that Black Americans could enter without fear, while at the same time providing politicians and society with market-driven success stories that obscured the lack of broader economic growth in the Black neighborhoods where fast food restaurants proliferated. The fights of Civil Rights organizations to open up franchising to Black owners, while laudable, similarly led to only limited macro changes while inoculating companies from further criticism.

My one nitpick is that I would've liked more quantitative analysis of the economic effects of these establishments to further reinforce the impressive historical and qualitative analysis here. But this is minor.

Overall this book is an important and frank look at the ability of business to bring social change as well as the power of social movements to shape business.

This book gives good historical perspective on what made company-states, like the Dutch East India Company, British East India Company, and the Hudson's Bay Company, special compared to state-controlled colonization and today's private companies. The authors focus on the relative novelty of the corporate form at the time of their inception and how their early success spawned copycats across the European colonial powers.

I found it interesting that there were originally no norms against empowering companies with de facto state powers over their chartered regions, but that atrocities committed by the private armies of these company-states against indigenous populations, as well as evolving norms around governance, shifted the tide against these organizations and eventually led to their dissolution in nearly all cases.

The fact that the modern Hudson's Bay Company is in fact the same company-state that used to control large swathes of Canada was startling, and the investigation of why they avoided the fate of other company-states was similarly fascinating.

If you're interested in the political implications of these organizations this book is going to be a winner for you, but I wanted to learn a lot more about the inner workings of these company-states and found a lack of detail from that perspective. Overall, however, this book is still a thorough examination of an important historical era and provides excellent grounding for debates around corporate power today.

Using the development of El Salvador's coffee industry as a jumping off point, Sedgewick convincingly demonstrates how coffee production is inextricably linked to colonialism, technological development, and accidents of history. Sedgewick brings deep research and a holistic approach to this instructive topic, and his extremely engaging writing style makes the entire book that much more enjoyable.

The importance of scientific advances in the mid-1800s was particularly interesting to me, with the discovery of the law of thermodynamics and the fascination with measurement spilling over to the workplace and society more broadly. The examination of its role in facilitating the expansion of scientific management and caloric expenditure measurement, first in the lab and then put in practice on plantations through an elaborate cafeteria and food production system, echoes even today in free corporate lunches. The importance of the human choices made during this period that dramatically shaped working conditions for plantation workers and the growth of the coffee industry was shocking and incredible.

Overall, this book not only highlights the genesis of the industry that produces a staple of the global diet. It also underlines how economic demand and concern for profit alone can create horrible societal outcomes that are hidden from consumer markets. There is so much more covered in this essential book, I can't highly recommend it enough.

Louis Hyman provides an excellent account of the historical players - people and organizations - that have lead to the current dominant modes of management and work in the US. This book is at its strongest when examining that history, revealing the surprising roots of certain now standard management practices and how to view the current wave of gig work as a natural extension of previous forms management and work.

A lot of time is spent on the important influence of management consulting firms, McKinsey in particular, and the genesis of many titles and practices in the consulting industry. One challenge with these sections of the book is a lack of context around some of the numbers provided - saying a firm had 100 people doing something or made $X million doesn't mean a lot if you don't know the scale of the business/industry. This work could also be improved with more integration from the academic literature on management practices - have the practices that were implemented been validated to be effective? Under what metrics?

The last two chapters unfortunately suffer from far too much ungrounded speculation about technology and economics. IMO those chapters should be skipped.

If you avoid those chapters, however, this is a great foray into 20th and early 21st century work and management history.

While a bit too focused on European pre-history than I'd like, this is still an incredible view into the evolving role of women in society. This isn't just about work, especially because economic production before the invention of money is hard to disentangle from social functions. This book dives into the archaeological record to piece together the role of women in society and how technological changes shaped that role - moving from one of child rearing to incorporating other tasks that could be done in the home to eventually full fledged production of complex goods.

I particularly liked how this book draws from various sources, and the author even engages in different types of weaving herself to understand what would have been done in the past. This contrasts sharply with economists of today, who often eschew qualitative and experiential understanding of companies and work and instead focus only on numbers. Overall this is a quick, engaging read.