2023 Volume 20 Pages 21-46
The postwar American economy in the 1950s and 1960s experienced a historic period of “sustainable growth”. The U.S. “postwar corporate system” of big business in mass-production and the related industries constituted the core of the economy. It was characterized by three main pillars: an American-style mass production system, a postwar “traditional-type” labor relations established to suit it, and a “matured oligopoly system” accompanied by a “bureaucratic” management organization. This “postwar corporate system” was a product of long-term historical developments, but most directly, the institutional and organizational transformation brought about by the wartime industrial mobilization of the World War II war economy established its basic structure with certain adaptations in the process of reconversion in the early postwar years. This paper focuses on the major aspects of the significant institutional and organizational transfiguration of the U.S. industrial relations to undergird the U.S. “postwar corporate system”, which brought about by the industrial mobilization system and war economy during World War II across all the three layers of “long-term strategy/policy formation”, “collective bargaining/personnel policy”, and “workplace/individual/organizational relations” on the basis of the historic transformation in labor relations in the 1930s.
