Covering the development of the U.S. labor market from 1880-1940, "The Fictitious Commodity" stresses relations of authority (versus power) in employment. Deemphasizing concepts of market and contract, Korver focuses on the differential statuses of employer/employee and demonstrates the inadequacy of conventional economic discourse on labor market analysis. U.S. companies, while undergoing rapid industrialization, tackled both organizational and technological problems. According to Korver, unskilled labor was the common root to these problems. Emphasizing the importance of this usually...