ABSTRACT
In 1933, Gardiner Means proposed and submitted in draft form to the department of economics at Harvard University a dissertation, “The Corporate Revolution,” which contained two types of materials: statistical and theoretical. The ideological and paradigm-driven nature of some of the treatments given Means’s work, coupled with the predominance of paradigm-specific hierarchical structures within the discipline, helps explain some of the negative views given certain of Means’s ideas, for example, the work by George Stigler critical of administered pricing and price inflexibility. Means’s mixed reception and status depends on considerations and factors arising as much from the social location, paradigm, and beliefs of his evaluators as from his work itself. This involves in part the existence of nonoverlapping citation groups and in part rival insider and outsider groups, both of which are due to the conflict of schools within economics.
