ABSTRACT
The political and social powers and influences of big business have grown so large as to rival traditional government. For sociological research, the trial records themselves are much richer in data, if the researcher can gain access to them. A fundamental conflict of social goals that persists to the present time was involved in the situation. Like traditional political oligarchies, corporations tend to be conflict organizations. An enterprise possessed of potentially profitable new technical or organizational devices must gain access to all the markets. As the primary organizational media of technological innovation, displacing older traditional institutions, they have shrouded their inner councils in secrecy. Big business institutions comprise cultural phenomena both in their range and in their complexity. In the matter of organizational control, succession turns on the character of the control groups as human groups, and on the sociological character of the business organization as a bureaucracy.
