Forging Citigroup: The Making of the Global Financial Services Supermarket and the Remaking of Postwar Capitalism

Abstract

This dissertation explores the transformation of American financial organization and governance over the postwar period. Through a case study of Citigroup, it seeks to explain how and why the global financial services supermarket became the dominant form of business organization in American finance and society. My core claim is that generational change in the late 1950s and 1960s swept into power a group of Interwar generation elites bearing with them a concept for the large financial firm and a vision of market order whose roots traced back to the Gilded Age. The timing and pattern of organizational and institutional change was, however, contingent on battles won and lost over particular features of their institutional environment.