----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- For the language, the idiom, there are a few pages in Raymond Williams's Keywords, the info lifted from the OED, interpreted and explained by RW. For a start up another line, i.e., backward, although not very far, try Richard Caves, "Industrial Organization, Corporate Strategy and Structure," Journal of Economic Literature (March 1980). And if you are patient, search JSTOR under Business, Economics, Finance, and Statistics for "industry," "industrial," "industrialist," "industrialism" (separately), from 1838, the date of the first journal there stored (Journal of the Statistical Society of London), up to whichever year you think can stand to go. The idea, I suspect, comes from two very different sources, Ricardo and von Thunen, which without (so far as I know) anyone noticing flow together in international trade theory in the 1930s, e.g., in Ohlin, von Haberler, et al., to join another stream (maybe from the same sources) flowing through the Russians to Leontief, thence to become IO "theory." Penrose denied "industries" (as her contemporaries in economics defined them) existed. See her Theory of the Growth of the Firm (1959). Do not follow O. Williamson's gloss of her book; read it straight. John Womack ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]