This HBR study: what was the time frame and what level of industry digit did they use to define markets (5, 7, more?)? Did they have corn flakes competing with rice krispies or not? Was it all containers or separated into glass or plastic? Absolutely vital questions all of them. Is the geographic market the whole of the US or did they try to define actual regional markets. Concentration numbers mean nothing without a careful delineation of product and geographic markets.
Actually, these numbers really don't mean much anyway, if you are trying to understand the trajectory of capitalist development. In that sense, Carroll may be right (!!). I say may be because I'm not sure where he is going with his comment. But the point is, competition and monopoly are a dialectic, though not, in my opinion, symmetrical.
Price competition creates monopoly. See airlines after dereg. Look at electric utilities now. Just a few short years ago there were more than 200 major, vertically integrated privately owned utilities. We are rapidly approaching the time when the national grid will be dominated by about 15 of them (if the mergers stop there). (Btw, where were utilites in this HBR study?) When faced with the prospect of competing for market share, every capitalist firm that has ever existed will try to buy that share, if possible. They will merge, or if not, at least try to divide up markets, which often has the same effect. But even if that were not true, the process of competition, even if real, will naturally lead to fewer firms as the weak get weeded out.
The turning of monopoly into competition is typically not as quick or smooth, but it happens too (and not necessarily in a different ime frame, but sometimes at the same time). Mostly because entry can't be completely stopped no matter how hard the dominant firms try, often due to technological change which either allows new firms to undercut existing ones providing the same product or service, or which creates substitute products that take away market share. Go back to the landmark concentration studies of the 30s and see how many of those dominant firms, most looking invincible at the time, still exist.
So don't look for "trends" from snapshot data, Doug. Try to understand the underlying dynamics, which focuses on the creation of surplus value, not reported profits, both at the firm level and in the aggregate. This is the same point I have made to you in countless rants against your misunderstanding of Marx's Falling Rate of Profit tendency. Thought for the day: tendencies and dialectics, not trends.
RO
John Mage wrote:
>
> Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> > Nor is
> > there any compelling evidence of a trend towards monopoly. A study of
> > 20 industrial sectors published last summer in the Harvard Business
> > Review found increased concentration of market share in only one,
> > semiconductors.
>
> Did they include commercial banking?...investment
> banking?...tv/cable/movie studios and distribution/record
> companies/commercial book and magazine publishing ("media")? Or by
> industrial did they mean "manufacturing"? And just how much more
> concentrated could aircraft, tires, petroleum refining, soap and other
> detergents, etc. get?
>
> john mage