The overall trend toward larger and more diversified organizations
that dominated the 1960s is reflected in the figures on industrial concentration.
In 1948, the two hundred biggest industrial corporations in the
United States controlled 48 percent of the manufacturing assets, but by
1969 they controlled 58 percent. By the early 1980s the top one hundred
manufacturing companies controlled 48 percent of total manufacturing
assets.
This strong pattern of centralized control has been sustained throughout
the century, but as Peter Drucker has noted, it has been accompanied
by an increasingly broad-based pattern of ownership through the
influences of pension funds and other channels of institutionalized
investment. The trend has produced a form of "postcapitalist society"
where the logic of accumulating capital still drives the system, but with
rewards accruing to a new detached group of "owners."