It is not easy to turn conference proceedings into a book, especially when authors are from so many different countries and do not share the same native tongue. Most chapters could have been pared down without loss of substance. Several read as English transliterations of the writer's first language rather than real translations. Not enough effort and resources were invested in the necessary rewriting to make their narrative more readable. Moreover, each chapter has its own style of footnotes and bibliography.
Word usage is also inconsistent.
The chapter on Russia, one of the salient cases of poor rendering, ends with a sentence in brackets that belatedly reconnects the paper to the assigned topic. Economist Andrei Yu. There is a larger point hidden behind this belated recognition. We may not need to take on the Chandler thesis in comparative perspective to contrast the economies of the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Another way to apply Chandler's work is not to use it as a framework to evaluate the development of big business in other countries but to reintegrate the organizational history of big business into the mainstream of history.