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Business & Economics Organizational Behavior

Open for Business

The Roots of Foreign Ownership in Canada

by (author) Gordon Laxer

Publisher
Oxford University Press
Initial publish date
Apr 1989
Category
Organizational Behavior
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780195407341
    Publish Date
    Apr 1989
    List Price
    $31.95

Classroom Resources

Where to buy it

Out of print

This edition is not currently available in bookstores. Check your local library or search for used copies at Abebooks.

Description

For a long time, controversy has surrounded the issue of foreign ownership of the Canadian economy; the most recent subjects of debate have been the National Energy Program, FIRA, and the Canada-US free trade deal. This book examines these debates and analyses the causes of Canada's uniquelyhigh level of foreign ownership. Using a wide ranging comparative approach, Laxer subjects the standard explanations of Canada's economic dependence to careful and critical scrutiny. He challenges the theories of accepted orthodoxies from Conservative to Marxist, and argues that the assumptionsabout external control, the role of Canadian elite and the effects of geography are not adequate to explain Canada's failure at more independent development. Laxer shows that the country was well along the path of industrialization before American branch plants and management took control of thecritical mass of its resources and manufacturing industries.

About the author

Gordon Laxer is a political economist in the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta. He is the author of Open for Business: The Roots of Foreign Ownership in Canada (Oxford University Press, 1989) and co-editor (with Sandra Halperin) of Global Civil Society and Its Limits (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Professor Laxer is the director and co-founder of Parkland Institute, a non-corporate, Alberta research network.

Gordon Laxer's profile page