[Excerpt] Historians often divide American social, political, and economic history since the early nineteenth century into two phases, the age of Industrial Capitalism and the age of Corporate Capitalism. Each of these phases was characterized by the emergence of distinctive forms of economic enterprise, by novel technologies and radically new modes of transportation and communication, by expansion in the extent of the market, by changes in the modes through which wealth was accumulated, by shifts in the relationship between public and private sectors, by evolution of the typical forms of social conflict, and by distinctive ideologies. Since the 1970s, we have entered a third phase, the phase I call “Third Wave Capitalism.”