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Defining Small: The Battle Over Business Size Standards in America
From the New Deal to the NAICS Overhaul

Book Details
About this book:

Defining Small: The Battle Over Business Size Standards in America **Defining Small** pulls back the curtain on the most consequential line in American capitalism—the invisible boundary that decides which firms get billions in federal contracts, subsidized credit, and regulatory shelter, and which are cast into the arena alone. From the New Deal’s improvised "500-employee yardstick" to the algorithmic NAICS overhaul quietly rewriting millions of corporate fortunes today, this is the secret history of how a bureaucratic convenience became a weapon of industrial statecraft.

You’ll discover why growing companies deliberately freeze hiring and suppress revenue to avoid the "Mid-Tier Valley of Death," how private equity and defense giants use corporate camouflage to masquerade as mom-and-pop shops, and how trade associations turned size standards into a high-stakes lobbying arena where the prize is the competitive landscape itself. The line between "small" and "large" isn't drawn by markets—it's negotiated in hearing rooms, litigated in administrative courts, and calculated by econometric models that few outside the Beltway have ever seen.

Meticulously researched and narratively rich, *Defining Small* reveals that smallness in America is not an economic condition but a legal construct—one crafted by politicians, gamed by insiders, and enforced by a bureaucracy that still runs on yardsticks invented for a smokestack economy. For anyone who has ever wondered why the corner bakery and a 1,500-employee defense contractor can share the same label, this book provides the definitive, eye-opening answer.

Table of Contents:
  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1 The Myth of the Main Street Merchant
  • Chapter 2 Depression, Recovery, and the Seeds of the Modern State
  • Chapter 3 The Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the Capital Gap
  • Chapter 4 Arsenal of Monopolies: Mobilization and Smaller War Plants
  • Chapter 5 The 500-Employee Yardstick: Birth of an Arbitrary Standard
  • Chapter 6 Cold War Procurement and the 1953 Small Business Act
  • Chapter 7 Establishing the Threshold: The SBA’s Early Formulae
  • Chapter 8 Revenue vs. Headcount: The Divergent Industry Paths
  • Chapter 9 Inflation, Stagnation, and the Shifting Ceilings of the 1970s
  • Chapter 10 Lobbying the Metric: How Trade Associations Found Their Leverage
  • Chapter 11 The Rise of Federal Set-Asides and the Cost of Graduation
  • Chapter 12 Defense Procurement and the High-Stakes Borderlands
  • Chapter 13 The Mid-Tier Valley of Death: Too Big to Qualify, Too Small to Compete
  • Chapter 14 Affiliation Rules, Parent Companies, and Corporate Camouflage
  • Chapter 15 Rent-Seeking and the Fraud Landscape: When Giants Pose as Goliaths
  • Chapter 16 From SIC to NAICS: Reclassifying the American Economy
  • Chapter 17 The Information Age Anomaly: Defining Tech and Intangible Capital
  • Chapter 18 Congressional Inquiries and the Politics of Special Exceptions
  • Chapter 19 The Jobs Act of 2010 and the Mandate for Comprehensive Review
  • Chapter 20 Econometrics in the Bureaucracy: Inside the Methodology War
  • Chapter 21 The Inflation Adjustment Battles: Bureaucratic Lag in Real Time
  • Chapter 22 Private Equity, Venture Capital, and the Affiliation Trap
  • Chapter 23 The Modern NAICS Overhaul: Redrawing Millions of Fortunes
  • Chapter 24 Winners, Losers, and the Future of Corporate Aggregation
  • Chapter 25 Drawing the Line in the Twenty-First Century
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Author:

Martha N. Stone

Published By:

MixCache.com Extended Catalog

Type:

Nonfiction

Date Published:

October 19, 2026

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