In New Book, OMI Chief Economist Brian Callaci Examines How Powerful Franchisors Have Eaten Our Lunch
“Chains of Command” is a groundbreaking investigation into how America’s biggest corporations built vast empires by dominating small businesses—without bearing responsibility for the workers who power them.
New York — Franchising employs millions of workers and touches nearly every American community—yet it remains largely absent from mainstream conversations about creating a fairer, more equal economy.
In Chains of Command: The Rise and Cruel Reign of the Franchise Economy (University of Chicago Press, April 20, 2026), Open Markets Institute Chief Economist Brian Callaci delivers the first comprehensive history of how franchising has shaped American capitalism. It reveals franchising as a hidden architecture of power, one that allows corporations to dominate markets while evading responsibility.
Drawing on decades of legal battles, lobbying campaigns, and corporate strategy, Callaci shows how franchisors systematically rewrote the rules governing corporate responsibility to make this possible—allowing multinational firms to exert near-total control over operations while outsourcing risk, liability, and blame to franchisees and workers.
The result, Callaci argues, is one of the most consequential yet least understood transformations of the U.S. labor market: the rise of a franchise economy that supercharged corporate growth, weakened worker power, and hollowed out the meaning of small business ownership.
Both sweeping and precise, Chains of Command traces franchising from its early resistance by U.S. courts to its triumph as a dominant business model—one that quietly tamed the labor market “one small business at a time.”
“In this deeply important work, Callaci explains who broke the American dream and how, by taking us on a tour of the system of power that reaches down every main street in the country,” said Open Markets Executive Director Barry Lynn. “In simple, elegant prose, “Chains of Command” fills a huge intellectual gap in our economic debate, detailing how the once-symbiotic relationship between working people and small business has been transformed into a gauntlet of abuse and exploitation in which only the billionaire wins. Anyone who aims to build a truly democratic and just society should read this book.”
This book is essential reading for journalists, policymakers, and readers interested in:
Corporate power and accountability
The future of work and labor law
Small business myths vs. economic reality
Antitrust, monopoly power, and inequality
About the Author
Brian Callaci is an economist whose work focuses on market structure, antitrust law, and their relationship to worker and employer power. He is widely recognized for his research on franchising and joint employment. He is the chief economist at the Open Markets Institute.
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