What is incorporation?

What is incorporation?

Trachtenberg uses incorporation in his book in reference to its cultural impact upon America.  Specifically, the author argues that economic incorporation helped subsume earlier aspects of American culture and simultaneously created new ones.  For the author, this process was characterized by discord and strife. Incorporation here is meant to simultaneously mean the economic structures developed after the Civil War AS WELL AS the cultural impact these structures had on American society. For instance: The Jeffersonian ideal in the homestead act vs. the reality of railroad corporations control of the settlement of the west. 

In other words: The Incorporation inherent in the railroads offered/created a culture of middle executives, engineers, and wage labor at odds with the Jeffersonian Ideal, which had been prevalent, of yeoman farm tenancy.  This new culture of technical experts, stock holders, and wage laborers injected new cultural elements into society - things like time discipline, dignity/indignity of labor, etc.  However, these new cultural elements did not go unopposed, and it is this strife which characterizes much of the narrative in "The Incorporation of America".