It should not also be confused with the concepts developed by Martin J. Sklar, who invented the term "corporate liberalism" in an article on Woodrow Wilson first published in 1960 when he was in graduate school in history at the University of Wisconsin.
According to Sklar's account, corporate liberalism was not a monolithic ideology, but unfolded in several major political variants that there were at once "mutually complimentary and in conflict with one another".
Sklar continued saying: "It was from this three-way progressive split that sprang the major divisions of twentieth-century American politics with respect to political-economic policy formation".
Other historians who advocate similar theories of United States history include Gabriel Kolko and Murray Rothbard.
The thesis of corporate liberalism has similarities with the ideas of the organizational synthesis school of Alfred D. Chandler Jr., Samuel P. Hays, Robert Wiebe and Louis Galambos.