Hi, so I'm not sure if this is a homework question or not, and I'm not sure what level this is, so here goes, I'm gonna answer it as a homework q. at my intro-history-survey TA level:

The canonical comparative work on the relationship between small manufacturers in Philadelphia and the textile corporations of Lowell is probably the now-really-getting-up-there Proprietary Capitalism by Philip Scranton. Like lots of books about industrial history from the early '80s, the way it argues is tangled up with the decline of American manufacturing in the '70s and '80s and, while it might not be totally weird to us, the argument he's making might still be at an angle to what you're looking for. So how do you deal with this? Here's your good blow-by-blow of how to use a secondary source like this, but with something this old it's also useful to check what's come after it and how they might have used or disagreed with its arguments in all sorts of ways. These days it's so much easier to do this even than when I started undergrad--Google Scholar is a pretty powerful citation search engine (that doesn't require you to be logged in at a library! what a relief), so you can just punch in the name of what you want and click "Cited by [#]" and get a sense, at least, of the influence it's had on other arguments in the intervening 35 years.