آیا Berle و Means اشتباه کرده اند؟ تأملاتی در تورستن وبلن، پل ساموئلسون، و استراتژی سازمانی مالی '

This article has two main aims. One is to reconcile Berle and Means’ conclusions in 1932 about management control in large US corporations with the earlier views of Thorstein Veblen, who from much the same starting point reached a seemingly contrary position. The explanation offered in terms of changes in financial control puts many subsequent developments in a different light. The other aim, drawing on the views of Paul Samuelson about product market competition, is to question the precise contribution of the ‘financialization of corporate strategy’ to the institution of ‘the era of shareholder value’.

An important contribution of the article by Andersson, Haslam, Lee, Katechos and Tsitsianis (in this issue) is in reminding us that there was a substantive literature examining governance issues in the large corporation and the nature of financial performance in the early years of the 20th century, stemming especially from the writings of Veblen, 1904 and Veblen, 1923. In 1904, Veblen made the observation that ‘the management is separated from the ownership or property, more and more widely as the size of corporation finance widens’ (p. 157). He also identified the conflict of interest between managers and stockholders and others that was later to form the basis of principal–agent theory, nowadays associated with first Berle and Means and then Jensen and Meckling. The classic agency theory problem was posed by Berle and Means (1932), and then formally developed and extended by Jensen and Meckling (1976) in terms of the ‘positive theory of agency’ (Clarke and McGuinness, 1987, Cohen and Boyd, 2000 and Williamson, 1996). The aim of this paper is to put the views of Veblen in the context of the later literature, and in this way offer some different perspectives on the issues under consideration. 2. Three stages in the principal–agent gap literature In broad terms, the literature on the ‘principal–agent gap’ has proceeded in three stages. First, there was the study by Berle and Means (1932) documenting the importance of the large corporation and the implications for ownership and control. As Table 1 shows, a steady (if unremarkable) growth of the relative share of manufacturing output of the largest corporations has been a feature of the United States, Britain and France since 1909, although apparently occurring earlier in the United States than in the other two countries. However, from a shareholder's viewpoint it is not the size of the corporation itself that presents special difficulties, but rather the nature of the shareholding, in particular its dispersed nature (Ricketts, 1987).