The myth of the shareholder revolution and the financialization of the firm

Samuel Knafo and Sahil Jai Dutta

Review of International Political Economy, 2020, vol. 27, issue 3, 476-499

Abstract: This article re-examines the shareholder value revolution of the 1980s to challenge the dominant conception of the financialization of the firm. This transformation is widely interpreted as a re-alignment of corporate management in response to growing shareholder power and neoliberal managerial norms associated notably with agency theory. By contrast, we demonstrate how the financialization of the firm has its roots in the innovations made in 1960s America by a small group of outsider firms, the conglomerates, that challenged the corporate establishment. As we show, these firms pioneered financial techniques that profoundly transformed the nature of corporate strategy and launched a process of financialization as firms began to exploit the leverage financial markets could provide in various corporate contests. Taking stock of this historical lineage leads us to re-interpret the shareholder revolution of the 1980s. We demonstrate how the key features of this era: the orientation of firms towards capital market, the increase in shareholder activism, and the rise of agency theory, should be read as unintended outcomes of the success of financialized management and its destabilizing effects on corporate governance.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09692290.2019.1649293 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rripxx:v:27:y:2020:i:3:p:476-499

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rrip20

DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2019.1649293

Access Statistics for this article

Review of International Political Economy is currently edited by Gregory Chin, Juliet Johnson, Daniel Mügge, Kevin Gallagher, Ilene Grabel and Cornelia Woll

More articles in Review of International Political Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().