Politics, the reorganization of the economy, and income inequality, 1980-2009

Politics and Society

Volumn 38, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 233-242

  Fligstein, Neil ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

Corporate reorganization; Income inequality; Managerial pay; Shareholder value

Indexed keywords

EID: 77952641166     PISSN: 00323292     EISSN: 15527514     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0032329210365047     Document Type: Article

References (32)

1. A recent report by the U.S. Census Bureau, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States, 2008 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2009) shows that between 2007 and 2008, the income distribution changed very little. The same is true for most measures since 2000, except for the ninety-ten ratio which has increased.
2. See Benjamin Friedman, Corporate Capital Structures in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), chap. 1.
3. Neil Fligstein, The Architecture of Markets: An Economic Sociology of Twenty-First-Century Capitalist Societies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), chap. 4.
4. See Neil Fligstein and Linda Markowitz, "Financial Reorganization of American Corporations in the 1980s," in Sociology and the Public Agenda, ed. William J. Wilson (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1983), 185-206.
5. Gerald Davis, Kristina Diekmann, and Catherine Tinsley, "The Decline and Fall of the Conglomerate Firm in the 1980s: The Deinstitutionalization of an Organizational Form," American Sociological Review 59 (1994): 547-70.
6. The deregulation of the trucking and airlines industries led to more competition and lower prices for consumers. The deregulation of the savings and loan industry led to the savings and loan crisis whereby most of the banks went bankrupt. This is relevant to our current financial crisis, but not to the story I want to tell here.
7. See David Card and Joseph DiNardo, "Skill Based Technological Change and Rising Wage Inequality: Some Problems and Puzzles" (Working Paper 8769, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, 2002).
8. See Fligstein and Markowitz, "Financial Reorganization of American Corporations".
9. Davis, Diekmann, and Tinsley, "The Decline and Fall of the Conglomerate Firm".
10. Ellen Appelbaum and Paul Berg, "Financial Market Constraints and Business Strategy in the U.S.," in Creating Industrial Capacity: Towards Full Employment, ed. James Michael and John Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 193-221.
11. Gerald Davis and Suzanne Stout, "Organization Theory and the Market for Corporate Control, 1980-1990," Administrative Science Quarterly 37 (1992): 605-33.
12. Michael Useem, Executive Defense: Shareholder Power and Corporate Reorganization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
13. Dirk Zorn, Frank Dobbin, John Dierkes, and Michael Kwok, "Managing Investors: How Financial Markets Shaped the American Firm," in The Sociology of Financial Markets, ed. Karin Knorr Cetina and Alex Preda (London: Oxford University Press, 2007), 269-89.
14. See Friedman, Corporate Capital Structures in the United States.
15. See Zorn et al., "Managing Investors."
16. See Useem, Executive Defense.
17. See Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America (New York: Basic Books, 1986).
18. David Card, "The Effects of Unions on the Structure of Wages: A Longitudinal Analysis," Econometrica 64, no. 4 (1996): 957-79.
19. Card and DiNardo, "Skill Based Technological Change and Rising Wage Inequality".
20. David Gordon, Fat and Mean: The Corporate Squeeze of Working Americans and the Myth of Downsizing (New York: Free Press, 1996).
21. Bennett Harrison and Barry Bluestone, The Great U-Turn: Corporate Restructuring and the Polarizing of America (New York: Basic Books, 1988).
22. See Henry Farber, "The Changing Face of Job Loss in the U.S., 1981-95" (Brookings Paper on Economic Activity: Microeconomics, Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, 1997), 55-142.
23. See ibid.
24. See ibid.
25. See Neil Fligstein and Taekjin Shin, "The Shareholder Value Society: A Review in Changes in Working Conditions in the U.S., 1976-2000," in The Social Inequalities, ed. Kathy Neckerman (New York: Russell Sage, 2004), pp. 401-432.
26. See Ezra Zuckerman, "The Categorical Imperative: Securities Analysts and the Illegitimacy Discount," American Journal of Sociology 104 (1999): 1398-1438.
27. Ezra Zuckerman, "Focusing the Corporate Product: Securities Analysts and De-Diversification," Administrative Science Quarterly 45 (2000): 591-619.
28. See David Blackwell, Wayne Marr, and Michael F. Spivey, "Plant-Closing Decisions and the Market Value of the Firm," Journal of Financial Economics 26 (1990): 277-88.
29. Henry Farber and Kenneth Hallock, "Have Employment Reductions Become Good News for Shareholders? The Effect of Job Loss Announcements on Stock Prices, 1970-1997" (Working Paper 7295, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, 1999).
30. Kenneth Hallock, "Layoffs, Top Executive Pay, and Firm Performance, "American Economic Review 88, no. 4 (1998): 711-23.
31. See Lucien Bebchuk and Jesse Fried, Pay Without Performance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004) for a more negative take on executive compensation.
32. Kevin Murphy, "Executive Compensation," in The Handbook of Labor Economics, ed. Orley Ashenfelter and David Card (New York: North Holland, 1999), 2485-2563 for a review with more of efficiency spin.