After the corporation

Politics and Society

Volumn 41, Issue 2, 2013, Pages 283-308

  Davis, Gerald F ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

Author keywords

Cooperatives; Corporate governance; Economic democracy; Shareholder capitalism; Technology

Indexed keywords

EID: 84877352867     PISSN: 00323292     EISSN: 15527514     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0032329213483110     Document Type: Article

References (54)

1. Public corporations are corporations with ownership shares traded on stock markets. Throughout the text I will use "corporation" and "public corporation" interchangeably, although nonprofits and private companies are also typically organized as corporations under the law.
2. William G. Roy, Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
3. Adolph A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1932, 1991 Modern Reprint).
4. Gerald F. Davis and J. Adam Cobb, "Corporations and Economic Inequality around the World: The Paradox of Hierarchy," Research in Organizational Behavior 30 (2010): 35-53.
5. J.Adam Cobb, "From the Treaty of Detroit to the 401(k)" (Unpublished dissertation, The University of Michigan, 2011).
6. Charles Perrow, "A Society of Organizations," Theory and Society 20 (1991): 725-762.
7. Davis and Cobb, "Corporations and Economic Inequality," 35-53.
8. Gerald F. Davis and Suzanne K. Stout, "Organization Theory and the Market for Corporate Control: A Dynamic Analysis of the Characteristics of Large Takeover Targets, 1980-1990," Administrative Science Quarterly 37 (1992): 605-633.
9. Gerald F. Davis, Kristina A. 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, no. 4 (1994): 547-570.
10. Lawrence J. White, "What's Been Happening to Aggregate Concentration in the United States? (And should we care?)" (unpublished, New York University Department of Economics, 2001), http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=293822.
11. Gerald F. Davis and Doug McAdam, "Corporations, Classes, and Social Movements after Managerialism," in B. Staw and R. I. Sutton, eds., Research in Organizational Behavior 22 (Oxford, UK: Elsevier Science, 2000): 193-236.
12. "A Tiny Camcorder Has a Big Payday," New York Times (19 March 2009).
13. "For Flip Video Camera, Four Years from Hot Start-up to Obsolete," New York Times (12 April 2011).
14. Gerald F. Davis, Finance Capitalism 2.0: How BlackRock became the new J.P. Morgan (Paper presentation, Labor and Employment Relations Association annual meeting, Chicago, 7 January 2012).
15. Gerald F. Davis, "A New Finance Capitalism? Mutual Funds and Ownership Re-concentration in the United States," European Management Review 5 (2008): 11-21;
16. Gerald F. Davis and E. Han Kim, "Business Ties and Proxy Voting by Mutual funds," Journal of Financial Economics 85 (2007): 552-570.
17. Johan S. G. Chu and Gerald F. Davis, "Who Killed the Inner Circle? The Breakdown of the American Corporate Elite Network, 1999-2009" (Paper presented at Political Networks Conference, The University of Michigan, 2011), http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/pnconfs_2011/1/.
18. Sanford M. Jacoby, Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism since the New Deal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
19. Harold Bradley and Robert E. Litan, "ETFs and the Present Danger to Capital Formation" (Prepared testimony before the United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Subcommittee on Securities, Insurance, and Investments, 21 October 2011), http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1947346.
20. "One Share, One Vote?" Wall Street Journal (28 October 2011).
21. While this might seem like corporate governance arcana, consider a situation in which China's sovereign wealth fund offered to buy Facebook, and all the information it has on its billion or so users, for $1 trillion. One 28-year-old could, in principle, approve or reject this deal.
22. Facebook prospectus available at http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000119312512240111/d287954d424b4.htm
23. Davis and Cobb, "Corporations and Economic Inequality," 35-53.
24. Annette Bernhardt, Martina Morris, Mark S. Handcock, and Marc A. Scott, "Trends in Job Instability and Wages for Young Adult Men," Journal of Labor Economics 17, no. 4 (1999): S65-S90.
25. "Young Workers Like Facebook, Apple, and Google," Wall Street Journal (13 November 2011).
26. Lest the optimistic reader infer that retail will become an engine of job growth, the New York Times reports that retailers are increasingly turning to in-store iPads and other technology to allow shoppers to avoid salespeople while still buying things in person. Combined with self-checkout registers and security tags, it is possible to project a time when stores will have few if any employees on-site. "Retailers Add Gadgets for Shoppers at Ease with Technology," New York Times (9 March 2012).
27. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy (Digital Frontier Press, 2012).
28. Gerald F. Davis, "After the Ownership Society: Another World Is Possible," Research in the Sociology of Organizations 30B (2010): 331-356.
29. "The Printed World," The Economist (10 February 2011).
30. As I completed this draft, The Economist [4/21/12] published an illuminating special report titled "A Third Industrial Revolution" on this topic.
31. See, for example, Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations (New York: Penguin, 2008).
32. "Do-it-yourself Genetic Engineering," New York Times Sunday Magazine (10 February 2010).
33. David Graeber, "Occupy Wall Street's Anarchist Roots," Al Jazeera Online (30 November 2011).
34. Berle and Means, The Modern Corporation.
35. Gerald F. Davis, Managed by the Markets: How Finance Reshaped America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
36. John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan, "Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony," American Journal of Sociology 83 (1977): 41-62.
37. Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: Times Books, 2010).
38. cf. "Big Firms Try Crowdsourcing," Wall Street Journal (17 January 2012).
39. See Davis, Managed by the Markets, chapter 3 for this and other colorful examples.
40. Joyce Rothschild and J. Allen Whitt, The Cooperative Workplace: Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 190.
41. Joyce Rothschild and J. Allen Whitt, The Cooperative Workplace: Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 114.
42. McKibben, Eaarth.
43. Marc Schneiberg, "Toward an Organizationally Diverse American Capitalism? Cooperative, Mutual, and Local, State-owned Enterprises," Seattle University Law Review 34 (2011): 1418.
44. Davis, "After the Ownership Society," 331-356.
45. This process has been hindered somewhat by the easy availability of detailed time-series data on public corporations compared to other kinds of enterprise formats, which encourages research publications on these organizations, and by the general orientation of business school research toward for-profit organizations.
46. Gar Alperovitz, Thad Williamson, and Ted Howard, "The Cleveland Model," The Nation (11 February 2010).
47. Chris Anderson, "In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits," Wired (25 January 2010)
48. Jamais Cascio, "The Desktop Manufacturing Revolution," Fast Company (9 July 2009).
49. The Economist recently labeled this a "third industrial revolution" of digitally enabled manufacturing. See "A Third Industrial Revolution: Special Report on Manufacturing and Innovation," The Economist (21 April 2012).
50. Anderson, "In the Next Industrial Revolution."
51. "New Valley Trend: Sharing for Profit," Wall Street Journal (6 October 2011).
52. Douglas L. Kruse, Richard B. Freeman, and Joseph R. Blasi, Shared Capitalism at Work: Employee Ownership, Profit and Gain Sharing, and Broad-based Stock Options (Chicago: NBER/University of Chicago Press, 2010).
53. Schneiberg, "Toward an Organizationally Diverse American Capitalism," 1421.
54. I have previously noted that macro (state or federal) solutions are the right level for large-scale projects such as infrastructure, defense, and remediating damage from climate change. These are also the right levels for activities that involve large-scale risk-sharing, such as income and health security. It is, however, well beyond the scope of this paper to engage with these topics, other than to note that it will no longer be feasible to rely on employers to provide them.