Company Men: The Invention of Shareholder Value and the Splintering of the American Economy

How an esoteric economic theory-and its most devout believers-changed the world forever. In the modern economy, stock price is king. The value of a corporation is measured in how it enriches its shareholders, even when doing so subtracts from long-term growth or social good.Greed, in the last half-century of corporate practice, has become very good.Company Men is a sweeping intellectual history of how shareholder value rose from the lesser-known edges of academic theory to the vanguard of corporate practice. Historian Sean Delehanty marshals archival resources to reveal how a group of motivated consultants, activist investors, and academic economists successfully branded shareholder value as the antidote to problems of management and economic stagnation in the 1970s.In their success, they created a class of well-heeled managers who executed shareholder-value theory as an everyday practice-and at the expense of most everything else.Delehanty’s history of the modern American corporation