● Company Men: The Invention of Shareholder Value and the Splintering of the American Economy
Sean Delehanty
Summary via publisher (Chicago U. Press)
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.