Management and Ownership in the Large Firm
Management and Ownership in the Large Firm
复制标题
大公司的管理和所有权
DOI:
10.1111/j.1540-6261.1969.tb01684.x
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发表时间:
1969
影响因子:
8
通讯作者:
Wilbur G. Lewellen
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
Wilbur G. Lewellen
THE PROFESSIONALIZATION of American corporate management during this century continues to be one of the more remarked-upon features of our industrial society. We are reminded at regular intervals, both in the popular and in the scholarly press, that the era of the owner-manager has passed. The men who run the several hundred large firms which dominate our contemporary economy are said to be motivated no longer by the monetary rewards-and stirrings of pride traditionally attendant upon proprietorship. Instead, they are pictured as something like the private sector's equivalent of civil servants: the secure employees of an immense organization who are apt to feel only an incidental identification with the interests and objectives of the organization's owners.If accurate, certainly, this characterization is particularly unsettling where economic analysis is concerned. Most of our received doctrine in economics is predicated on the assumption that the productive units in the community seek some form of" profit maximization" in developing their activities. Unless the professional managers who nowadays administer the affairs of those units can be relied on to adopt a proprietary attitude and thereby pursue the indicated goal, the applicability of much of our theory becomes suspect. The likelihood that this suspicion is justified has, of course, received wide attention in the literature of business and economics. Two kinds of arguments can be observed. On the one hand, behavioral scientists have pointed out that most menincluding corporate executives-are strongly motivated by other than pecuni-