A Reassessment of the Owner - Manager “Class Conflict”: the Unintended Private Consequence of Some Public Regulations
A Reassessment of the Owner - Manager “Class Conflict”: the Unintended Private Consequence of Some Public Regulations

Summary/Abstract: Traditional literature regarding “corporate governance” finds the “tension between ownership and management” (as it was shaped by the agency theory) to be a node in the logic of what should be the answer to the question “how the structure of the corporation’s property can be designated and, in this way, achieve its organizational architectural efficiency on the more developed financial markets, populated by publicly listed firms and owned by «diffuse» shareholders?”. In such modern capital markets, that are more dynamic due to a more liberal corporatist law (although uneven across jurisdictions), a phenomenon as “unprecedented” as “ambiguously” theorized by Berle and Means (1932) has been identified: the classic problem of the “separation of ownership from control”. This article makes a brief survey on a part of the corporate governance literature that is mostly neglected and in the ignorance of which lies the melting down in the same pot of the “separation of ownership from control” reality and the “managerial omnipotence” fatality, both associated to modern multinational corporation, and, more or less, misled by Berle and Means (1932). The Austrian School’s treatment within the theory of the firm has the potential to mitigate bad explanations and poor policy prescriptions that undeservedly hamper the very capacity of corporate structures to adapt themselves to changes, the need turning more stringent in times of worldwide spread crises.

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