Corporations, Corporate Governance, Corporate Finance

07 Dec 2011 23:02

---

Corporations are a particular kind of institution, which for obscure reasons have come to dominate the economies of industrial societies. It is not at all clear why this should be so, though there are of course theories...

See also: Finance; Management (which overlaps a lot with this notebook)

Recommended:
• Lucian Bebchuk and Jesse Fried, Pay without Performance: The Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation
• James Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society [Review]
• Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property [1932]
• Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand
• J. Bradford DeLong, "The Corporation as a Command Economy"
• Thráinn Eggertsson, Economic Behavior and Institutions [Review: Homo economicus on the Grand Tour, or, When Is a Lizard a Good Enough Dragon for Government Work?]
• John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State
• Bennett Harrison, Lean and Mean
• Doug Henwood, Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom [Where does the money actually come from? Free online!]
• James Hoopes, False Prophets: The Gurus Who Created Modern Management and Why Their Ideas Are Bad for Business Today
• Rakesh Khurana, Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs [Blurb, ch. 1]
• JoAnne Yates, Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management

To read:
• Sanjai Bhagat and Richard H. Jeffries, Jr., The Econometrics of Corporate Governance Studies [Blurb]
• Gregory K. Dow, Governing the Firm: Workers' Control in Theory and Practice [blurb]
• J.B. Glattfelder, S. Battiston, "Backbone of complex networks of corporations: The flow of control", Physical Review E 80 (2009): 036104, arxiv:0902.0878
• Peter A. Gourevitch and James Shinn, Political Power and Corporate Control: The New Global Politics of Corporate Governance [Blurb, ch. 1]
• Kent Greenfield, The Failure of Corporate Law: Fundamental Flaws and Progressive Possibilities [Blurb]
• Takeo Hoshi and Anil Kashyap, Corporate Financing and Governance in Japan: The Road to the Future
• Robert Jackall, Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers
• Allen Kaufman, Lawrence Zacharias and Marvin Karson, Managers vs. Owners: The Struggle for Corporate Control in American Democracy
• Art Kleiner, The Age of Heretics: Heroes, Outlaws, and the Forerunners of Corporate Change [Described thus by Phil Agre: "This is a journalistic history of an important chapter of the 20th century that could easily have gone unwritten: a generation of attempts, more or less countercultural, to reform and reinvent the corporation. It's all here: unpredictable experiments in social engineering, weird tales of engineers dropping acid, computer programs predicting the future of the whole world, and the truly odd omnipresence of an Armenian mystic named G. I. Gurdjieff." Kleiner seems to be part of the Whole Earth Catalog/CoEvolution Quarterly crowd.]
• Bruce Kogut (ed.), The Small Worlds of Corporate Governance [blurb]
• Dan Krier, Speculative Management: Stock Market Power and Corporate Change
• William S. Laufer, Corporate Bodies and Guilty Minds: The Failure of Corporate Criminal Liability [Blurb]
• Lazonick, Business Organization and the Myth of the Market Economy
• Paul MacAvoy and Ira Millstein, The Recurrent Crisis in Corporate Governance [Blurb]
• Robert N. McCauley, Judith S. Ruud and Frank Iacono, Dodging Bullets: Changing U.S. Corporate Capital Structure in the 1980s and 1990s
• Lawrence E. Mitchell, Corporate Irresponsibility: America's Newest Export [Blurb]
• Randall K. Morck (ed.), A History of Corporate Governance around the World: Family Business Groups to Professional Manager [Blurb]
• David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism
• Charles Perrow, Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism
• Mark J. Roe, Strong Managers, Weak Owners: The Political Roots of American Corporate Finance
• William G. Roy, Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America
• Anthony Sampson, Company Man: The Rise and Fall of Corporate Life
• Ekkehart Schlicht, "Social Evolution, Corporate Culture, and Exploitation" [online]
• David E. Schrader, The Corporation as Anomaly [blurb]