FIRMA: De Ronald Coase (1937) à Jensen & Mecking (2015)
“Coase’s theory assigned a power of influence to management — which was typically that of the Taylor-Fordist enterprise — where there was a clear-cut separation between the enterprise’s internal vertical hierarchy and the exterior spontaneity of the market. The development of ‘financialization’ — linked to the emergence of the logic of fulfilling short term profits as well as the increasingly forceful claims of shareholders (who seek an ever increasing representation on executive boards) — changed things. Therefore, a new theory of enterprise took hold quickly: Jansen and Meckling’s 1976 “theory of agency”. [ PALTRINIERI, 2015, pp.3/4]
THEORY OF AGENCY “This theory stipulated that managers are no more than the agents of the shareholders they represent, and also that the duty of management shouldn’t take priority over stakeholders. Since Jensen thinks that there is an asymmetry of information and contradictory interests between “the agent” (the director or mandator) and the “principal” (the owners or authorized representatives), he seeks to legitimately construct a series of counterweights and obligations in order to limit managerial power and to benefit the shareholders’ power: one or more legal persons (the principal, or the corporations) engage another person (the agent) in order to execute a task in their name — involving the delegation of a certain power. Subsequently, the whole enterprise can be designed as a cascade of delegations established in contract; from the executives to the management, to the employees.”[ PALTRINIERI, 2015, pp.3/4]
THEORY OF AGENCY “It is important to understand that the theory of agency is both a product and an agent of the neoliberal transformation of the enterprise, in the measure where it has facilitated the transformation of the power relations between shareholders, management, and employees by rewriting the principles of corporate governance. It facilitated the financialization of enterprise, but also disseminated a sort of pacified anthropological vision of the company as an assembly of free and rational individuals, each following his own interest (the investor wants to make a profit, the worker wants to earn a salary which allows him to live outside the enterprise): all the actors are moved by the same instrumental rationality — everyone is invested in the enterprise in order to profit in some way, meaning there is no fundamental conflict between capital and work. The theory of agency therefore dissolves the enterprise into a “knot” of mercantile contracts: the classic opposition between the interior and exterior of the enterprise — between the organisation and the market — does not really have any space left to exist, because the relations between the agents which make up the enterprise are purely mercenary and competitive.” [ PALTRINIERI, 2015, p. 4]
VERTICAL INTEGRATION “ The problem of vertical integration of results disappears because the different units of production are set against one other, even within an organisation. As J. Bidet says: “the market has radically hegemonised the organisation”, or better still, the market is itself becoming the mode of organisation. In a context where a large part of the production of material commodities and services are outsourced, “contract management” which formalises the relations between internal and external suppliers and providers, become the core function of the company. This also signifies that a significant part of the production of big business enterprise today is normative production (still more than material goods or services); a production of rules according to which the enterprise seeks to construct and standardise its juridical, economic and ecological environment[BASSO, 2015]. One could suggest that, today, the activity of the firm is immediately “political”, so we can consider the firm as an object for political philosophy. [ PALTRINIERI, 2015, p. 4/5]
BIBLIOGRAFIA
BASSO, O., Politique de la très grande entreprise. Leadership et démocratie planétaire, Paris, PUF, 2015.
COASE, R., Nobel lecture IN WILLIAMSON, O. E. & WINTER, S. G., The Nature of the Firm. Origins, Evolution and Developments, Oxford University Press, 1993.
CANDLER, A., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, Harvard Univeristy Press, 1977.
JENSEN, M. & MECKLING, W., “Theory of the Firm : Managerial Behaviour, Agency Cost and Ownership Structure” IN Journal of Financial Economics, vol. 3, 4, p. 305–360.
PALTRINIERI, Luca., The Center for Contemporary Marxism Abroad (Fudan, Shanghai) and Actuel Marx (Paris), November 7–8th, 2015, Fudan University, Shanghai : « Subjects and Subjectivity in Era of the Neoliberal Globalization »Managing Subjectivity Neoliberalism, Human Capital and Empowerment
SIMON, H., “Organizations and Markets”, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 5, 2, 1991, p. 25–44.