From Orchestra Conductor to Principal's Agent: How Internal Financialization of Top Management Has Enabled External Financialization of the Firm

This paper analyzes the evolution of internal management work within large corporations from the end of the nineteenth century to the late 1960s. It argues that internal financialization is the prior condition for external financialization, as expressed notably in the shareholder value that is the focus of most theoretical and empirical analyses of financialization of corporate governance. Starting from the twofold nature of management work, our analysis examines how top managers of large corporations have become progressively disassociated from the production process. Through an exploration of the history of business accounting, we show how the evolution of management work has progressively financialized the functions of top managers. One of our main conclusions is that the alliance between shareholders and top managers around the nature and purpose of the firm is the result of an endogenous process. Therefore, the origin of shareholder-value-based corporate governance not only has to be situated before the rise of institutional investors and financial liberalization in the 1970s, but must also be seen as an internal process setting the conditions for the emergence of this management model.