ABSTRACT
Today there seems to be a vast series of different organisational arrangements capable of regulating the functioning and evolution of production activities and, at a first glance, it seems impossible to reduce all of them to a common institutional setting. Is it reasonable to speak of ‘capitalism’ when referring to such diverse phenomena as public companies, state firms, financial markets, the managerial revolution, the pension funds revolution and the like? What hampers our capacity to understand all these phenomena as particular forms of a unique and general mode of production is the widespread acceptance of a traditional notion of capitalism whereby ownership of the means of production unites the claims on residual control and residual income. This view, even if it has been rediscovered and refined in recent research, corresponds to a common sense doctrine, going back to the classical economists and Marx, according to which capitalism is a mode of production based on private ownership of capital assets. It is a theory elaborated on the ground of observation of the economic system prevailing in Great Britain in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.
