ABSTRACT
Exercising power means taking decisions (Simon 1947); the company is a nexus of strategic decision (Cowling and Sugden 1996); therefore company managers exercise power. This simple syllogism, inverting neoclassical theories which showed markets wielding power over companies, has endured successive challenges as customers and shareholders act to pull decision in their direction. But ‘manageralism’, a source of injustice and inefficiency from most economic vantage points, always showed a more progressive side beneath political and social lenses. New commercial pressure has changed the way managers work; it has not removed their power, or propensity, to move, shape and escape from markets whose undiluted instructions prove too hard to take.
Markets spent most of the twentieth century in retreat from two types of management: demand management by central governments, and supply management by large corporations. Because their rises coincided, these two sources of ‘intervention’ were often assumed to be related. For companies that ‘planned’ their specific demand to ensure that heavy product and process investments paid back, fluctuations in aggregate demand were a frustrating and potentially fatal complication, so big business supported big government in its countercyclical efforts (Galbraith 1973). Companies engaged in developing new technologies and labour-force skills which they knew would be ‘poached’ by free-riding rivals looked to the state to subsidise their research and training efforts. Public ownership of energy supply, telecoms and transport networks drew tacit corporate support, as necessary to ensure that the private sector was cheaply and reliably supplied with utilities which on its own it would probably have underproduced.
