ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the control of corporate power. The most vexed issue among social scientists in relation to industrial companies is the question of the separation of ownership and control. Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means’s principal contentions were that among the 200 largest non-financial corporations in the US in 1930 there was a variety of types of control in accordance with different patterns of shareholding and that control was in the hands of non-owners in the majority of companies. In the long term, management control of companies and the divergence of interests of owners and management were both likely to grow. Under management control the controlling individual is likely to want personal profit, power, prestige and the gratification of professional zeal; and the fewer shareholders shareholding, the more opportunities to profit at the company’s expense will appear directly to his benefit.
