The Incompatibles

It is essential to the wider public legitimacy of the shareholder value maximization approach to corporate governance that share values can be maximized only by meeting consumers’ preferences and by using resources as efficiently as possible; and that therefore shareholders’ interests represent the general interest. The claim rests on the assumption that firms are operating in more or less pure markets. Since few markets are pure, theorists have moved from the idea of consumer sovereignty to that of consumer welfare, but this represents a sleight of hand. Further, not all human needs can be served by trading in markets. That leads us to the search for alternatives. There must be a variety of these, as one lesson of the failure of neo-liberal market theory to realize its ambitions is that there is no one best way. Neo-liberal dogmatism must be replaced by a genuinely liberal pursuit of diversity.