Scandals and Contemporary Economic Institutions: a Comment on Dobbin and Zorn

"Corporate Malfeasance and the Myth of Shareholder Value" is an excellent article that suggests several interesting contributions to economic sociology. The most important of these i s clearly the atlernpt lo explain how the nolion of shareholder value emerged and how it has come to play such a central role in the current corporate economy. One way to describe the accornplishniznt of Dobbin and Zorn would be to say thal the authors accept artd add to Neil Fligstein's suggestion in The T r ~ ~ t ~ , ~ f ~ r m a t i n n of Corporar~ Comtrol and later writings that the best way to understand conternporav U.S. capitalism is to focus on the large carpora~ions and how their strategies (or rather, how their conceptions of their strategy) have changed over the years (Fligstein, 1990, 2001; Fligstein 6: Shin. 2004). Fligstein has laid the empirical foundation for this type of analysis by carefully fotlowing the development of the big U.S. corporations from the 1940s and onwards; and in doing so, he has relied mainly on the concept of