Firms and their Shareholders

This article presents a review of the literature on large firms and investigates the capitalistic investment that underpins them: what are the conditions for its existence and its historic incarnations? We look at two critical periods for this organizational form: the establishment of integrated large firms at the end of the nineteenth century and the shareholder revolution at the end of the twentieth century. While referring in particular to the development of legal support for capitalistic investment and the consequences for employees of the adoption of shareholder value, we focus on the issue of relations between shareholders and managers.