:Formally you are right. But effectively the shareholder may not have enough knowledge to sensibly take part in the elections - the director usually have much larger knowledge than shareholder about company and the branch of industry - so it may be difficult for him/her to check whether the management of his firm acts in the interests of owners or in its own interest. (it is the problem which in economics is called 'the principal-agent problem', see for example David Begg et al "Microeconomics" chapter 4) |
:Formally you are right. But effectively the shareholder may not have enough knowledge to sensibly take part in the elections - the director almost always has much larger knowledge than shareholder about company- so it may be difficult for him/her to check whether the management of his firm acts in the interests of owners or in its own interest. (it is the problem which in economics is called 'the principal-agent problem', see for example David Begg et al "Microeconomics" chapter 4, or the book of John Kenneth Galbraith from 1973 "Economics and the Public Purpose"). |
The 'governing body' of a company is usually self-appointed, and in the case of many private companies, largely self-perpetuating. The democratic aspect referred to only generally applies to public companies...
Validity of the term discussion Google turned up over 200 - mostly biased articles of political motivation. Hence I described it as perjorative. Go here [[1]]
Thanks for the reference. But at the same time google gives 8100 hits for Plutocracy (40 : 1 ratio). And [metacrawler] still gives no results and I don't think this rather recent term merits a full blown entry. A short explanatory sentence and a reference to Plutocracy should be done at most. Adding a term like this gives additonal credibility and helps to proliferate it. Using not well established terms degrades the quality of an encyclopedia. So perhaps instead of deleting I will just shorten it considerably and move the rest to Plutocracy. Is this OK for you?
Yeah, I agree with your thinking. Truncating and linking to plutocracy would seem to be the best idea. MMGB
I think if at all possible someone should add some notes on how often the less-affluent-person-influence thing comes up. Right now the page seems to imply that it happens enough to make the idea of corporatocracy a moot point, but if it is a rare occurence this is not true. If on the other hand it is common the page should explicitly state so, and how much so.
Sorry, but "democratically elected" means one-person-one-vote, not one-share-one-vote, so it's fine to say that corporations have elected boards, but not democratically elected boards. --LDC
Kazik