[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.In my analysis, the institutions of finance capital wieldedpower as the only source of large-scale capital, a power which allowedthem to persist whether they worked efficiently or not.If they had not arisenfrom their public origins, there is no guarantee that they would have arisenat all or in anything like the form they did.It was because they arose inthe form that they did that large-scale enterprise developed as socializedcapital in the property regime we still live with today.Such features as theuse of bonds rather than stocks were adopted for reasons of power.That is,some individuals defined the consequences of choices made by railroadleaders: foreign investors, for example, who initially had far greater assetsavailable for investment, wanted the greater security bonds offered.As anunintended consequence, American businessmen later discovered that theycould use bonds for construction and expansion while maintaining a con-trolling ownership interest.Other developments stemmed from government actions that had little di-rect connection to market dynamics.A national banking structure adoptedto facilitate the wartime mobilization of wealth to purchase arms, blankets,and food for soldiers created a national currency system that reduced thehigh transaction costs of exchanging bank currencies in interstate com-merce.In other words, the development of auxiliary institutions illustrateshow causes may differ from its consequences and how, once formed, struc-tures may control the resources and organizational capability to reproducethemselves.The institutions of corporate capitalism arose to trade govern-ment securities, that is, for public finance, but became central institutionsfor private capital.At the outset, no one intended that they become a sourcefor capitalizing manufacturing corporations.But the modern corporationcould not have developed without these institutions.Manufacturing capitalcould not have developed such institutions on its own.If one looks only atthe immediate needs or intentions that fostered the development of the A U X I L I A R Y I N S T I T U T I O N S 119large corporation at the end of the century, one is likely to miss many of thedeeper underlying historical developments.The stock market, investmentbanking, brokers, and the investing public did not arise to fulfill a func-tional need in production or distribution.They did not create more efficienttechnologies.They did not inherently enhance managerial rationality.Al-though they were part of the central institutional core of corporate capital-ism, and although they were unquestionably necessary for the rise of corpo-rate capitalism, they arose for quite different purposes.A similar historical path can be seen in the fungible nature of corporateownership.It was the mercantile character of the stock market, stemmingfrom its origins as a secondary market of government securities, that ex-plains why the entities sold were both fungible and alienated from theirsource.The fact that the securities were fungible set the stage for the social-ization of capital.Ownership was divided into small parcels, each of whichcould be owned separately.As parcellized entities they could be alienated inboth senses of the word they could be sold and they could be separatedfrom the responsibilities of ownership.Enumerating these qualities will benews to no one.But the point is that they must be explained not as a func-tional adaptation to a need but as a historical precedent that shaped corpo-rate capital only because corporate capital grew out of these institutions.Ifone were creating a capitalist economic system out of whole cloth, it is quitelikely one would design it differently.The theoretical importance of institutions like the stock market, invest-ment banks, and stock brokers is seen especially clearly in the differencebetween the way they are treated by the new institutional economists andthe institutionalization perspective that sociologists have applied to organi-zations.New institutional economists like Chandler, Williamson, andNorth have treated institutions as any stable social arrangements whichexist outside of markets, that is, they define institutions in terms of whatthey are not.The task is then to explain why and under what conditionseconomic arrangements are structured in institutions rather than markets(Coase 1937; Williamson 1975, 1981, 1985; Chandler 1977; Davis andNorth 1971; North 1981).As many economic sociologists have argued, itdistorts history to take the market as the given, the natural way of being,without any need of explanation.Polanyi s (1957) account of how thestates intentionally created the legal and institutional shell in which marketscould operate opened the agenda of economic sociology to the historicalroots of the market in social and political processes (Campbell and Lind-berg 1991; Zukin and DiMaggio 1990; Friedland and Robertson 1990;Block 1990; Lie 1993).In contrast, the agenda of the new institutionaleconomists problematizes only deviations from the market, not the marketitself.Moreover, they still base their explanation on notions of efficiency,either the minimizing of transaction costs for Williamson or the maximiza-tion of throughput for Chandler
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]