Implications of Financial Capitalism for Employment Relations Research

New paper by Eileen Appelbaum, Rose Batt and Ian Clark of CEPR

Increasing share of the economy is organized around financial capitalism, where capital market actors actively manage their claims on wealth creation and distribution to maximize shareholder value. Drawing on four case studies of private equity buyouts, this article published in the British Journal of Industrial Relations challenges agency theory interpretations that they are ‘welfare neutral’ and show that an alternative source of shareholder value is breach of trust and implicit contracts. It also shows why management and employment relations scholars need to investigate the mechanisms of financial capitalism to provide a more accurate analysis of the emergence of new forms of class relations and to help us move beyond the limits of the varieties of capitalism approach to comparative institutional analysis.

See here (subscription required).