Governance. During the managerialism of the 1950s, the dominant ideology asserted that economic growth necessarily leads to the progress of society as a whole. The responsibility of corporations was therefore to prosper economically and socially. The managerial superstructure was called upon to guarantee this promise. The famous slogan “What’s good for General Motors is good for America” summed up the optimism of the time.
An optimism based on a partial view of reality. In fact, the state played an essential role in regulating economies thanks to huge public investments, its power to arbitrate social tensions and to create geopolitical opportunities to globalize national activities.
The neoliberal revolution rose from the 1970s against this state omnipresence and advocated a return to idealized economic freedom. To “depoliticize” the economy, the state was replaced by financial market regulation, which was supposed to be “politically neutral” because it was driven solely by the return on investment. This led to the financialization of companies, which were asked to devote themselves solely to the profitability of their activities. A word from the American economist Milton Friedman (1912-2006) became the banner of this era: “The only responsibility of business is to make a profit”.
With the repeated financial crises until that of 2008, the illusion that the markets can best regulate economic activity has vanished. At the same time, the environmental danger has made a return to the managerialism of yesteryear hardly credible: who can still assert that what is good for a company is necessarily good for the planet and that the leaders have the competence to ensure such a relationship?
Network and shareholder activism
We have thus entered a new phase in the relationship between the economy and politics: “societalization”. “Society” now intends to act on companies so that they integrate effective responses to social and environmental issues into their value creation. But the “society” is heterogeneous, and the opinions of the citizens on their answers sometimes diverge radically. Many demands are then expressed by the voice of the activists.
These operate on two fronts. On the one hand, they put pressure on the State, its public policies and its laws through the interplay of opinion: this is network activism; and on the other hand, as investors in the capital of companies, they recover the power of shareholders to directly influence the management of companies: this is shareholder activism.
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