Tribune. For some, large traditional companies are doomed to decline. Unable to reinvent themselves, they should give way to start-ups who dream of replacing them. For others, it is the capitalist system itself that is at the end of its rope, unable to respond to the challenges that stand before it. The threats are real, of course, but should we confuse today’s economy with the system itself?
The current form, called ultraliberalism, is in reality only the third historical form of a changing capitalism. It emerged from the 1980s in a shift from managerial capitalism to financialized capitalism. Managerial capitalism had itself replaced entrepreneurial capitalism from the 1920s. These various shifts were so many periods of crises in which antagonisms were brought to their paroxysm for many years.
In the 1920s, the entrepreneur was gradually supplanted by the professional manager armed with a whole new skill, management, while the power of the shareholder was diluted with the fragmentation of the capital of large companies. The third phase corresponded to the emergence of the professional shareholder, armed with a new skill, finance, and a new balance of power, a concentration of capital through investment funds.
The different ways to adapt
Do the current difficulties signify the end of capitalism and big business or the laborious birth of a fourth capitalism brought about by the transformation of big business? In recent years, large companies have been stepping up initiatives in two apparently very different directions.
The first is to find the entrepreneurial vitality of the origins. It is the development of “Corporate entrepreneurship”. All of the large French companies have developed massive acculturation actions to entrepreneurial culture and innovation or developed intrapreneurship programs or have learned to invest in start-ups, when it is not the three to that time. Although few of them have succeeded in bringing about the emergence of new businesses the size of the famous unicorns, many of them have succeeded in developing viable start-ups, a first success that was not obvious.
The second type of initiative aims to extend the responsibility of the company, beyond its traditional scope, to all the stakeholders in its environment with a regained long-term perspective. These are actions of the “corporate social responsibility” (CSR) type, the notion of ” purpose “, or even the new status of a company with a mission or B-corp in the United States.
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