Shareholder value operates as discourse disconnected from actual firm performance
Evidence
Finally,shareholdervaluehasbeenconceptualizedasadiscursiveconstruct,alanguage of financial market expectations that operates independently of a firm’s performance. What explains for shareholder value’s lack of materiality, according to Froud et al. (2006), is the absence of an empirical connection between managerial policyand financial performance.Theauthors write: ‘Exante, thefirm andits managementstrategyisrepresentedbythecorporateCEOaspurposiveactionforfinancial results, which is then ex post vindicated by the achievement of positive financial numbers on earnings which are celebrated by management, analysts and business press’ (2006, p. 126). — Natascha van der Zwan, Making Sense of Financialization, 49
Categorization
- DEFINE: Defines shareholder value as a discursive construct distinct from material performance.
- XREF: Connects to Fiss and Zajac’s symbolic management work and the broader financialization debates in economic sociology. — connects to: The VC-to-IPO model dominates bio-economy discourse but not actual financing — Kean Birch, Rethinking Value in the Bio-economy:…, 34; Firms adopted shareholder-value rhetoric selectively to protect executive discretion. — Gerald F. Davis & Suntae Kim, Financialization of the Economy, 57; Shareholder-value maximization went unanswered by any countervailing force — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 570 (+3 more)
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Natascha van der Zwan, Making Sense of Financialization, 49
Related
- German firms deployed shareholder-value rhetoric symbolically without full implementation (similarity 0.81)
- Firms adopted shareholder-value rhetoric selectively to protect executive discretion. (similarity 0.80)
Broader Connections
- Critical finance studies treat markets as discursively constituted rather than merely material
#expands(0.78) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 578