The Corporation in the 21st Century

In the world of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, capitalists built and controlled mills and factories. That relationship between capital and labour continued in the automobile assembly lines and petrochemical plants of the twentieth century. But no longer: products and production have dematerialised. The goods and services provided by the leading companies of the twenty-first century appear on your screen, fit in your pocket, or occupy your head. Ownership of the means of production is a redundant concept. Workers are the means of production; increasingly, they take the plant home. Capital is a service bought from a specialist supplier with little influence over customer businesses. The professional managers who run modern corporations do not exert authority because they are wealthy; they are wealthy because they exert authority. The pharmaceutical industry (or Big Pharma) creates life-saving vaccines and ramps drug prices up to near-unaffordable levels. Amazon gives us next-day delivery on almost everything and has its workers urinate in bottles rather than take breaks. John Kay's incisive overhaul of our ideas about business redefines our understanding of successful commercial activity and the corporation - and describes how we have come to 'love the product' as we 'hate the producer.' This is a brilliant and original work from one of the greatest economists.

A brilliant analysis of how business really works and why we should stop thinking about "capitalism" and talk instead about a pluralistic economy. Informative, funny, and full of deep insights. Truly a magnum opus, A very entertaining read for specialists and non-specialists alike, it's a book that manages to be incredibly expansive, and yet also with a depth of argument you won't often find in a business text. Few writers come close to matching Kay's analysis of what makes good businesses succeed and bad businesses fail, Praise for John Kay, Kay is both a first-class economist and an excellent writer, An admirable debunker of myths and false beliefs - Kay can see substantial things others don't

Sir John Kay is one of Britain's leading economists. A Fellow of the British Academy and Royal Society of Edinburgh, he was the founding dean of the Oxford Business School and has held chairs at London Business School and LSE. He is a winner of the Senior Wincott Award for Financial Journalism for his Financial Times columns. Other People's Money won the Saltire Prize and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. His other books include Obliquity, The Long and Short of It, Greed is Dead and Radical Uncertainty.

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