Can someone make sense of this?
Glenn Reynolds, the anti-Peter Drucker, writes:
This is also, I suspect, one reason activist groups like to target big businesses. Small businesses don’t care what they think, unless the activists are their customers. Big businesses are run by people who can afford to let other issues — like how they’re treated at dinner parties or on the golf course — affect their bottom lines. In this sense, giving in to activist demands is just another example of management self-dealing. Like Gulfstream jets or fancy executive dining rooms, it’s a way for managers to improve their quality of life at the expense of shareholders and employees.
Managers at large corporations “give in” to consumer boycotts in order to improve their quality of life — just like with Gulfstream jets or fancy executive dining rooms. Color us unconvinced.
Bonus points:
In the really old days, prior to the industrial revolution, there were no real advantages to hugeness. 1,000 blacksmiths pounding on anvils weren’t any more efficient per capita than a single blacksmith working alone.
Replace blacksmiths with bloggers, and pounding on anvils with pecking at keyboards. What do you get? This.
Yeah, it means he’s full of beans. Smaller businesses, in my experience anyway, tend to be more socially conscious because the owner is the business, whereas larger businesses, contrary to Insty’s opinion, become entities unto themselves, and no one person takes responsibility for corporate acts. I’d guess he has no real-world experience in either.
Um I think he’s saying that liberals with all their complaining about large corps breaking the law and or killing people means that the companies have to change how they do business and that costs money which brings the shares down which means Glenn may have lost some money recently and is blaming liberals?
I dunno I’ve been sniffing toner all afternoon.
we’re trying to kind of lead a crusade to googlebomb open source media with Sadly, No! but we don’t really know how to do it.
Regarding that last part-
I think someone famous said that you could put a thousand monkies in a room with type-writers and eventually you would get Shakespeare.
You mean like by posting Open Source Media everywhere?
Yeah, that’s what I meant by Open Source Media.
Pinko- Here’s a start.
Here, and here
Don’t you mean “Open sores media?
Sorry my mistake, it’s spelled Open source media
Hey, Have I mentioned Open Source media yet? What a gee golly great place to get your “open source news” Whatever the fuck that means.
ha ha you effed up the italics tags! that is CLASSIC Sadly, No!
Gobsmacked as I am to admit this, I find myself agreeing with Reynolds here. At least, I agree to the extent he is claiming that topmost managers of firms strongly subject to the inherent contradictions identified by Berle and Means tend to be rentseeking parasites.
But I’m not altogether certain that’s the route Reynolds meant to travel down; and I am altogether certain he is in any event, at bottom, a dickhead.
Have you checked out Open Source Media? It’s the BOMB.
Don’t agree with the guys politics but he’s such a implacable foe of the pajamadheen it really seems more fitting – why not make it Open Source Media instead?
OTOH, something to be said for precedent too…
Hey, I hear that Open Source Media is teh gay!
This is kind of fun: by choosing the name of a pre-existing company, comprised of widely-used buzzwords, the folks at Open Source Media have preemptively Google-bombed themselves!
This is also, I suspect, one reason activist groups like to target Open Source Media. Small businesses don’t care what they think, unless the Open Source Media are their customers. Big businesses are run by people who can afford to let other issues — like Open Source Media — affect their bottom lines. In this sense, giving in to activist demands is just another example of management self-dealing. Like Open Source Media jets or fancy executive dining rooms, it’s a way for managers to improve their quality of life at the expense of Open Source Media.
PS: Open Source Media
Hey did sadly, no! Switch to approved comments? Or did the bot eat my post?
errr…………
Prior to the industrial revolution, capitalism as we know it didn’t even exist, so comparing a mercantile-era family workshop to a small business in the fully capitalized corporate system of today is comparing apples and any other goddamned thing on the planet that isn’t apples.
Economies functioned on a weird amalgam of feudal dependencies and proto-trade union associations. Corporations were chartered by kings, for specific purposes, and existed only at the king’s will. If the corporate governors pissed the king off, the corporation ceased to exist. This system was about as anti-free market, anti-libertarian as you could get.
And Reynolds has obviously never read so much as the first chapter of “Wealth of Nations”, where Smith analyzes how task specialization in the making of pins could increase a trade shop’s output geometrically.
Let me guess…Glenn was using his university’s wireless internet access to play Quake on his laptop during History of Western Civ II.
Jillian, I heart you soooo much, although you know he’s playing Battlefront.
If you heart me that much, then we should spend an evening sharing drinks and humiliating observations about Instadork’s gaming habits.
Can anyone else see him sitting around getting all turgid while playing Railroad Tycoon?
I AM IN STITCHES. Try another video game. I think it might be funny with ANY GAME>
What’s the one where you are this ball that rolls and round and sticks to stuff. That’s so Pundy.
“IT’S LIKE I AM GATHERING LINKS I”M SUCH A TOTAL GENIOUS!!!!!!!!1!!!!!!!”
Hey, has anyone been shopping for waffles on Amazon lately?
I think someone famous said that you could put a thousand monkies in a room with type-writers and eventually you would get Shakespeare.
Or at least Scenes From A Mall.
Ah, now I see why we’re googlebombing Open Source Media.
Methinks Instacracker had too much boob play from Atlas at the OSM Orgy. Nevertheless, I doubt a third rate law prof at a third tier law school even knows who Berle and Means were, let alone be able to understand the Modern Corporation and Private Property.
Actually, there’s always been an advantage to hugeness. A thousand blacksmiths banded together in any particular area could have fixed prices low to drive out competition, then limited supply to raise prices, or otherwise controlled the horseshoe market in any number of ways. Maybe activists target big businesses precisely because bigness creates and exerts economic and political power that is exponentially greater than small business power. I realize that this probably sounds so simplistic to profound thinkers like Reynolds with their complex theories of causation linked to executive malfeasance.
Which is why the Vatican mandated price and wage controls back when blacksmiths were the pinnacle of industry.