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The Modern Corporation and Private Property

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Encyclopedia of Sustainable Management
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Introduction

The Modern Corporation and Private Property is one of the most influential books in the business history of the United States. It is written by Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means in the 1930s and remains of central value to those studying or researching corporate evolution. It is a foundational text in company law and corporate governance, and many of today’s theoretical debates about corporate governance structure are directed, or at least substantially affected, by the core theses of Berle and Means’s monumental work.

The book presents a substantial, revolutionary view of the modern corporate system and the related economic concepts. However, the authors’ anti-neoclassical economic stance was largely influenced by the institutional economists such as William Ripley (1867–1941), Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), Wesley Mitchell (1874–1948), and Rexford Tugwell (1891–1979), who focus on the important role of institutions in affecting economic behaviour. On top of that, the...

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References

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Correspondence to Min Yan .

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Yan, M. (2020). The Modern Corporation and Private Property . In: Idowu, S., Schmidpeter, R., Capaldi, N., Zu, L., Del Baldo, M., Abreu, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Sustainable Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02006-4_428-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02006-4_428-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-02006-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-02006-4

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Business and ManagementReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences

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