[skybrian]

It's reductionist because it assumes management has no choice in how to run their business and US corporations are basically all the same.

This is clearly, obviously not the case. There are many ways to make money and the management of a company has a lot of freedom to choose how to go about it. Different companies have quite different strategies and cultures. Some treat their employees much better than others. Pretending they're all the same is sort of like saying it doesn't matter who wins in an election.

What we can say is that when new management takes over, sometimes things change quite drastically. But this isn't deterministic and so you can't conclude all that much just from knowing the theory of shareholder value.

[magduf]

>Different companies have quite different strategies and cultures. Some treat their employees much better than others.

Yes, but you can find clear trends when you look at different groups, such as American corporations vs. European ones, and if you do that, you can see that employees, on average, are treated much worse at American companies. While there are some success stories in America, such as Costco (which is pretty famous for paying and treating employees very well, considering the jobs there are generally low-skill and don't require college degrees), the American system rewards companies that don't treat employees well and they tend to do better when competing with companies that do.

[skybrian]

This is roughly my understanding as well, but when we start talking about averages and trends across many industries and countries, I think personal observations might not count for much. Very few people have that wide range of experience.