Abstract
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century did much to bring discussions of economic inequality into the intellectual and popular mainstream. This article indicates how business, management and organization studies can productively engage with Piketty’s book. It does this by deriving practical consequences from Piketty’s proposed division of intellectual labour in general and his account of ‘super-managers’ in particular. There are organizational specificities to inequality which Piketty’s framework does not address, however. His account of corporate governance, of tax avoidance policy and of financialization, in particular, requires significant conceptual and empirical supplementation. We argue that business, management and organizational scholars should contribute to the cross-disciplinary inequality research project which Capital in the 21st Century proposes not despite these limitations but because of them.
Highlights
Social scientific research is and always will be tentative and imperfect
We – that is to say organizational scholars – will need to demonstrate the active role which changes in the corporate form itself have had upon measurable levels of economic inequality
This is not to suggest that the contemporary corporate form exists for the sake of concealing massive wage disparities between the few and the many, it is rather to insist that the seemingly arid terrain of corporate governance is a fertile ground upon which organizational scholars might productively contribute to Piketty’s cross-disciplinary programme
Summary
Social scientific research is and always will be tentative and imperfect. It can help to redefine the terms of debate, unmask certain preconceived or fraudulent notions, and subject all positions to constant critical scrutiny. Proceeding through over 600 pages of Cap 21st’s data, table and graph laden prose, it quickly becomes apparent that this is no manifesto It has been filtered through numerous intellectual, practical and ideological agendas, not all of which, as the infamous debate concerning the tension between the book’s empirical claims and their methodological support illustrates (Piketty, 2014b), have received it effusively (see McCloskey, 2014). Beyond providing its readers with empirical data which they can cite and a conceptual framework which they can use, Cap21st issues an invitation to would be collaborators While this invitation has been well received across many contemporary social sciences, scholars of business, management and organisation haven’t yet been so receptive.
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