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The corporation in the 21st century

Hosted by the Department of Economics

In-person and online public event (Sheikh Zayed Theatre, Cheng Kin Ku Building)

Speaker

Professor Sir John Kay

Professor Sir John Kay

Chair

Professor Francesco Caselli

Professor Francesco Caselli

Join us for this talk by John Kay who will be speaking about his latest book, The Corporation in the Twenty-First Century: Why (almost) everything we are told about business is wrong.

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.

Meet our speaker and chair

John Kay (@ProfJohnKay) is 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.

Francesco Caselli is the Norman Sosnow Professor of Economics at LSE. His work includes contributions to the understanding of convergence and cross-country income differentials, and he is the author of the book Technology Differences over Space and Time. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2010, and he is also a fellow of the Econometric Society (2019).

More about this event

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This public event is free and open to all. This event will be a hybrid event, with an in-person audience and an online audience. 

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For any queries see LSE Events FAQ.

For the online event: Registration for this event will open after 10am on Thursday 26 September.

For any queries email events@lse.ac.uk.

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