Page 142 - Culture Society and the Media

132 CONTROL OF THE COMMUNICATIONS INDUSTRIES
company’s involvements in arts patronage and social-welfare programmes have
been hailed as a prime example of the ‘soulful’ corporation in action, and there is
no doubt that these moves are partly motivated by a genuine concern for the
quality of communal life. However, as the chairman pointed out to shareholders
in 1978, they also help considerably with the main business of profit
maximization.

Atlantic Richfield is aggressively seeking out the economic opportunities
afforded by our free enterprise system and taking full advantage of them.
Despite the social upheaval of the last few years (including increasingly
critical appraisals of business), Atlantic Richfield’s primary task remains
what it has always been—to conduct its business within accepted rules to
generate profits, thereby protecting and enhancing the investments of its
owners. But…senior management recognize that the Company cannot
expect to operate freely or advantageously without public approval. And
today the public expects a corporation to contribute to the quality, as well
as the quantity, of life—or go out of business altogether. (Atlantic
Richfield, 1978, p. 27) [my italics]

Far from replacing the pursuit of profit as Berle and Means had hoped, then,
corporate excursions into social responsibility have become a way of pursuing
this goal more effectively in an unstable social and political climate.
Analysing the nature of these constraints on profitability and their implications
for corporate behaviour provides the basis for the structuralist strand in Marxist
approaches to corporate control. In contrast, the instrumentalist’s current stresses
the continuing centrality and power of individual owners and of the capitalist
class.

PATTERNS OF OWNERSHIP: RECENT EVIDENCE
According to the most recent detailed study of the largest 250 firms in the UK
economy, well over a half (56.25 per cent) have ‘an effective locus of control
connected with an identifiable group of proprietary interests’ and can be
classified as owner controlled (Nyman and Silbertson, 1978, p. 80). However,
the composition of these proprietary interests has changed considerably over the
last two decades. In 1957, almost two thirds (65.8 per cent) of the shares quoted
on the London Stock Exchange were held by individuals. By 1975, this
proportion had shrunk to just over a third (37.5 per cent). Over the same period,
the proportion held by major insurance companies, investment trusts and pension
funds, increased from 19 per cent to 42.7 per cent. There was also a small rise in
the proportion held by other industrial and commercial companies and by
overseas interests (Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth,
1979, p. 141). Not surprisingly, communications corporations show the impact
of these shifts somewhat unevenly.