IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/jinter/v17y2006i3p313-326.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Business as Usual? Ambitions of Profit Maximization and the Theory of the Firm

Author

Listed:
  • Kenny Crossan

    (Napier University, United Kingdom)

  • Thomas Lange

    (Corresponding author: Professor of Economics, AUT University, Faculty of Business, Private Bag 92006, Auckland 1020, New Zealand. Tel.: +64 9 921 9999 ext: 5788; Fax: +64 9 921 9876; Email: (office)thomas.lange@aut.ac.nz (home)thomaslangel@hotmail.)

Abstract

What constitutes the ultimate aim of managers of businesses remains a contestable question that has been debated by both economists and management scholars for several decades. We collected and analyzed survey data from 159 managers of UK based companies and explored the latter’s overriding ambitions for their businesses. We combined our survey data with detailed financial information contained in the FAME (Financial Analysis Made Easy) database, which allowed us to verify and complement the reported survey results. Irrespective of possible constraints in the market in which they operate, we conclude that managers act “as if†they were the perfectly informed agents of neoclassical economic theory who aim for profit maximization as their overriding business objective, even though – in real life or ex post – their objectives may not necessarily move from this ambition into a reality.

Suggested Citation

  • Kenny Crossan & Thomas Lange, 2006. "Business as Usual? Ambitions of Profit Maximization and the Theory of the Firm," Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics, , vol. 17(3), pages 313-326, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:jinter:v:17:y:2006:i:3:p:313-326
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://jie.sagepub.com/content/17/3/313.abstract
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Dariusz Klimek & Elżbieta Jędrych, 2020. "A Model for the Sustainable Management of Enterprise Capital," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(1), pages 1-13, December.
    2. Xiaoyong Li & Giuseppe T. Cirella & Yali Wen & Yi Xie, 2020. "Farmers’ Intentions to Lease Forestland: Evidence from Rural China," Land, MDPI, vol. 9(3), pages 1-18, March.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:jinter:v:17:y:2006:i:3:p:313-326. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.