Description
The rise of passive investment structures such as BlackRock and ETFs, which hold vast capital with minimal control, has coincided with the expansion of structures such as limited partnerships, holding companies and dual-class shares that grant outsized control to certain owners. How should we understand this ambivalence?
Political economists have focused on asset managers and institutional investors, framing contem-porary capitalism as a form of “monopoly capitalism.” However, this perspective overlooks the rise of high-control capital structures, described as “neo-patrimonial capitalism.” Rather than re-presenting competing tendencies, we argue that these developments are mutually constitutive.
Based on six years of fieldwork in family holdings, private equity and asset management, we argue that contemporary capitalism is neither dominated by dispersed financial ownership nor by patri-monial control alone, but by the articulation of both within hierarchical layers of capital. Econo-mic power stems not primarily from ownership itself, but from the capacity to orchestrate different forms of capital and distribute control, returns, risk and responsibility unevenly across them. High-control actors can thus mobilise low-control capital while maintaining concentrated control.
Our article reconnects debates on financialisation, wealth concentration and capitalist power by shifting attention from financial intermediaries to the patrimonial centres that organise capital ac-cumulation.