Corporate Ownership and Trajectories: Fields as the Political-Cultural Control of Business

Corporate control can be addressed as the power to shape corporate policies and strategies. We suggest that the social control of the business is affected by meso orders or social fields. This implies that corporate policies and strategies are shaped by relations between and within organized groups. From this perspective, the article explores how the corporate ownership structure and the executives' trajectories affect financial performance in the largest automobile companies. Panel regression discloses the effects of the forms of control over time. Results open an intriguing debate among economic sociology, agency, and corporate control literature.