40 MONOPOLY CAPITAL
even though not the ultimate goal, are the necessary means to
all ultimate goals. As such, they become the immediate, unique,
unifying, quantitative aim of corporate policies, the touchstone
of corporate rationality, the measure of corporate success. Here
is the real the socio-structural as distinct from individual-
psychological explanation of the kind of profit-maximizing
behavior so ably described by Earley in the passage quoted on
pages 24-26.
Nothing has yet been said about whether corporate execu-
tives strive to maximize their salaries and/ or personal in-
comes.19 It is probably safe to assume that tl1ey do, for two
reasons. For one thing, there is a selective process at work
which tends to draw the people who are most interested in
making money into business and to divert those less interested
into other pursuits. As Veblen said, ''men whose aim is not an
20
increase of possessions do not go into business." And second,
within any given business milieu, relative salary or income is
an important badge of standing. William H. Whyte, Jr., inquir-
ing into executives' attitudes toward taxes, found the following
to be true:
Unhappy as executives are about high taxes, to them the key
aspect of salary is not its absolute but its relative size. And the
relative size does depend on the income before taxes. The part of
the pay stub that shows gross salary may be cause for hollow laugh-
ter, but it is still the part that is critical, and the man who gets
$30,000 a year finds very little comfort in pondering the thought that
21
his $37,000-a-year rival takes home only $892 more than he does.
The two are of course nut identical. Mainly for tax reasons, the
19
corporate world has devised a variety of methods for compensating ex-
ecutives in addition to the old-fashioned salary and bonus. Taken over
the whole life of the executive, these "fringe benefits'' may be even more
important than salary. "In these days of profit-sharing benefits, retirement
plans, and stock options," says an advertisement of the Guaranty Trust
Company in Business Week of November 24, 1956, ''the present and
future capital assets of the average business executive are far greater than
his bank balance and salary check seem to indicate."
20
The Theory of Business Enterprise, p. 20.
21
The Organization Man, New York, 1958, pp. 144-145.
THE GIANT CORPORATION 41
There can thus hardly be any doubt that corporate managers
do normally strive to maximize personal income. But nothing
in the theory of corporate behavior would be changed if we
were to make the opposite assumption: that company men are
unconcerned about the size of thei1· incomes, that they go into
business and work hard at it because they like to rather than
for the money it brings in. There certainly are some business-
men who feel this way; and indeed they might all be of this
type, and might be paid accordingly, without changing any-
thing in their behavior as company men.
One way o.f clarifying this is by an analogy. A professional
baseball player makes his living by playing ball. He may detest
the life and stay with it solely for the money. Or he may love
the game and be quite willing to play for nothing if necessary.
It makes no difference at all when he gets out on the playing
field. There his objectives are no longer dictated by his per-
sonal feelings and preferences; they are laid down for him in
the baseball rule book. Whatever his likes and dislikes, what-
ever his inner urges, his actions must be directed to the single,
measurable aim of getting more runs than the other team. If he
won't or can't play the game according to the book, he is
dropped from the team and loses his job. If his contribution to
his club's success is inadequate, he is benched or sent down to
the minor leagues.
Baseball, it is said, is America's national game. It would be
mo1·e accurate to say that business is America's national game:
there are many more people engaged in it and the stakes are
much higher. But the two operate on similar principles. In
baseball the objective is to get to the top of the league; day-to-
day policies are directed toward winning games by getting
more i·uns than opposing teams; players are judged by their
cumulative day-to-day performance. In business the aim is to
get to the top of the corporate pyramid; day-to-day policies
are directed to making the most possible profits; as in baseball,
men are judged by their c.umulative day-to-day performance.
In both, those who refuse to play according to the rules get