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Shareholder value provides the rationale, incentive, and justification for investor engagement. The chapter outlines the basic concepts of shareholder value, its preconditions, and the reasons for its growth since the 1980s, especially in the UK and the USA. Shareholder value developed out of responses to the economic crises of the 1970s, facilitated by the dominance of liberal economics and the absence of counter definitions of corporate transformation by organized labour.

This chapter discusses how public awareness of the 1970s “energy crisis” influenced the shift towards neoliberalism. Surveys revealed that the majority of Americans believed the energy crisis was manipulated by various forces including the oil companies, oil sheiks, and the government itself through oil price controls. The 1970s energy crisis thus represented not a crisis of scarcity but a crisis for the whole free market system; it focused upon a whole set of actors and institutions that were defined as the antithesis of the fair competition of the market. The rise of neoliberalism at the time prompted the establishment of an apolitical economy, wherein any visible form of power over the market was considered as an unfair “political” attempt to seize wealth through connections with special interests, instead of individual hard work.

This chapter details how, in the 1970s, a major crisis marked the end of a phase of industrial capitalism. This world systems analysis is introduced in the context of the 1970s crisis, emphasizing the extent to which the dynamics of capitalism had to be understood through analysis of an international division of labor, recurrent crises and waves of problem-solving, and the stabilization and leadership provided by successive hegemonic powers. The chapter details the different challenges to capital accumulation that coincided in the 1970s, making clear that these involved political demands for a greater share in wealth as well as long-term economic cycles.

This chapter explores the fundamental sociotechnical and ecological role of refineries in fragmenting working class power within the realm of social reproduction. This realm focuses on reproduction in understanding the decline of working-class politics in the United States that began with the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, and continued on through the McCarthyism of the 1950s, the crisis of the 1970s, and the rise of neoliberalism. The chapter reviews the basics of petroleum refining and its associated products that reveal particular barriers and problems in the material transformation of crude oil, as part of tracing the role of refineries in shaping the reproduction of entrepreneurial life.