Apple's Changing Business Model: What Should the World's Richest Company Do with All Those Profits?

Lazonick, William; Mazzucato, Mariana; Tulum, Öner

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2310608

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 11 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…It is severely shrinking its own pool of customers (Stout, 2012). And some companies are buying back their own shares in order to increase shareholder value at the expense of long term investment in the company (see for example, Lazonick et al, 2013). Non-financial companies have been accruing increasing proportions of their profits from financial activity (Clegg et al, 2011).…”

Section: Financialisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Accounting for the fictitious: A Marxist contribution to understanding accounting's roles in the financial crisis

Cooper¹

2015

Critical Perspectives on Accounting

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper presents a contribution to the debates surrounding the culpability of accounting in the recent financial crisis. It adopts a Marxist theoretical perspective concentrating mainly on Marx's work on fictitious capital. Fictitious capital is any form of investment (for example bonds, stocks, derivatives, and collateralized debt obligations) which is based upon the expectation of future returns. According to Marx while fictitious capital is useful to capitalism, it cannot create valueonly human labour can do that. The recent crisis was exacerbated by the significant amounts of investment which were made in extreme forms of fictitious capital. The paper argues that the accounting profession's adoption of financial economic rationalities meant that it helped to animate the form of financialised neo-liberalism which dominated at the time of the crisis. The accounting profession and accounting academia have implemented and propagated technologies and rationalities which enabled, legitimised, and drove the activities of business in general and financial institutions in particular in the run up to and since the crisis. While, accounting could be seen as being complicit in the crisis, it is important to remember that it was a capitalist crisis. The intuitional structures of accounting mean that it is susceptible of being captured by the most powerful in society.

show abstract

Section: Financialisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Accounting for the fictitious: A Marxist contribution to understanding accounting's roles in the financial crisis

Cooper¹

2015

Critical Perspectives on Accounting

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Several authors have highlighted the potential for financialized business models to distort corporate behaviour in particular ways. For example, Lazonick, Mazzucato, and Tulum (2013) have highlighted how Apple's business model produces extreme profitability and consequent distribution to shareholders which, they argue, is unjustified by any argument about risk or investment.…”

Section: Alternative Framing Through Critical Business Model Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

It is the business model… Reframing the problems of UK retail banking

Froud

Tischer

Williams

2017

Critical Perspectives on Accounting

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…The relationship between the two corresponded to that depicted in the upper right-hand quadrant of Table 2. Apple was the focal firm in the global value chains for its products, and the power relationship between Apple and Foxconn was heavily skewed in favor of the US firm (Bergvall-Ka˚reborn & Howcroft, 2013;Froud, Johal, Leaver, & Williams, 2012;Haslam, Tsitianis, Andersson, & Yin, 2013;Heracleous, 2013;Lazonick, Mazzucato, & Tulum, 2013;Montgomerie & Roscoe, 2013). Apple was thus able to move progressively from simply purchasing components from Foxconn, to outsourcing the manufacture and assembly of many of its products to the Taiwanese firm whilst still retaining control over the value chain, and crucially capturing most of the added value from the value chains (Jacobides, Knudsen, & Augier, 2006).…”

Section: Stage 1 (2000à2007): the Origins Of The Relationshipmentioning

confidence: 99%