In their classic study Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (1994) Jim Collins and Jerry Porras show that long-term successful companies are not really profit-seeking machines, but are pervaded by a strong feeling of “core ideology”. This classic capitalist culture is increasingly being challenged by a new culture, which, instead of developing the company in the long term, strives to maximise short-term profit for the shareholders.

Will Hutton has formulated the development in the following way:

“The culture of the first half of the twentieth century, with professional management teams dedicated to creating companies focused around investment, innovation and R&D, and with a compact between labour and management, has become a financial engineering culture. Raising the share price has become the dominant objective of the CEO, the board and the wider management team. A new logic holds sway: shareholders own the corporation and put their money at risk and, because the sole purpose of ownership is to maximise profits, the only strategic purpose of the corporation is to maximise the financial returns to shareholders.” (Will Hutton, The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century, 2007.)

It is not clear that this short-termism is compatible with long-term profits. The general perception is that short-termism has gained ground and become increasingly dominant in the world of business as well as in society as a whole.

Short-termism is, hypothetically, a result of a combination of new technology, changing ownership structures – from private owners to faceless institutional owners – and a changing mentality or different conception of human capital.

But we need empirical evidence. Short-termism has existed for such a long time that there are now the prerequisites for an empirically based critical evaluation of its range and its consequences for the individual, for the company and for society as a whole.

Is it possible in the name of long-term profitability to find alternatives to short-termism? The aim of the project “Short-termism in the long run” is to evaluate, on an empirical basis, the extent of short-termism and to discuss the scope for action on the basis of those experiences we have made today.