Gardiner C. Means was an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 economist

Economist

An economist is a professional in the social science discipline of economics. The individual may also study, develop, and apply theories and concepts from economics and write about economic policy...

. He worked at Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 where he met Adolf Berle. Together they wrote the seminal work of corporate governance

Corporate governance

Corporate governance is a number of processes, customs, policies, laws, and institutions which have impact on the way a company is controlled...

, The Modern Corporation and Private Property

The Modern Corporation and Private Property

The Modern Corporation and Private Property is a book written by Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means published in 1932. It explores the evolution of big business through a legal and economic lens, and argues that in the modern world those who legally have ownership over companies have been separated...

. Means followed the institutionalist

Institutional economics

Institutional economics focuses on understanding the role of the evolutionary process and the role of institutions in shaping economic behaviour. Its original focus lay in Thorstein Veblen's instinct-oriented dichotomy between technology on the one side and the "ceremonial" sphere of society on the...

 tradition of economists. In 1934 he created to the term "administered prices" to refer to prices set by firms in monopoly

Monopoly

A monopoly exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity...

 positions. In The Corporate Revolution in America (1962) he wrote,

"We now have single corporate enterprises employing hundreds of thousands of workers, having hundreds of thousands of stockholders, using billions of dollars' worth of the instruments of production, serving millions of customers, and controlled by a single management group. These are great collectives of enterprise, and a system composed of them might well be called "collective capitalism."

Means argued that where an economy is fueled by big firms it is the interests of management

Management

Management in all business and organizational activities is the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives using available resources efficiently and effectively...

, not the public

Public

In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individuals, and the public is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociological concept of the Öffentlichkeit or public sphere. The concept of a public has also been defined in political science,...

, that govern society

Society

A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...

.

Writing by Means

• The Modern Corporation and Private Property
  The Modern Corporation and Private Property
  The Modern Corporation and Private Property is a book written by Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means published in 1932. It explores the evolution of big business through a legal and economic lens, and argues that in the modern world those who legally have ownership over companies have been separated...
  
  with Adolf Berle (1932)
• "Industrial Prices and their Relative Inflexibility" (1935)
• Patterns of Resource Use (1938)
• The Structure of the American Economy (1939)
• Pricing Power and the Public Interest (1962)
• The Corporate Revolution in America (1962)
• "Simultaneous Inflation and Unemployment: Challenge to theory and policy" (1975)
• The Heterodox Economics of Gardiner C. Means: A collection 1991.
• A Monetary Theory of Employment 1994.