Generally 1 to 3 individuals, such as the president and top senior vice-presidents. Directors are elected by the stockholders. The millions of middle-class Americans who own corporate stock have virtually no influence over the decisions of directors. When confronted with mismanagement, the stockholders simply sell their stock, rather than try to challenge the powers of the directors. Indeed, most stockholders sign over 'proxies' to top management so that top management may cast these proxy votes at the annual meetings of stockholders.
Many corporate directors represent family owners, who maintain controlling stock-holdings.
And through interlocking directorates, the power of the oligopolistic system of commercial, financial, and industrial domination, stockholders' desires, when they do find reason to be active, are easily neutralized. Now with this in mind, globalization has incredible ramifications for the global distribution of economic power. Already the political might that derives from this concentration of economic power has been felt everywhere. Where the IMF cannot impose austerity, domestic power structures are carrying out the equivalent of SAPs, in the US the dramatic move to dismantle social welfare, shift from consensual domination to coercive domination, and restructure the social structure of accumulation for integration and consolidation in the global economy has been brutal. Falling wages, increasing poverty, degraded environmental and workplace safeguards, overflowing prisons, are just some of the consequences stemming from the power of the transnational corporate world order to work their wills on the majority of America's population.