Froud, Johal, Leaver and Williams's book contains three extended case studies of the ways in which narratives of corporate strategy, finely subdivided into firm, industry and grand economic stories, are reflexively related to accounting numbers and circulated among corporate managers, analysts, consulting firms and best selling authors of how-to management books. All this takes place in an economy in which the stock-market has become an object of interest to large strata of society, slowly but surely turning the attention of almost everybody towards day-to-day movements in share prices.I felt schizophrenic about the book: in defence of my own sanity I will argue that the book is to blame, and not me. I will begin in the mode of praise.The studies of the histories of GlaxoSmithKline, Ford and General Electric all illustrate the interweaving of business, politics, media and the rest of civil society in this organizational society of ours. They do so by way of sustained empirical research, a great deal of 'feel' for the field, and diligence on the part of the four authors. The case studies make great reading.Overall, and quite explicitly, the main proposition of the book is that 'shareholder value' is a rhetoric that spurs on the formation and expression of increasingly utopian managerial visions of how radical transformations of businesses will take place and make it possible for shareholders to reap the massive rewards to come. This contrasts rather sharply with the realities of the past where the big corporations in the West have faced all sorts of constraints that make these narratives even more unrealistic.The study of GlaxoSmithKline shows clearly that the fate of 'Big Pharma' is predominately a question of politics. Will governments, after all the major source of finance for the pharmaceutical industry, retain their relatively one-sided generous stance towards this particular private industry, or will they attempt to socialize some of the profits generated from the practice of modern medicine? All else are details really, but financial analysis of the companies proceeds without taking that into account, focussing forever on the details rather than on the more fundamental preconditions for the business under analysis.Ford is the story of a mature, slow-growth and globally competitive industry. The authors hint at the company being in a rather dire situation with ageing plants in high-cost America. The twists and turns of management, primarily sequences of rationalizations, ventures into finance and international acquisitions respectively, do little to produce the numbers that analysts are looking for. Hence, the stock is never valued along the same lines as those of Big Pharma, for instance. Now, the analysis of Froud et al. can be underlined even more, as Ford has been posting huge losses in recent years.Managers can make many strategic moves (both in rhetoric and in practice) but they have a hard time finding strategic levers to achieve profitable growth. The study of General Electric includes an ironical non-transferable list of 'how-to' principles explaining the apparent, and necessarily temporary, success of GE and its CEO 'Neutron-Jack' Welch. The pie `ce de re Β΄sistance of the managerial strategy of GE has been the internalization of finance into an industrial