Really great piece by Justin Fox on “What We’ve Learned from
the Financial Crisis” over at the Harvard Business Review.  What follows is a brief excerpt, but you’ll want to go read the whole thing.

Five years ago the global financial system seemed on the
verge of collapse. So did prevailing notions about how the economic and
financial worlds are supposed to function. The basic idea that had governed
economic thinking for decades was that markets work…. In the summer of 2007,
though, the markets for some mortgage securities stopped functioning…. [T]he
economic downturn was definitely worse than any other since the Great
Depression, and the world economy is still struggling to recover…. Five years
after the crash of 2008 is still early to be trying to determine its
intellectual consequences. Still, one can see signs of change…. To me, three
shifts in thinking stand out: (1) Macroeconomists are realizing that it was a
mistake to pay so little attention to finance. (2) Financial economists are
beginning to wrestle with some of the broader consequences of what they’ve
learned over the years about market misbehavior. (3) Economists’ extremely
influential grip on a key component of the economic world—the corporation—may
be loosening.

Fox goes on to dissect each of these shifts, putting them in
historical perspective.  As I said, I
think it is well worth your time to read his entire piece.  A
couple of additional noteworthy quotes from his analysis of item (3) above follow:

• [M]ost economic theories also build upon a common foundation
  of self-interested individuals or companies seeking to maximize something or
  other (utility, profit) …. Still, one narrow way of looking at the world can’t
  be the only valid path toward understanding its workings. There’s also a risk
  that emphasizing individual self-interest above all else may even discourage
  some of the behaviors and attitudes that make markets work in the first
  place—because markets need norms and limits to function smoothly.

• I don’t think the shareholder value critics have come up
  with a coherent alternative. We’re all still waiting for some other framework
  with which to understand the corporation—and economists may not be able to
  deliver it. Who will? Sociologists have probably been the most persistent
  critics of shareholder value, and of the atomized way in which economists view
  the world. Some, such as Neil Fligstein, of UC Berkeley, and Gerald Davis, of
  the University of Michigan, have proposed alternative models of the corporation
  that emphasize stability and cohesion over transaction and value.