The solution to all these problems, famously articulated by the University of Chicago free market economist Milton Friedman in a 1970 New York Times article, was an elegant one: By framing the corporation purely in terms of its monetary value to shareholders, and setting aside the notion that it might be a valuable entity in and of itself by virtue of what it did, corporate America suddenly had an easy way to measure performance. The scheme had a kind of moral clarity: The risk of operating a company is borne by stockholders, so they’re the ones who deserve to reap the rewards.

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By the 1990s, the notion that a CEO had an obligation to maximize shareholder value had become an unquestioned mantra taught in business schools; ordinary people assumed it was simply the way of the world. “People think it was brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses, as the 11th Commandment,” said Richard Sylla, a professor who specializes in the history of financial institutions at NYU Stern School of Business, and the coauthor of a recent article in the journal Daedalus critiquing the notion of shareholder supremacy. “If you’re younger than 50 or 60, you’ve lived in a world where everyone taught you that this is what a corporation is supposed to do—maximize profit and shareholder value. But the world used to be different.”

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The broader social effects of the shift toward shareholder value are clear, critics say, with wages stagnating and unemployment remaining stubbornly high even as the stock market has rebounded after the recession. Meanwhile, if the point was to benefit shareholders, it’s not clear that worked either. Roger Martin, the former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, points out in his 2011 book, “Fixing the Game,” that from 1933 to 1976, returns on investment in the S&P 500—the decades immediately before the “shareholder value” took hold—were actually higher than they have been since. And Stout notes that in the 20 years after 1993, when a change to the tax code encouraged corporations to tie executive compensation to share price, investors in the S&P 500 saw returns that were slightly worse than what they were getting during the 40 years prior. The life expectancy of S&P 500 companies, meanwhile, has been cut dramatically—from around 70 years in the 1920s to 15 years today.

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Ultimately, what might have the best chance of changing minds in the business world are examples of companies that have pursued the stakeholder model and flourished as a result. If Market Basket is an example of such a company—as the remarkable solidarity of its employees and customers suggests it is—then proof that the model works might lie in the impressive growth and annual revenues that the chain has managed to pull off despite spreading the wealth around to all those who play a part in generating it. As an institution, Market Basket matters in New England in a way that a company narrowly focused on pleasing its investors could never be, by making it possible for thousands of people to live more prosperous middle-class lives, and tens of thousands of other people to feed their families more easily. With that in mind, whoever ends up in control of Market Basket once the dust settles will have to decide how to run a company that has been carrying on its shoulders significantly more than a few bags of groceries.