Amid growing public discontent over income inequality and theburgeoning costs of healthcare and higher education, Jamie Dimonand other leaders at some of the world’s largest companies saidthey plan to abandon the long-held view that shareholders’interests should come first. The purpose of a corporation is toserve all its constituents, including employees, customers,investors, and society at large, the Business Roundtable said Monday in astatement. Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., heads thegroup.

“While each of our individual companies serves its own corporatepurpose, we share a fundamental commitment to all of ourstakeholders,” the group said in the statement. “Americans deservean economy that allows each person to succeed through hard work andcreativity, and to lead a life of meaning and dignity.”

The 181 signatories include BlackRock Inc.’s Laurence Fink; Bankof New York Mellon Corp.’s Charlie Scharf; and the CEOs of severalWall Street banks, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., MorganStanley, and Moelis & Co. It also includes Amazon.com Inc.founder Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person.

This shift in corporate priorities comes as some politicians andcritics question whether the fundamental premise of Americancapitalism should be revamped. Some executives also have complainedthat an outsize focus on share prices and quarterly results hamperstheir ability to build businesses for the long term.

The group’s statement offers scant detail on how the executives’commitments will be converted into action, and it presents noroadmap for getting there. Many companies vow to do good things butresist releasing data that would enable others to independentlyverify such promises. And it will fall on CEOs—who, on average,last no longer than six years—to convince fickle investors,including powerful activists, that shifting resources will pay offin the long term.

The idea that businesses exist primarily to benefitshareholders, also known as “shareholder primacy,” took hold incorporate America in the 1980s. In 1997, the Business Roundtableembraced the idea in a document outlininggovernance principles.

The concept has been criticized for leading to a fixation onshort-term results and helping fuel the rapid increase in executivepay. Last year, public companies in the United States begandisclosing the difference between their CEOs’ compensation and thatof their median workers. At S&P 500 firms, the average ratio isabout 280-to-1, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Both Dimon and Fink have written open letters saying that chiefexecutives should take on a larger responsibility for tacklingsocietal matters and, at times, take stances on politicallycontroversial topics.

“Stakeholders are pushing companies to wade into sensitivesocial and political issues—especially as they see governmentsfailing to do so effectively,” Fink wrote this year. The messageechoed a position he took in 2018 urging CEOs to make a morepositive contribution to society. BlackRock oversees almost US$7trillion in assets.

In April, Dimon challenged fellow chief executives to get moreinvolved in social causes and public-policy matters.

“In the past, boards and advisers to boards advised company CEOsto keep their head down and stay out of the line of fire,” Dimonsaid in a letter toshareholders. “Now the opposite may be true. If companies and CEOsdo not get involved in public-policy issues, making progress on allthese problems may be more difficult.”

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