The verdict is in, and it serves as a convenient end point for the era of shareholder capitalism: Say-on-pay has been a dud.

Fewer than 100 corporations, about 1.5%, lost these mandatory but nonbinding votes on executive pay practices. Most got well over 90% in favor. Say-on-pay may have led some to modify their practices before the votes, but it’s clear that executive worries of investor interference have not played out.

Why does this matter now? Most investors, including the big institutional players, have long tolerated rising compensation. Pay started taking off in the 1980s, at the beginning of the era of shareholder capitalism. Companies were putting renewed focus on investors relative to workers or society. Shareholders were fine with paying executives more if that boosted their returns.

At some point, though, the tail started wagging the dog. Shareholder returns and executive pay diverged after the market bust of 2000. Since 2001, shareholders have typically made nothing on their stock after inflation, while executive compensation has continued its long boom. For a variety of reasons, stock-based compensation is no guarantee that pay will rise and fall with stock returns. Even the Great Recession, blamed partly on compensation practices, now looks to be only a hiccup in the pay rise.

Another data point is the decline in dividends since the 1990s. Companies now generally pay out far less than half of their earnings, the lowest in decades. Cutting dividends might make sense if firms were growing rapidly, but that’s hardly the case these days.

Say-on-pay finally gave investors an easy way to challenge how corporate profits are divided — and they punted. Take Celgene, a bio-pharmaceutical company that by all accounts is well managed. Several investors were unhappy that executive pay had ballooned even as their returns were flat. They organized a vote on say-on-pay, and even got major media coverage. But 96% of the votes cast went with management.

This is good news for executives, who now have more flexibility in deciding where to put corporate resources. And, thinking broadly, “managerial capitalism” is simply a more realistic state of affairs than shareholder capitalism.

As early as an HBR article in 1927, observers argued that the newly emerging stock markets gave managers special authority over investors’ “property.” The Depression put this new era on hold, though, as New Deal regulations and energized labor unions intervened to put limits on executive discretion. When those pressures ended in the 1970s, corporate raiders and other interventions stepped in to give investors newfound power.

But not for long. As Roger Martin and Mihnea Moldoveanu explained in HBR back in 2003, it’s all gets down to supply and demand. Big companies have plenty of capital at hand. Yet even with the attractions of higher pay, the supply of able executives seems limited. So it’s only natural that management gets a bigger piece of the pie than investors (or mid-level knowledge workers, for that matter).

That’s not to say executives can forget about Wall Street. Even with the flood of money in capital markets, established companies still need to give investors some return on their shares. But it’s clear that executives have far more leeway than rhetoric about “shareholder value” suggests.

What should executives do with this power? They could take corporate social responsibility more seriously. The new thinking that marries corporate and social goals makes this shift more plausible than ever.

In any case, executive pay will likely continue to rise disproportionately. Boards will still compete for talent. I see only three possible checks on this growth.

Disgruntled investors could stage a mass exodus from equities. Or the government could enact major regulations on corporate behavior, as in the 1930s. Those two outside pressures would be easy to spot. More troubling, and more likely, would be an internal dynamic. If the pay gap between executives and everyone else keeps growing, it will eventually undermine organizational cohesion and corporate performance. Would executives be able to see this happening before it was too late?