Absentee ownership

What does Absentee ownership mean in American Law?

The definition of Absentee ownership in the law of the United States, as defined by the lexicographer Arthur Leff in his legal dictionary is:

A situation in which the “owner,” that is the person with the ultimate right to control a source of wealth, does not directly exercise that control, though he receives profits or rents from the property. The separation may be geographic (as with English owners of Irish estates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) or conceptual (as with stockholders of modern corporations). There is some implication that absentee ownership contributes to exploitation (in the bad sense), but there is no clear evidence that active on-the-spot owners are likely to be less exploitative. The objection to absentee ownership may be nothing but a special case of the objection to any separation between labor and the fruits thereof. See labor theory of value.