For more than a century, the corporation has shaped our thinking of organizations. This deeply institutionalized form is still regarded as both the iconic business organization and the core structural unit of our economic order. Today, however, it standsat a crossroads. Economic, social, and environmental failures of the recent past as well as misconduct and scandals are widely associated with deficits of the corporate form and its governance. The Corporation engages with current issues of the corporation as an institutionalized organizational form, approaching the concept from the backgrounds of organization theory, law, and economics, combining different theoretical views and empirical approaches. This volume addresses the corporation's entanglement with capitalism, examines a spectrum of constitutive features and purposes of the corporate form, offers historical perspectives on its emergence, and provides reflections on its future development. Encouraging you to rethink the corporation, each contribution also adds to the conceptual development of the corporate form as the iconic business organization.
This volume compiles 12 essays on the role of the corporation in society and its alternative purposes, organizational forms, and concepts. Business, economics, management, and other researchers from Europe, Singapore, and the US consider economic and legal aspects, particularly concentrated ownership and its outcomes for society, why shareholder primacy still persists after decades of criticism and opposition, and how the firm is a form of constitutional contract; sociological and institutional perspectives, with discussion of the Istituto per La Ricostruzione, a public holding company that controlled large parts of the post-war Italian economy, as well as the emergence of the local version of the corporation in Germany and Austria, the historical evolution of different forms of nonprofit business organizations in the UK and Germany, and key elements in the debate about profit vs. contribution to public interest in the UK and US from the interwar years to the 1970s; diverging views of the corporation, including the role of social ontology in understanding organizations and rethinking their purpose in relation to their activities; and alternative forms of business organizations. Distributed in North America by Turpin Distribution. Annotation ©2022 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
For more than a century, the corporation has shaped our thinking of organizations. This deeply institutionalized form is still regarded as both the iconic business organization and the core structural unit of our economic order. Today, however, it stands at a crossroads. Economic, social, and environmental failures of the recent past as well as misconduct and scandals are widely associated with deficits of the corporate form and its governance.
The Corporation engages with current issues of the corporation as an institutionalized organizational form, approaching the concept from the backgrounds of organization theory, law, and economics, combining different theoretical views and empirical approaches. This volume addresses the corporation's entanglement with capitalism, examines a spectrum of constitutive features and purposes of the corporate form, offers historical perspectives on its emergence, and provides reflections on its future development.
Encouraging you to rethink the corporation, each contribution also adds to the conceptual development of the corporate form as the iconic business organization.
The Corporation engages with current issues of the corporation as an institutionalized organizational form, approaching the concept from the backgrounds of organization theory, law, and economics, combining different theoretical views and empirical approaches.
