- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Preface
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- The Evolving Corporation: economy, law, and society
- The Dutch East India Company: the first corporate governance debacle
- English East India Company-State and The Modern Corporation: the google of its time?
- Socializing Capital: the rise of the industrial corporation
- From Berle to the Present: the shifting primacies of corporation theory
- Understanding the Roots of Shareholder Primacy: the meaning of agency theory, and the conditions of its contagion
- Corporate Purpose: legal interpretations and empirical evidence
- Corporate Law as a Solution to Team Production Problems
- Corporations as Sempiternal Legal Persons
- Finance Capitalism, the Financialized Corporation, and Countervailing Power
- The Neoliberal Corporation
- Theorizing the Corporation: liberal, confucian, and socialist perspectives
- Global Corporations and Global Value Chains: the disaggregation of corporations?
- Growth Strategies of the New Multinationals
- Corporations, Organization, and Human Action: an anthropological critique of agency theory
- The Japanese Corporation: community, purpose, and strategy
- Dynamic Capabilities, the Multinational Corporation, and Capture oF Co-created Value from Innovation
- The Theory Of Innovative Enterprise: foundations of economic analysis
- Corporations In The Clouds?: the transformation of the corporation in an era of disruptive innovations
- The Changing Nature of The Corporation and The Economic Theory of The Firm
- Corporate Responsibility and the Embedded Firm: a critical reappraisal
- The Greening of the Corporation
- Corporate Sustainability In A Fragile Planet
- Transcending The Corporation: social enterprise, cooperatives, and commons-based governance
- The Evolution of Corporate Form: from shareholders’ property to the corporation as commons
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter traces the evolution of the corporation through different eras of the past century, with a focus on the development of competing primacies of corporate law. Successive eras of managerialism, technocracy, and shareholder primacy are examined in the Darwinian struggle for corporate power and business success. Our understanding of the modern corporation over the last 100 years cannot be separated from the nature of American hegemony over the world system during that time frame. Likewise, it cannot be separated from America’s unique twin ideologies—individualism and American exceptionalism. Nor can it be separated from the struggle for power between the modern corporation, viewed as a system, and the American nation state. This chapter deconstructs our changing understandings as to whose interests hold primacy in governance of the modern corporation, with a constant eye on the underlying political struggle for power and meaning, and the role which theories of the corporation play in these struggles.
Keywords: evolution of corporation, corporate law, managerialism, technocracy, shareholder primacy, American hegemony
Director, Adolf A. Berle, Jr. Center on Corporations, Law and Society, Seattle University School of Law
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- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Preface
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- The Evolving Corporation: economy, law, and society
- The Dutch East India Company: the first corporate governance debacle
- English East India Company-State and The Modern Corporation: the google of its time?
- Socializing Capital: the rise of the industrial corporation
- From Berle to the Present: the shifting primacies of corporation theory
- Understanding the Roots of Shareholder Primacy: the meaning of agency theory, and the conditions of its contagion
- Corporate Purpose: legal interpretations and empirical evidence
- Corporate Law as a Solution to Team Production Problems
- Corporations as Sempiternal Legal Persons
- Finance Capitalism, the Financialized Corporation, and Countervailing Power
- The Neoliberal Corporation
- Theorizing the Corporation: liberal, confucian, and socialist perspectives
- Global Corporations and Global Value Chains: the disaggregation of corporations?
- Growth Strategies of the New Multinationals
- Corporations, Organization, and Human Action: an anthropological critique of agency theory
- The Japanese Corporation: community, purpose, and strategy
- Dynamic Capabilities, the Multinational Corporation, and Capture oF Co-created Value from Innovation
- The Theory Of Innovative Enterprise: foundations of economic analysis
- Corporations In The Clouds?: the transformation of the corporation in an era of disruptive innovations
- The Changing Nature of The Corporation and The Economic Theory of The Firm
- Corporate Responsibility and the Embedded Firm: a critical reappraisal
- The Greening of the Corporation
- Corporate Sustainability In A Fragile Planet
- Transcending The Corporation: social enterprise, cooperatives, and commons-based governance
- The Evolution of Corporate Form: from shareholders’ property to the corporation as commons
- Index
