- 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 explores the contemporary relevance of Berle and Means’ fundamental questioning of the purposes of the corporation. The issues considered concern the contemporary nature of the modern corporation as a new institutional form, and the determination of its purposes. The chapter draws on legal and empirical sources to examine the purposes of the corporation: the interpretation by courts of the duty imposed on directors to act in the interests of the corporation; a survey of company directors to assess what influence directors’ duties have on the extent to which directors are adopting stakeholders’ approaches; and research on how corporations define their business objectives as this provides insight into how corporations define their purposes.
Keywords: business objective, corporate social responsibility, directors’ duties, corporate purpose, accountability, shareholder primacy, stakeholder theory
Senior Research Fellow, Graduate School of Business and Law, RMIT University
Director of the Centre for Corporate Law and Securities Regulation, Melbourne Law School and University of Melbourne
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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
