The Corporation: A Critical, Multi-Disciplinary Handbook
Abstract
The corporation has become an increasingly dominant force in contemporary society. However, comprehensive, in-depth analysis of the concept of the corporation is often restricted, or limited to one disciplinary approach. This handbook brings together the cutting-edge scholarship, expertise and insight of leading scholars in a wide range of disciplines, notably management studies, law, history, political science, anthropology, sociology and criminology, using a critical approach to dissect and understand the corporation. Ten chapters provide overviews of the state of play of critical scholarship on the corporation in each of these disciplines. Further contributors tackle current hot topics, such as corporate social responsibility, corporate crime, global value chains, financialization, and the interaction between corporations and communities. Finally, they consider resistance and alternatives to the corporation. With its interdisciplinary approach, this book is an invaluable resource for all readers studying the past, present and future of the corporation. The first text to offer a critical analysis of the corporation from an inter-disciplinary perspective, allowing readers to consider the approaches of multiple disciplines Provides an overview of the history of the corporation, as well as a breakdown of current issues and possible outcomes for the future Presents an impetus to finding new solutions to current issues around the corporation in global society.
... The interpretation of the notion of corporation varies greatly between disciplines, including those studying corporate crime such as law, sociology and political science. Baars and Spicer (2017) offer a rare critical analysis of corporate crime from an inter-disciplinary perspective. Interestingly, they also reach for the Hydra metaphor to describe the corporation, calling it a many-headed amorphous beast (Baars & Spicer, 2017). ...
... Baars and Spicer (2017) offer a rare critical analysis of corporate crime from an inter-disciplinary perspective. Interestingly, they also reach for the Hydra metaphor to describe the corporation, calling it a many-headed amorphous beast (Baars & Spicer, 2017). ...
This dissertation analyses perceived differentiation between the Netherlands and the United States in enforcing anti-corruption legislation. These two countries share jurisdiction over the world’s largest multinationals, many of which trade on the US stock exchange and have a corporate mailbox address in the Netherlands.
I offer an explanation for the low levels of enforcement in the Netherlands until 2013, namely that the Dutch government had a limited sense of the harm corruption abroad caused, and a facilitating culture towards multinationals. Moreover, anti-corruption enforcement officials in the Netherlands lacked resources, expertise, skills and confidence to take on multinationals, particularly abroad.
This situation changed in or around 2013, when the first three major anti-corruption settlements were concluded in the Netherlands. During my research, Dutch anti-corruption changed dramatically; it now closely resembles that of the USA.
In the USA, I found that specific mechanisms led to high enforcement levels, including a focus on high financial rewards of settlements and career prospects for law enforcement professionals. In contrast to their Dutch counterparts, US enforcement officials felt confident to engage internationally.
I found that US authorities deliberately attempted to influence a change in anti-corruption enforcement cultures abroad. I conclude that the USA’s attempt to globalize its rules has resulted in lasting changes in the Netherlands, the new characteristics having become an integral part of Dutch anti-corruption enforcement culture.
... Büthe, 2010). In other words, studies in international political economy (IPE) often focus on the use of power with forms of organization and decision-making, and pay less attention to the ways corporations exert power directly over states (for exceptions, see Baars & Spicer, 2017;Babic et al., 2017;Mikler, 2018;Ylönen & Teivainen, 2018). The GWC framework is one attempt to question and problematize this divide by suggesting that corporate activities traditionally associated with the private, economic sphere may have important societal effects. ...
... Büthe, 2010). In other words, studies in international political economy (IPE) often focus on the use of power with forms of organization and decision-making, and pay less attention to the ways corporations exert power directly over states (for exceptions, see Baars & Spicer, 2017;Babic et al., 2017;Mikler, 2018;Ylönen & Teivainen, 2018). The GWC framework is one attempt to question and problematize this divide by suggesting that corporate activities traditionally associated with the private, economic sphere may have important societal effects. ...
This chapter discusses Monsignor Francesco Bianchini’s birth in Verona and his education in Bologna, Padua, and Rome. It mentions how Bianchini emerged well-trained in the Jesuit humanistic curriculum and Galilean science. He was a diplomat by nature and necessity and his ambitions were moderate, as were his means, namely his parents, Gaspare and Cornelia, that were Venetian subjects of the merchant class. The chapter describes the Bianchini family that lived at the Ponte delle Navi, a bridge over the Adige close to the church of San Fermo Maggiore. Bianchini’s nephew and first biographer, Alessandro Mazzoleni, mentioned singular piety as the first among his uncle’s character traits.
... In this sense, business ethics comprises the study of the collective or 'legal entity' that produces goods and services, as well as its individual members and external stakeholders related to the business. From this perspective, technology corporations can be seen as powerful and pioneering collectives that maintain close relationships with governments and regulators via public affairs, lobbying, and corporate political activity, sometimes also close collaborations regarding security and intelligence [6,71]. ...
This paper proposes to generate awareness for developing Artificial intelligence (AI) ethics by transferring knowledge from other fields of applied ethics, particularly from business ethics, stressing the role of organizations and processes of institutionalization. With the rapid development of AI systems in recent years, a new and thriving discourse on AI ethics has (re-)emerged, dealing primarily with ethical concepts, theories, and application contexts. We argue that business ethics insights may generate positive knowledge spillovers for AI ethics, given that debates on ethical and social responsibilities have been adopted as voluntary or mandatory regulations for organizations in both national and transnational contexts. Thus, business ethics may transfer knowledge from five core topics and concepts researched and institutionalized to AI ethics: (1) stakeholder management, (2) standardized reporting, (3) corporate governance and regulation, (4) curriculum accreditation, and as a unified topic (5) AI ethics washing derived from greenwashing. In outlining each of these five knowledge bridges, we illustrate current challenges in AI ethics and potential insights from business ethics that may advance the current debate. At the same time, we hold that business ethics can learn from AI ethics in catching up with the digital transformation, allowing for cross-fertilization between the two fields. Future debates in both disciplines of applied ethics may benefit from dialog and cross-fertilization, meant to strengthen the ethical depth and prevent ethics washing or, even worse, ethics bashing.
... We also note how these debates have been going on for at least two centuries in company law (e.g., Deakin, 2019;Deakin, Gindis, Hodgson, Huang, & Pistor, 2017;Millon, 1993;Pistor, 2019;Robé, 2011;Yosifon, 2014;Winkler, 2018) and have only recently found their way into debates in corporate governance (e.g., Aguilera & Jackson, 2010;Kay, 2015;Tricker, 2015). Despite their significance for MOS, explicit engagement with these debates has been mostly confined, in MOS, to the contributions of a small group of scholars whose work is typically only loosely inter-connected and indirectly engaged with our focus on the politico-legal dimensions of the contested social ontology of the corporation (e.g., Baars & Spicer, 2017;Bower & Paine, 2017;Djelic, 2013;Driver & Thompson, 2019;Ghoshal, 2005;Lan & Heracleous, 2010;Levillain & Segrestin, 2019;Perrow, 2002;Williams & Zumbansen, 2011). ...
We explore the significance of social ontology and its capacity to inform the specification of organizational status, architecture and capacities. We consider how different conceptions of social ontology are critical for explicating a range of epistemological and socio-economic questions concerning organizations and develop a research agenda oriented to studying these issues from the perspective of management and organization studies. © 2022 by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
... Here the crisis of the corporation as well as its future is being investigated by scholars from various disciplines. Research on the corporation from an economic or legal perspective has brought related issues of corporate architecture, governance, and management to the fore (see Baars & Spicer, 2017). The sociology of organizations is, quasi by definition, more interested in broad cultural and political questions (Dobbin, 1994;Fligstein & Choo, 2005;Mizruchi, 2013;Roe, 2003;Roy, 1997). ...
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 linked to inadequacies in this corporate form and its governance. The aim of this volume is to spark a debate within the e ld. In this introduction, we provide an outline of the current crisis and an overview of the interdisciplinary set of articles presented in this volume. We conclude with a view ahead and a plea for the acknowledgement of “alternatives.”
... We also note how these debates have been going on for at least two centuries in company law (e.g., Deakin, 2019;Deakin, Gindis, Hodgson, Huang, & Pistor, 2017;Millon, 1993;Pistor, 2019;Robé, 2011;Yosifon, 2014;Winkler, 2018) and have only recently found their way into debates in corporate governance (e.g., Aguilera & Jackson, 2010;Kay, 2015;Tricker, 2015). Despite their significance for MOS, explicit engagement with these debates has been mostly confined, in MOS, to the contributions of a small group of scholars whose work is typically only loosely inter-connected and indirectly engaged with our focus on the politico-legal dimensions of the contested social ontology of the corporation (e.g., Baars & Spicer, 2017;Bower & Paine, 2017;Djelic, 2013;Driver & Thompson, 2019;Ghoshal, 2005;Lan & Heracleous, 2010;Levillain & Segrestin, 2019;Perrow, 2002;Williams & Zumbansen, 2011). ...
... In the academic field, it seems to be the case that new, critical approaches are being produced. Their aim is to critically assess the operation, functions and power of corporation and address the relation between capitalism, law and corporation (Baars and Spicer, 2017). ...
... Adjacent to this literature there is also a large body of interest group research. In addition, there have recently been attempts to bridge disciplinary divides, best represented by Baars and Spicer (2017). 2. A major reason for this narrowness in the business power literature is that there are conceptual divides as to what should count as power, and methodological divides as to how to measure power. ...
Accounts of neoliberalism have noted, but not fully explored, the neoliberal empowerment of corporations. The corporate power literature, similarly, rarely makes the connection between corporate agents and neoliberalism as a power structure. This article fills the gap between these literatures with a dual contribution. It develops these contributions by first reviewing the neoliberalism literature and in so doing, developing the idea of neoliberalism as a bricolage of practice and ideas. It then discusses the mischaracterization of the corporation within neoliberalism before deconstructing four core policy areas of neoliberalism – deregulation, non-intervention, free markets and free trade. In each policy area it is shown how the practice of these policies has enhanced the social and economic power of major corporations – thereby deepening practice-based accounts of neoliberalism – and how the discourse of these policies has empowered corporations in the political arena – thereby deepening the corporate power literature’s account of how corporations operate powerfully. More generally this article offers a much fuller account of how 40 years of ‘free market’ policies have resulted in the creation of oligopolistic corporate economies.
... For quite some time, management academia has raised the question whether we still base our academic field on an adequate theory of what a firm actually is. Most recently, since the financial crisis of 2008, but already earlier in the aftermath of the crises around 2000, anxieties around the model of the firm's adequacy have been increasingly subject of an emerging debate (Baars and Spicer 2017;Barley 2007;Barton et al. 2016;Child 2002). These concerns revolve particularly around an apparent lack of social responsibility of business as an institution, and its detrimental influence on the public good. ...
This paper analyzes the relationship between Business Groups as a distinct way of organizing economic activities and their relation to the public good. We first analyze the phenomenon of Business Groups and discuss some of their core features. Subsequently, the paper moves to analyzing the existing literature on Business Groups and corporate social responsibility (CSR) as the most common label for the topic of this Special Issue. Subsequently, specific peculiarities of Business Groups in the context of CSR and their contribution to the public good are fleshed out. Based on this analysis, the paper delineates some implications for the field of CSR and the wider debate on the nature of the firm. We close with some perspectives for future research.
I propose verifying whether, in the context of “high-tech” capitalism, large companies have reinforced their control over innovation. The new digital economy has often been associated with the emergence of a market democracy which is favourable to new entrants through the adoption of innovative entrepreneurial approaches. The economic evolution resulting from the digital economy seems to call into question the findings of the theory of monopoly capitalism formulated in the context of industrial capitalism, which gives a central place to giant companies. The identification and exploitation of innovative opportunities were thus considered to be the prerogative of large firms, thus limiting the possibilities of market entry. Based on the analysis of 10,900 patent applications, I demonstrate that the control of innovation by Big Tech companies in the digital industry is stronger than in other industries and less favourable to new entrants.
The global financial crisis of 2008, its following bank bailouts, and associated corporate impunity sparked a renewed interest in the concept of the structural power of business and the question of “who rules?” in capitalist societies. This new wave of scholarship mitigated some of the problems of the original, theory-driven discussions from the 1970s and 1980s. But despite significant advancements in the empirical identification of business power, we lack a unified framework for studying its working mechanisms. So-called hybrid approaches, drawing on instrumental and structural power for their analyses, display high potential for such a unified and easily applicable framework. We build on this hybrid tradition and propose a novel model that integrates instrumental and structural power analysis into a basic framework. With this, we recalibrate the often rigid division between instrumental and structural power forms and emphasize the role of perceptions as key for understanding the dynamics of business power over time. We illustrate this parsimonious framework by an analysis of the plans of the Dutch government to abolish a dividend tax in 2018 that would have benefited a number of large multinationals but collapsed before implementation.
How might the structure of banking affect economic resilience? We address this question by analyzing how the organizational structures of banks and banking markets were associated with unemployment trajectories in local economies during the Great Recession. Two county-level analyses yield convergent results. Increasing branch densities of giant derivative holding banks within local economies were associated with greater surges in unemployment, weaker employment recoveries and stronger recession effects on unemployment from 2007 through 2016. Increasing branch densities of community banks and credit unions and localism in banking were associated with lower unemployment spikes, stronger recoveries and dampened crisis effects. These findings advance sociological studies of finance by providing new quantitative evidence for links between the social structures of banking and economic performance. They also confound arguments that decentralized systems of small, locally based financial institutions are inherently fragile by design, suggesting instead that alternatives to ‘too-big-to-fail’ banking can enhance local economies’ capacities to adapt proactively, withstand crisis and sustain employment during recessions.
It is now 50 years since Milton Friedman set out his doctrine that “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” This paper seeks to add fresh and compelling new evidence of why Lynn Stout was correct in her resolute critique of the thesis of shareholder primacy at the heart of the Friedman doctrine, and how this doctrine remains profoundly damaging to the corporations that continue to uphold this belief. It is argued that the Friedman doctrine has had a catastrophic impact upon American business and society beginning with General Motors failure to respond to investor calls for increased concern for safety and pollution at the time of Friedman’s intervention in 1970, stretching all the way to the recent fatal errors of Boeing in placing a higher priority in getting the new Boeing 737 MAX into the market than ensuring the soundness of software controls on the flight deck which led to two horrific plane crashes in 2018 and 2019 with the loss of 346 lives. These tragic errors in corporate judgement are ultimately related to the constricted sense of corporate purpose imposed by Milton Friedman and taken up with enthusiasm by agency theorists focused upon maximising shareholder value. This reckless single-mindedness has privileged the pursuit of the narrowest of financial measures of performance above fundamentals including passenger safety and environmental emissions controls. As a result, innocent lives have been lost, brands have been tarnished, and ultimately the strategic future of significant corporations endangered, and the ecology of the planet imperilled. There is now emerging a new sense of the purpose of the corporation that defines a rationale for corporate social and environmental responsibility in a way similar to Lynn Stout’s more inclusive stakeholder approach. The question remains open whether this will lead to the development of fiduciary duties, governance, strategies, targets, measures, transparency and disclosure that might deliver the sustainable corporation.
A growing body of research describes connections between religion and economic activity through the language of commodification and marketization. Although this scholarship rightly challenges the assumption that religion is or should be divorced from worldly concerns, it still relies on distinctions between religion and the economy as isolable, reified entities. Rejecting this binary approach as untenable, we argue that studying the corporate form enriches the academic study of religion by providing concrete examples of how people create institutions and how organizations turn human bodies into resources while also fostering individuals’ devotion to collective agendas. Attention to the corporate form enables us to keep money and power in view as we trace historical formations and current manifestations of religious organizations. We investigate Japanese genealogies of the corporate form to elucidate some generalizable principles for how nonprofit religions and for-profit companies alike generate missions, families, individuals, and publics.
The political role of corporations has attracted scholarly attention in several disciplines, including political science, organizational and management studies, sociology, law, and economics. These literatures are interested in similar phenomena (including corporate political strategies and the political impacts of business mobilization). Yet, there are striking differences between their normative premises, conceptual repertoires, and methodological toolboxes (Baars and Spicer 2017).
The purpose of this symposium is to shed light on the genealogy of the idea of a business corporation, an economic institution which has long been regarded with a mixture of awe and apprehension. Each of the four original contributions addresses the history of some of its key features. In the process, each contributor reveals some of the insights that history has to teach us regarding the central concepts that inform contemporary debates about the nature of the corporation, the contours of the corporation's purpose, the sources of corporate power, the functions of corporate law, the duties of directors, the status of shareholders, and the legitimacy of corporate rights.
We engage with the convergence/divergence debate in the comparative study of corporate governance by commending a nuanced formulation of the convergence thesis. Directing attention to the precarious constitution and adoption of knowledge claims about corporate status and architecture in the field of corporate governance we suggest that the study of comparative corporate governance might usefully incorporate consideration of claims about corporate governance as potentially performative statements that function to stabilize particular ideas of status and architecture of the modern corporation with substantive outcomes for political economy, thereby influencing the shape of the institutions comprising the field of corporate governance. We conclude that the predominantly epistemological preoccupations of participants in the convergence/divergence debate could be usefully refined and supplemented by giving closer attention, empirical as well as theoretical, to the relation between performativity, convergence/divergence, and political economy.
A vállalati társadalmi felelősségvállalás (CSR) fogalma és elméletei nem újak, mégsem mondhatjuk, hogy a vele kapcsolatos viták lezártak lennének. Ez az írás éppen ezért a CSR elméletek legnagyobb szeletét, nevesen azokat az irányzatokat veszi szemügyre, amelyek a gazdasági racionalitás diskurzusán belül keresik a vállalatok társadalmi szerepvállalásának módját és jogosságát. Ugyanakkor a CSR kérdését övező vitában a kritikai hangok szintúgy szerteágazóak, és komoly kérdésekre irányítják a figyelmet. A három fő kritikai párbeszéd, ami bemutatásra kerül egyrészt a vállalati felhatalmazás, vállalati állampolgárság koncepcióját járja körül, másrészt az általános versus társadalom-függő CSR modellek vitáját, végül pedig a vállalatok politikai szerepével kapcsolatosan a gazdasági és társadalmi szféra elválasztásának kérdését.
This chapter addresses one of the assumptions of standard agency theory—that the corporation is a legal fiction. It sets out a series of arguments as to why this assumption is incorrect, explains why public corporations should be regarded in ontological terms as real entities, and spells out why this matters—the consequences for agency theory as a whole and the particular consequences for shareholders and directors.
La question de la gouvernance des entreprises et en particulier des bonnes pratiques de gouvernance traverse en continue l’actualité politique et médiatique. Les débats et controverses qui animent les différentes prises de position sont sous-tendues par des référentiels théoriques qui orientent la perception, le jugement et l’action des acteurs impliqués directement dans la fabrique de la stratégie des entreprises. Depuis plusieurs décennies, c’est le tropisme de la gouvernance actionnariale stabilisé autour de la théorie de l’agence qui domine de manière hégémonique les débats. Construite au carrefour de la finance et de l’économie, la théorie de l’agence oriente les pratiques de gouvernance à travers la production de lois, la rédaction de codes de bonnes conduites ou encore la formation des dirigeants et administrateurs. C’est sans aucun doute l’une des théories issues des sciences sociales les plus performatives tant les implications du cadre théorisé à la fin des années 1970 conduisent à structurer et impacter une multitude de comportements collectifs et individuels. En ce qui concerne plus spécifiquement les sciences de gestion, l’impact de la théorie de l’agence et du modèle de gouvernance actionnariale sur la vie des entreprises est sans équivalent. Elle détermine à la fois la réflexion stratégique et sa mise en œuvre, en faisant des objectifs financiers et actionnariaux l’alpha et l’oméga de la stratégie des entreprises. Dans ce chapitre, nous souhaitons revenir sur l’émergence et l’institutionnalisation progressive de ce référentiel théorique en matière de gouvernance des entreprises au cours du XXème siècle. Nous nous attardons en particulier sur les prémices de ce référentiel théorique et soulignons à la suite de nombreux auteurs leur grande fragilité. Nous mettons également en évidence les contresens à partir desquels les théoriciens de l’agence ont bâti leurs raisonnements. Dans une troisième partie, nous présentons le cadre théorique de la gouvernance de médiation qui est susceptible selon nous d’offrir une approche renouvelée de la gouvernance permettant de : (1) définir un véritable horizon stratégique pour l’entreprise et ses parties prenantes et (2) répondre aux impasses du modèle actionnarial qui influencent les pratiques et les jugements des acteurs de la gouvernance d’entreprise. Nous concluons par une exposition rapide des grands axes de recherche susceptibles de renforcer les connaissances et assurer une plus grande performativité de la gouvernance de médiation.
The case for alternative forms of capitalism, or alternatives to capitalism, has been made for a long time and on many different grounds. In the context of academic work on management and organization there is an increasing interest in work that investigates alternative organizational forms. However, the question for this paper is a slightly broader one: What sorts of policy or ecosystem changes would be necessary to encourage alternative businesses to grow? I begin with the practical necessity of business in a social democratic society, and try to think about policies that could be sold to policy makers and the electorate. I argue that a localized small business system is more resilient to economic shocks, as well as providing clear advantages in terms of environmentally friendly business practices and the reduction of inequality.
The chapter routes through demise and expulsion, sweatshops and distressed ecologies, to say something about the harms, repressions, and tragedies that lurk in the recesses of corporate networks. It uncovers parts and existences that corporate costings repeatedly leave out, and that form into deposits and accumulations of neglect under the surfaces of law. A critical feature of these sub-surface deposits is that they are depleted in their ability to generate obligations, an effect traced to the company’s bounded and managerial mode of interaction with the world. The chapter problematises the length of time that some existences spend in this state of disregard; governance is struggling to look after existences at the far-flung reaches of corporate networks and assemblages. But time also marks out the chapter’s journey towards new methods for reaching under law’s sub-surfaces. These draw together critical thinking about law and governance with thinking about the ‘legacy’ of corporate organisations, human and non-human accumulations of scale that reach into ‘the geologic’. The chapter, ultimately, uses this notion of legacy and the geologic mode to give existential meaning and force back to forgotten existences, and to introduce a new formula for corporate obligation.
In this article we extend the debate about critical performativity. We begin by outlining the basic tenets of critical performativity and how this has been applied in the study of management and organization. We then address recent critiques of critical performance. We note these arguments suffer from an undue focus on intra-academic debates; engage in author-itarian theoretical policing; feign relevance through symbolic radicalism; and repackage common sense. We take these critiques as an opportunity to offer an extended model of critical performativity that involves focusing on issues of public importance; engaging with non-academic groups using dialectical reasoning; scaling up insights through movement building; and propagating deliberation.
Why do corporations increasingly engage in good deeds that do not immediately help their bottom line, and what are the consequences of these activities? This volume examines these questions by drawing on historical documents, interviews, qualitative case comparison, fieldwork, multiple regression, time-series analysis and multidimensional scaling, among others. Informed by neoinstitutionalism and political economy approaches, the authors examine how global and local dimensions of contemporary corporate social responsibility (CSR) intersect with each other. Their rigorous empirical analyses produce insights into the historical roots of suspicions concerning cross-societal economic actors, why and how global CSR frameworks evolved into current forms, how conceptions of CSR vary across societies, what motivates corporations to participate in CSR frameworks, what impacts such participation might have on corporate reputation and actual practices, whether CSR activities shield corporations from targeting by boycott campaigns or invite more criticism, and what alternative responses corporations might have to buying into CSR principles.
The essays in this volume have brought together two fields of inquiry, the study of social movements and the study of organizations, that have shown substantial convergence in core concepts and modes of analysis (McAdam and Scott, Chap. 1; Campbell, Chap. 2). Social movements are often represented by formal organizations, and organizations respond to social movements and have movement-like processes within themselves. Thus, scholars from both areas of study are finding it useful to borrow or bridge across the boundaries. This is not an entirely new development; indeed, it has a long, if fitful, history. We will not review that history here, although Elisabeth Clemens, in the next chapter, helps us to understand why that history has been so fitful. Instead, we want to give a partial answer to the question, Why now? Why is this bridging even more relevant today than it has been in the past? What events and processes “out there” almost force us to bridge and blend these two areas?
The market is traditionally hailed as the very exemplar of a system under which people enjoy freedom, in particular the negative sort of freedom associated with liberal and libertarian thought: freedom as noninterference. But how does the market appear from the perspective of a rival conception of freedom (freedom as non-domination) that is linked with the Roman and neoRoman tradition of republicanism? The republican conception of freedom argues for important normative constraints on property, exchange, and regulation, without supporting extremes to the effect that ‘property is theft’ or ‘taxation is theft’ or anything of that kind. It does not cast a cold eye on commerce; it merely provides an alternative view of the attractions.
Although historians have explored changes both in the way that American corporations were created in the 19th century and in theories of the corporation, very little is known about the history of corporate governance before the 20th century. Most historians assume that the power of individual shareholders has always been proportional to their investment (based on the one-vote-per-share voting rules so familiar in the 20th century), and therefore that large shareholders have always held the preponderance of power. This chapter suggests that this essentially timeless view of the distribution of power among American shareholders is simply wrong - that voting rules once routinely curbed the power of large shareholders - and that the failure to appreciate these (distinctively American) changes in the governance of corporations over the middle decades of the 19th century has, among other things, impoverished the understanding of late 19th-century debates about the nature of corporations.
Although international lawyers thinking about global order generally focus on the interplay of nation-states and international institutions, international law as a discipline has also long sought to account for the significant role played by non-state actors, particularly corporations, in the system of global governance. From the Dutch and later the British East India Companies to the modern multinational enterprise, the enormous impact of corporate actors on the shape and content of national and transnational regulation and the significant effects of corporate activity on local and global social welfare have challenged the narrative of a world exclusively governed by states. International law has treated corporations as a subject for regulation, as an influence on regulation, and has worried that corporations might be a force that escapes regulation. Perhaps to preserve the unique sovereign character of nation-states and intergovernmental institutions, international lawyers have been hesitant to treat transnational corporations as state-like creatures. In any event, we have not traditionally thought of corporations as producers of regulation or as governance institutions. In this chapter, I suggest that our understanding of transnational regulation and global governance would be enriched were we to think about corporations not as the ‘private’ other to the ‘public’ nation-state, but rather as legal institutions performing public regulatory functions with public welfare effects not unlike nation-states. At the same time, I suggest how a focus on the role of corporate activity and decision-making in global governance can expose new sites for political contestation and new strategies for intervention by regulators, policy-makers and activists seeking to harness and shape corporate power more effectively for the public good.
Analyzing Indian receptivity to the right-wing Hindu nationalist party, this book also explores its political wing, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which claims to create a policy based on "ancient" Hindu culture. The author places the BJP within the context of the larger transformation of democratic governance in India. The text goes on to argue that the Hindu nationalist movement has successfully articulated the anxieties and desires of the large and amorphous Indian middle class. Consequently, the movement has attracted privileged groups fearing encroachment on their dominant positions but also "plebian" and impoverished groups seeking recognition around a majoritarian rhetoric of cultural pride, order, and national strength. This book aims to advance the understanding of democarcy in the post-colonial world.
This essay reviews recent theory and research on organizations and social stratification, focusing on two dimensions of inequality that are affected by organizations and their environments: (a) how rewards and opportunities vary as a function of organizational attributes and (b) how enterprises differ in their criteria for matching workers and jobs. The effects of reward structures and sorting processes on workers, organizational performance, and interorganizational relations are also considered briefly. Since many hypotheses about labor markets concern links between organizations and socioeconomic achievement, there is a need for comparative organizational research to complement analyses at the individual and aggregate levels. Moreover, the interdependence of career outcomes within and among enterprises is widely recognized but requires explicit study. Future research will benefit immeasurably from the development and testing of hypotheses about how organizations and environments influence labor market processes.
How are firms, networks of firms, and production systems organized and how does this organization vary from place to place? What are the new geographies emerging from the need to create, access, and share knowledge, and sustain competitiveness? In what ways are local clusters and global exchange relations intertwined and co-constituted? What are the impacts of global changes in technology, demand, and competition on the organization of production, and how do these effects vary between communities, regions, and nations? This book synthesizes theories from across the social sciences with empirical research and case studies in order to answer these questions and to demonstrate how people and firms organize economic action and interaction across local, national, and global flows of knowledge and innovation. It is structured in four clear parts. The first part looks at foundations of relational thinking. The next part is about relational clusters of knowledge. The third part looks at knowledge circulation across territories. The final part considers whether there is a relational economic policy. The book employs a relational framework, which recognizes values, interpretative frameworks, and decision-making practices as subject to the contextuality of the social institutions that characterize the relationships between the human agents.
People need dignity and autonomy at work. If they are denied this, there will be a strong tendency to resist working conditions and misbehave at work. This book presents and analyses stories about people’s resistance in working life that make us reflect upon how employees are treated at work and consequences thereof.
What is the role of elites in shaping foreign policy? Did unaccountable foreign policy elites shape the post-1945 world order? Chatham House and the Council on Foreign Relations were vital in America's shift from isolationism to globalism, and in Britain's shift from Empire to its current pro-American orientation and were also fundamental in engineering public backing for a new world order. Inderjeet Parmar presents new evidence to show how well-organized and well-connected elite think tanks helped to change the world.
What does 'being flexible' mean in practice? What can the move towards flexible work contracts tell us about organizational change in general and about changing forms of workplace governance and control in particular? This book engages with transforming notions of career and community at a transnational temporary agency.
Coca-Globalization explores globalization through an historical and anthropological study of soft drinks such as Coke and Pepsi, examining how they have become more than mere commodities.
The social conditions that affect innovation change over time and vary across productive activities. Hence theoretical analysis of the innovative enterprise must be integrated with historical study through the use of what I call a historical-transformation methodology —a methodology that stands in sharp contrast to, but can nonetheless be complemented by, the constrained-optimization methodology favored by conventional economists. In surveying some major attempts to analyze the role of the business enterprise in generating superior economic performance in the advanced economies, including the works of Oliver Williamson, Alfred Chandler, Edith Penrose, and resource-based theorists, I explain what a historical-transformation methodology is and why such a methodology is needed for understanding how and under what conditions business enterprises can in fact be innovative enterprises.
This article challenges the idea that the corporation is a globally superior form of business organization and that the Anglo-American common-law is more conducive to economic development than the code-based legal systems characteristic of continental Europe. Although the corporation had important advantages over the main alternative form of organization (partnerships), it also had disadvantages that limited its appeal to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). As a result, when businesses were provided with an intermediate choice, the private limited liability company (PLLC) that combined the advantages of legal personhood and joint stock with a flexible internal organizational structure, most chose not to organize as corporations. This article tracks the changes that occurred in the menu of business organizational forms in two common-law countries (the United Kingdom and the United States) and two countries governed by legal codes (France and Germany) and presents data showing the rapidity with which firms in each country responded to enabling legislation for PLLCs. We show that the PLLC was introduced first and most easily in a code country (Germany) and last and with the most difficulty in a commonlaw country (the United States). Late introduction was associated with prolonged use of the partnership form, suggesting that the disadvantages of corporations did indeed weigh heavily on SMEs.
The fate of national approaches to management in the global economy is contested (Whitley, 1999; Geppert et al. in this volume). As we shall see, the arguments are complex, the stakes high. Nevertheless, the key question may, initially at least, be put quite simply: arc previously diverse national forms of business organization and management practice converging on common patterns and processes? For a long line of commentators (Rostow, 1960; Ohmae, 1990, 1995; Yip, 1992; Reich, 1993) the answer is a clear yes. They believe that economic processes will ultimately lead to the erosion of any notable national distinctiveness, a ‘wilting away of the idea of a cohesive and sequestered national economy and society’ (Amin and Thrift, 1994: 1). For advocates of the convergence thesis there is, ultimately, one best way of organizing, one best way of managing, which firms must adopt if they wish to succeed In the global economy. Such views have been strongly opposed by those who suggest that national cultures and unique societal and institutional structures will continue to support different, yet sustainable, patterns of economic organization and management practice (Whitley, 1994; Zysman, 1994; Hollingsworth and Boyer, 1997; Thomas and Waring, 1999).
For the past 25 years, a group of scholars has developed the idea that a business has stakeholders - that is, there are groups and individuals who have a stake in the success or failure of the business. There are many different ways to understand this concept, and there is a burgeoning area of academic research in both business and applied ethics on so-called ‘stakeholder theory’. This literature seems to represent an abrupt departure from the usual understanding of business as a vehicle to maximize returns to the owners of capital. This more mainstream view, call it ‘shareholder capitalism’, or ‘the standard account’, has come under much recent criticism, and the ‘stakeholder view’ is often put forward as an alternative.
Counterproductive work behaviour (CWB) by employees is an all too common occurrence in organizations. Studies have shown that 95 per cent of employees have engaged in some form of CWB at least once (e.g. Penney, 2002). The costs to American businesses associated with just one type of CWB, employee theft, have been estimated to be more than $200 billion annually (Govoni, 1992). Given the prevalence and economic impact of CWB, the attention given to CWB by organizational researchers is not surprising. Two major threads in organizational research on CWB have developed over the years. One identifies environmental conditions that may serve as antecedents to CWB, such as the presence of job stressors, while the other focuses on the role that individual personality plays in the likelihood that an individual will engage in CWB. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss recent organizational research linking both of these streams, job stressors and personality, to CWB. First, the CWB construct and research is discussed briefly. Next, a conceptual model illustrating the relationships among job stress, personality, and CWB is presented as an organizing framework. Finally, specific job stressors and personality variables and their relationships with CWB are discussed.
Employees can engage in a wide spectrum of misbehaviour in organizations. Such counterproductivity costs employers billions of dollars annually worldwide (Ones, 2002). The extent of actual, psychological and societal costs to organizations can be better understood when one considers the multitude of different ways employees can misbehave. Geddes and Baron (1997) found that 69 per cent of managers reported having experienced verbal aggression. Wimbush and Dalton (1997) used multiple methods and samples to estimate the base rate for employee theft, and found ‘Depending on the level one ascribes to nontrivial employee theft, .. . [the different techniques of estimating employee theft] . . . converge on theft rates over 50 per cent’ (p. 756). It is estimated that substance abuse costs the United States alone more than $135 billion each year (DeCresce et al., 1990). Harwood, Fountain and Livermore (1992) estimated that in the United States economy $82 billion in lost potential productivity could be attributed to alcohol and drug abuse in 1992 ($67.7 billion and $14.2 billion, respectively).
This article attempts to demonstrate the intimate interconnection between value and race in international law. It begins with
an exploration of Marxist understandings of imperialism, arguing that they falsely counterpose race and value. It then attempts
to reconstruct an account in which the two are understood as mutually constitutive.
Corporate accountability (CA) legitimises and thus reinforces the current system of surplus value extraction. Accountability struggles effectively to reduce corporate capitalism’s violence to the good corporate citizen’s occasional ‘wrongdoing’, which becomes a calculable risk capable of being exchanged—signifying ‘planned impunity’. CA, though a seemingly emancipatory process, thus exemplifies law’s constitutive role in capitalism and the need to move beyond law for emancipation.
The current financial and economic crisis has negatively underlined the vital role of multinational companies (MNCs) in our daily lives. The breakdown and crisis of flagship MNCs, such as Enron, WorldCom, Lehman Brothers, Toyota and General Motors, does not merely reveal the problems of corporate malfeasance and market dysfunction. It also raises important questions, both for the public and the academic community, about the use and misuse of power by MNCs in the wider society, as well as the exercise of power by key actors within internationally operating firms. This book examines how issues of power and politics affect MNCs at three different levels; the macro-level, the meso-level and the micro-level. This wide-ranging analysis shows not only that power matters but also how and why it matters, pointing to the political interactions of key power holders and actors within the MNC, both managers and employees.
This collection of original essays provides an innovative and multifaceted reflection on the impact and inspiration of the scholarship of eminent anthropologist Marilyn Strathern. A distinguished team of international contributors, all former students of Strathern, reflect on the impact of their relationship with their teacher and address the wider conceptual contribution of her work through their own writings. The essays provide an accessible entry into Strathern's scholarship for those new to her work and a rich source of material which mobilises and deploys her concepts, including new ethnographic examples and discussion of contemporary political issues, for those more familiar with her scholarship. The result is a collection that dissects, contextualises and reroutes concepts of relationality, inspiration and knowledge in novel and unpredictable ways. Recasting Anthropological Knowledge will prove invaluable to all students of anthropology and will be of interest to scholars across the social sciences.
Bushman and Smith (2001, this issue) provide a useful review of research on the role of accounting in management compensation contracts and an appealing future research agenda that builds on recent research using a cross-country approach. This paper rounds out their discussion by highlighting some limitations of their research agenda, providing a critical review of the contributions of accounting scholars to governance research and highlighting research opportunities on the role of financial accounting in governance mechanisms other than managerial incentive contracts.
The Oxford Handbook of International Business contain articles by distinguished scholars in the field of international business. The authors are all authorities on their chosen topics and have been active as leaders in the Academy of International Business. Their articles survey and synthesize relevant literature of recent years. The book is split into five major sections, providing comprehensive coverage of the following areas: the history and theory of the multinational enterprise; the political and policy environment of international business; strategies of multinational enterprises; the financial areas of the multinational enterprise (marketing, finance and accounting, Human Resource Management [HRM], and innovation); and business systems in Asia, South America, and the transitional economies.
This paper analyzes the survival of organizations in which decision agents do not bear a major share of the wealth effects of their decisions. This is what the literature on large corporations calls separation of 'ownership' and 'control.' Such separation of decision and risk bearing functions is also common to organizations like large professional partnerships, financial mutuals and nonprofits. We contend that separation of decision and risk bearing functions survives in these organizations in part because of the benefits of specialization of management and risk bearing but also because of an effective common approach to controlling the implied agency problems. In particular, the contract structures of all these organizations separate the ratification and monitoring of decisions from the initiation and implementation of the decisions.
The challenges facing criminal law are many. There are crises of over-criminalization and over-imprisonment; penal policy has become so politicized that it is difficult to find any clear consensus on what aims the criminal law can properly serve; governments seeking to protect their citizens in the face of a range of perceived threats have pushed the outer limits of criminal law and blurred its boundaries. To think clearly about the future of criminal law, and its role in a liberal society, foundational questions about its proper scope, structure, and operations must be re-examined. What kinds of conduct should be criminalized? What are the principles of criminal responsibility? How should offences and defences be defined? The criminal process and the criminal trial need to be studied closely, and the purposes and modes of punishment should be scrutinized. Such a re-examination must draw on the resources of various disciplines - notably law, political and moral philosophy, criminology and history; it must examine both the inner logic of criminal law and its place in a larger legal and political structure; it must attend to the growing field of international criminal law, it must consider how the criminal law can respond to the challenges of a changing world. Topics covered in this book include the question of criminalization and the proper scope of the criminal law; the grounds of criminal responsibility; the ways in which offences and defences should be defined; the criminal process and its values; criminal punishment; and the relationship between international criminal law and domestic criminal law.
In an overview of the theory and historiography of the corporation, this chapter examines contributions to understanding offered by historians, neo-classical economists, evolutionary economists, and organizational sociologists. It critiques existing theories of the corporation for neglecting power and culture and for failing to understand the mutual constitution of the corporation and its environment. This discussion paves the way for a new model that recognizes the ways in which corporations are embedded in their social environment and help to constitute their environment, and how this relationship has evolved over the past 150 years. An overview of the chapters that follow is presented.
In this article we engage in an extended critique of the thesis that the illegal conduct of corporations necessarily calls for different forms of regulation than other kinds of law-breaking. The proponents of that view argue that the unique nature of such illegalities is one reason why they necessitate a particular type of enforcement attitude or response. They advocate a strategy that produces compliance through persuasion rather than through the threat of sanctions. Another reason advanced is that corporations are not, as many would have it, 'amoral calculators', but rather 'political citizens' who may indeed sometimes err but are more prone to organizational incompetence than deliberate wrongdoing. Thus they need advice rather than chastisement: regulatory agencies should act as consultants rather than policemen. We will take each element of this argument in turn and show that it is neither logically nor empirically persuasive. We will then turn to the issue of how to make corporate regulation more effective and show that this requires a consideration of both the most suitable strategies for the enforcement agencies to adopt and the most appropriate legal framework for determining the criminal responsibility of these corporations. © 1990 The Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency.
While most people work ever-longer hours, international statistics suggest that the average time spent on non-work activities per employee is around two hours a day. How is this possible, and what are the reasons behind employees withdrawing from work? In this thought-provoking book, Roland Paulsen examines organizational misbehavior, specifically the phenomenon of ’empty labor’, defined as the time during which employees engage in private activities during the working day. This study explores a variety of explanations, from under-employment to workplace resistance. Building on a rich selection of interview material and extensive empirical research, it uses both qualitative and quantitative data to present a concrete analysis of the different ways empty labor unfolds in the modern workplace. This book offers new perspectives on subjectivity, rationality and work simulation and will be of particular interest to academic researchers and graduate students in organizational sociology, organization studies, and human resource management.
“Some books describe the neoliberal project using the neoliberals' own terms; others promote more profound understanding by bringing in other intellectual resources. Will Davies is one of the best of the latter. In this fascinating book he inverts the conventional neoliberal practice of treating politics as if it were mere epiphenomenon of market theory, demonstrating that their version of economics is far better understood as the pursuit of politics by other means.” - Professor Philip Mirowski, University of Notre Dame “Writing with clarity and precision and drawing on a rich array of sources, Will Davies takes the sociological discussion of neo-liberalism, its past and possible futures, to newer and richer intellectual realms.” - Professor Paul du Gay, Copenhagen Business School “A sparkling, original, and provocative analysis of neoliberalism. It offers a distinctive account of the diverse, sometimes contradictory, conventions and justifications that lend authority to the cumulative extension of competitive market principles and the spirit of competitiveness to all spheres of social life and that provide it with room for manoeuvre and reinvention in the face of resistance and crisis.” - Professor Bob Jessop, University of Lancaster “In a world that seems to lurch from one financial crisis to the next, this book questions both the sovereignty of markets and the principles of competition and competitiveness that lie at the heart of the neoliberal project. This is a brilliant piece of work and is essential reading for anyone interested in the politics and economics of contemporary capitalism.” - Professor Nicholas Gane, University of Warwick Since its intellectual inception in the 1930s and its political emergence in the 1970s, neo-liberalism has sought to disenchant politics by replacing it with economics. This agenda-setting text examines the efforts and failures of economic experts to make government and public life amenable to measurement, and to re-model society and state in terms of competition. In particular, it explores the practical use of economic techniques and conventions by policy-makers, politicians, regulators and judges and how these practices are being adapted to the perceived failings of the neoliberal model. By picking apart the defining contradiction that arises from the conflation of economics and politics, this book asks: to what extent can economics provide government legitimacy?
Challenging assumptions about the history and performance of the business corporation in the United States, this book seeks to explain more fully this crucial institution of capitalism. The authors draw on theoretical insights from economics, law, political science, and cultural studies to show the multiple ways in which corporations have shaped American society, culture, and politics over the past two centuries. They reject assertions that the corporation is dead and show that it in fact has survived, and even thrived by adapting to changes in its politics, social, and cultural environment. They call into question narrow economic theories of the firm, and show instead that the corporation must be treated as a more fully social institution, pointing the way to a new periodization of corporate history and a new set of questions for scholars to explore. Key issues engaged include the legal and political position of the corporations, ways in which the corporation has shaped and been shaped by American culture, controversies over corporate regulation and corporate power, and the efforts of minority and disadvantaged groups to gain access to corporate resources and opportunities.
This book brings together chapters from the leading historians of British business. The contributors were asked to consider the renaissance in the British economy during the closing decades of the 20th century. In doing so they were also asked to reconsider the debates and assertions relating to relative economic decline in Britain since the end of the 19th century. Chapters range across the economy, from banking, retail, high technology and staple industries, transport, to sports and leisure industries. In addition, key themes such as foreign investment, government policy, managerial characteristics, marketing, business, ethics, and so on have their own chapters. What emerges is a picture of complexity and reappraisal bringing into question the accuracy or applicability of much of the writing and axioms surrounding British business in the 20th century. Both the nature of economic recovery, the depth and periodization of relative decline clearly do not stand up to scrutiny. If nothing else the book disposes with the notion that a simple re-injection of market forces ideology in the 1980s changed and modernised the British economy. The book has identified both a need for a broad reappraisal to take into account the complexity underlying ideas of renaissance in the late 20th century, in addition to a need to reject unicausal explanations for the fate and possibilities of the British economy in the 21st century.
This book came about due to the growing concern that antitrust, a system of regulation that for over a century has had wide professional and public support, is under attack. The recent trend appears to be toward more limited interpretation of doctrine (especially in the Supreme Court) and less aggressive federal enforcement. Part of the reason for the decline in enforcement is that for almost fifty years extremely conservative economic analysis (sometimes referred to as "Chicago School") has dominated scholarship in the area. With the exceptionally liberal "Warren Court" as their target, two brilliant academics, Richard Posner and Robert Bork, led a small army of academics in devastating criticism of the output of the Warren Court. Those in favor of the Chicago School's limited and strictly economic approach were handed an enormous political boost when President Ronald Reagan announced that "government was the problem and not the solution." Contributing towards this collection of chapters are Republicans and Democrats, lawyers and scholars left of center and right of center, one-time antitrust enforcers, and private sector representatives. Virtually all share the view that antitrust is better today, more rigorous, more reasonable, more sophisticated in terms of economics, than it was forty or fifty years ago. But virtually all also confess to a sense of unease about the current direction of antitrust interpretation and enforcement. Specific concerns include current preferences for economic models over facts, the tendency to assume that the free market will cure all market imperfections, the belief that only efficiency matters, and outright mistakes in matters of doctrine.
Introduction In June 2011, the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council (HRC) ‘endorsed’ the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (GPs). The GPs were proposed by Professor John Ruggie, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on the Issue of Human Rights and Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises (SRSG). This event was the culmination of a process that began in 2005, when the HRC established the SRSG’s post and the UN Secretary-General appointed Ruggie as the SRSG. The GPs were warmly greeted by business representatives, but less so by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and other civil society groups represented in the HRC – a sizeable number of these organisations expressed misgivings or openly opposed adoption of the GPs. Member states of the HRC, a body of forty-seven states periodically elected for terms of two years, had mixed reactions. Nearly all Western governments expressed unqualified support for the document, but many others from the global South expressed misgivings publicly or privately. However, ultimately, none felt that they were in a position to oppose and vote against the resolution endorsing the GPs. This reaction was markedly different to the reception given in 2008 to the first, and arguably the main, product in the process – the ‘Protect, Respect and Remedy’ Framework (Framework). The adoption of the Framework, also known as the ‘Ruggie Framework’, had virtually unanimous support from states, businesses and civil society organisations. During the debate in the HRC in 2011, a few human rights organisations expressed clear support for the proposed GPs.
From a modest beginning in the wholesale financial market specialising in government debt, offshore has expanded rapidly, penetrating and then dominating an ever-growing portion of international economic life. Offshore is normally associated with international finance. Since the early 1970s, however, the emerging offshore financial markets were joined by a plethora of export processing zones (EPZs), the Chinese special economic zones and the free zones in the USA, over 800 in total, providing employment directly to over two and a half million workers worldwide (Johansson, 1994; McMichael, 1996). It is estimated that over one-quarter of the third world’s manufacturing exports originate from one of these zones (Palan and Abbott, 1996). The Internet is providing opportunities for the extension of the principle of ‘offshore’ into areas such as gambling, pornography, telecommunication and on-line merchandising (OECD, 1995; Hussein, 1997; The Economist, 1997b). Soon shoppers will be able to avoid paying local taxes by purchasing goods in ‘offshore’ shops using offshore coupons (The Economist, 1997a). There is even a rudimentary offshore law.
The last four decades have seen momentous changes in the Indian society, in terms of its structure, processes, and the dynamics of social institutions. Sociological study of stratification, identity, ethnicity, democratic processes, and urbanism and modernity, have been at the centre stage of academic engagement with this transition, and Indian sociologists have contributed significantly to this corpus of knowledge. This book brings together an Introduction and 11 essays, written by well-known experts and commentators on modern Indian society. They cover a wide range of thematic and topical issues, from class constitution of Indian cities to social hierarchies; from the state of scheduled tribes to religion and politics; and from violence of law to health care in India. Compiled in the honour of Professor Dipankar Gupta, whose four-decade-long contribution to Indian sociology has shaped the way the discipline has evolved, is learnt, taught, and practiced in India, this volume brings to fore the key concerns of his scholarship. Going beyond Dipankar Gupta's work, the essays build an overarching theoretical framework, developing the threads of sociological scholarship in these areas.
The Politics of Commonwealth offers a major reinterpretation of urban political culture in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Examining what it meant to be a freeman and citizen in early modern England, it also shows the increasingly pivotal place of cities and boroughs within the national polity. It considers the practices that constituted urban citizenship as well as its impact on the economic, patriarchal and religious life of towns and the larger commonwealth. The author has recovered the language and concepts used at the time, whether by eminent citizens like Andrew Marvell or more humble tradesmen and craftsmen. Unprecedented in terms of the range of its sources and freshness of its approach, the book reveals a dimension of early modern culture that has major implications for how we understand the English state, economy and 'public sphere'; the political upheavals of the mid-seventeenth-century and popular political participation more generally.
This volume is about political corruption and the use of public office for private gain in India. A merit-based bureaucracy was launched in the nineteenth century to control corruption. This system with its pay structure that rewarded civil servants for honest effort was seen as the best solution to political corruption. It was based on the assumption that if merit was made the basis of administration, it would exclude private interest. However, the merit-based civil service system failed to restrain corruption because the ruling politicians had preferences on how to use a public bureaucracy and these preferences translated into an incentive structure, which governed the behaviour of civil servants. The author proposes an alternative paradigm-the New Public Management Model? which is being implemented in Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Sweden.
On the basis of interviews with regulatory agencies and business firms in the United States, we outline three implicit “theories” of why business firms violate the law-economic calculation, principled disagreement, and incompetence. Each gives rise to a different emphasis in enforcement-deterrence, negotiation, and education. Enforcement based on any single theory of noncompliance is shown to be counter-productive when violations occur for one of the other reasons. Flexible enforcement, based on the analysis of the specific cause of each particular violation, is inhibited by technical, bureaucratic and political contraints.