Remaking the Corporation

Recent scholarship, in business history and beyond, has decentered and pluralized the normative Anglo-American model of the corporation, from its origins in relation to the early modern state to its organizational mutations during the Industrial Revolution to the introduction of limited liability and the emergence of agency theory in the late 20th century. The rich ‘varieties of capitalism’ literature and numerous critical legal and sociological studies of the corporate form around the world have encouraged the examination of alternatives to this normative model. Yet careful empirical studies of how corporations have been reconceptualized and restructured, particularly in relation to social objectives beyond the maximization of profit and shareholder value, remain relatively siloed. Less systematic attention has been paid to the rise and fall of specific alternative forms, such as cooperatives or employee- and foundation-owned companies. To this end, our panel brings together four case studies of debates about the nature and future of the corporation from the late 19th to the mid-20th century. Shaun Yajima explores struggles over the disclosure obligations of coal cartels in Germany and their long-term regulatory impact. Nicole Sackley uncovers a cooperative challenge to the ascendant multinational oil cartel in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Mircea Raianu takes that same historical moment as a point of departure, showing how one utopian entrepreneur legally transformed his privately held company into a worker-owned ‘Commonwealth.’ David Chan Smith traces the influence of spirituality on corporate social responsibility through the work of the Federal Council of Churches in the United States. Taken together, the papers open up new avenues of research on contestations over monopoly power and exchanges of ideas about business ethics on a global scale.