The Enigmatic Corporation

According to Bakan, a corporation is an institution, but even more than that it is a legal institution. More specifically, it is a “unique structure and set of imperatives that direct the actions of people within it.” However, after this cursory definition, Bakan spends the rest of the first chapter discussing the development of the corporation, as well as the form it exists in today. Especially pertinent is his description of the recent events having to do with Enron, Arthur Andersen, and eventually the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.

In a historical view, corporations are only a relatively recent phenomenon. Before the 1800s, no real attempts had been made towards the creation of such an organization. However, with the growing capital demands of the Industrial Revolution, the corporation quickly became a necessary and useful tool for economic growth and development. However, as corporations first came about, the unique qualities caused many people to regard them as immoral and somewhat corrupt. This same fear and mistrust was the impetus for Justice Louis Baker to call corporations “Frankenstein monsters.” It is understandable that he and others would regard these purely economic organizations as alien because the very idea behind the corporation is a seemingly unnatural compulsion for shareholder wealth. Before the formation of the corporation, business was conducted on a much more personal level, and the rise of the corporation signaled for many a beginning of a new, odd, and mystifying age of disjointed and inhuman economic interaction. Through the creation of the corporation, the economic engine progressed from a personable, microcosmic experience, to a more removed, artificial, and nonhuman development.

Interestingly, I have never thought deeply about the impact of corporations, or even about their very existence. Now that I have reflected, the whole progression of this type of organization does seem very odd and somehow inhuman. A far cry from the businesses of centuries past, the corporation is at once both an exceedingly efficient economic model and a somewhat troubling societal development. At no other time in history has such a paradoxical mix presented itself to society. On one hand it is an unequaled system for generating wealth and production. On the other, it has pointed flaws and tends to be oblivious in terms of the human aspect of work. Overall, thinking about such a system allows me to readily acknowledge the duality of the corporation, which can act simultaneously as both a benevolent and malevolent societal entity.