The Corporation as Technology

Download or read book The Corporation as Technology written by Christopher M. Bruner and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Recent decades have witnessed environmental, social, and economic upheaval, spawning a host of interconnected crises to which major corporations have contributed. This book examines dynamics of the corporate form and corporate law that incentivize harmful corporate excesses, and advances an alternative vision to render corporate activities more sustainable. The corporate form is widely described by reference to a set of purportedly fixed characteristics that strongly prioritize shareholders' interests. Bruner, however, argues that such rigid and static depictions fundamentally misconstrue the nature of the entity and reinforce harmful corporate pathologies that include excessive risk-taking, externalization of costs, and insufficient regard for environmental and social impacts. Bruner presents the corporation not as a fixed and rigid set of legal characteristics, but rather as a dynamic legal technology that policymakers can re-calibrate in varying contexts, and over time, in response to a dynamic landscape. On this view, the corporation represents a set of flexible capacities that facilitate differing approaches to the structure and operations of the board, the allocation of governance powers among various stakeholders, and exposure to liability for corporate decision-making. Bruner conceptualizes these flexible capacities as governance levers that policymakers can adjust in various ways, and in differing combinations, to achieve a range of decision-making structures and levels of risk tolerance, toward a range of potential ends. The book explores theoretical and practical ramifications of this alternative vision, focusing on how the corporate form-properlyform-properly understood-can help secure an environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable future"--