Corporation: Reification of the Corporate Form

Abstract

I will problematize the corporate form as a reified social construct. To do this, I will ask two types of questions with regard to the corporate form. The first is a question about its ontological status: what is the corporation? The second is a question about its epistemological status: how can we establish criteria ‘by which we can know what does and does not constitute warranted, or scientific, knowledge’ in relation to the corporate form? To answer these questions I will first show that currently dominant accounts of the corporation and of corporate governance (the theory of how corporation should be governed) assumes that corporations share the same ontological status as all other types of organizations, i.e. that all organizations essentially exist as aggregations of individuals. I will then show how the corporate form provides a construct that in theory and in practice operates on very different ontological assumptions. Finally, this will lead me to a critical analysis of the reified nature of the corporate form and to a number of suggestions about how we can start to demystify this social construct.

Keywords: corporation, corporate governance, reification, company law, social construct