Corporate Regulation in the Public Interest-from Concession to Authorisation

Abstract

The current debate on corporate purpose challenges the idea that the corporation is solely a private actor. There is an increasing insistence that corporations are social and political actors as much as they are economic actors. If a key concern in the corporate purpose literature is to define and delimit the role that corporations now play in public and private life, then it is important to have a theoretical framework within which we can decide where and how those limits should be set. Available theories do not adequately capture this conceptual shift. The most likely candidate is concession theory, but it does not properly capture the role of the state in modern regulatory capitalism. This paper reconfigures the core elements of concession theory and develops a framework that provides a justification for the role of the state in regulating corporations.

Keywords: Corporate purpose, concession theory, incorporation, public interest, authorisation