Battling for the Soul of the Corporate Leader: Ida Tarbell and the Progressive Governance Model

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Debating, advocating, and contesting the appropriate role of the large-scale business enterprise in a democratic society has been an ongoing activity since the advent of industrial capitalism. For some, corporate behemoths are fundamentally and irretrievably incongruent with democratic institutions. Others hold out the possibility of responsible behaviors on the part of corporate leaders. The debate over what constitutes responsible behavior is typically conceptualized around a dispute between shareholder primacy and stakeholder plurality. Through an examination of the writings of Ida Tarbell, a leading early 20th century journalist, we explore a progressive option, one that rejects the possibility of moral self-governance and places greater emphasis on how to govern society than on how to govern the corporation. Tarbell is one of the many women whose contribution to the development of management and organization studies has been neglected. She makes for a particularly useful representative figure because of her massive history of one of the first and most significant manifestations of early corporate enterprise: Standard Oil. By analyzing Tarbell’s body of work, we offer a ‘progressive’ paradigm that insists that the question of how to govern the corporation is secondary to the more fundamental question of how to govern society. For Tarbell and her fellow progressives, answering the corporate governance question without addressing the matter of societal governance was futile. Corporations were conceived not as stand-alone institutions but as part of a larger society. No business leader, no matter how well-meaning, would be sufficient to ensure the enhancement of democracy and the stability of open markets, competition, and fairness.