Law, Scale, Anti-Zooming and Corporate Short-Termism

Abstract

This article uses ‘Contact’, an art installation by Olafur Eliasson, and ‘anti-zoom,’ an essay by Bruno Latour to reimagine the problem of corporate short-termism. It investigates what it means to propose, under the gaze of law, that directors and investors look to the ‘long-term’ when pursuing corporate purposes. The article contests that it is possible to zoom, as if using a telescopic lens, between the demands of different time frames. It is only after an extended amount of ‘contact’ that one is able to plot the relation of the short to the long term and make sense of it, a finding that problematizes the corporate self-governance of time. A way forward is imagined that makes the thesis of anti-zoom fit for renovating corporate law.