Abstract
ABSTRACT The firm is the central institution of modern capitalism, predominantly in the shape of the “corporation” in which entrepreneurs and investors cooperate under certain legal forms, especially limited liability. Although in modern capitalism, the emergence of these legal and organizational forms was intimately tied to technological innovation and the ongoing deployment of technologies, most economic theories about the corporation tend to neglect its material dimension, mediating between user practices, technologies and production via the mobilization of symbolic media, such as industrial design. We advance a semiotic theory of the corporation, which we relate to recent developments in sociology, especially organizational ecology. In this view, corporations embody technologies in semiosis, which is a complex multi-level process combining different dimensions that relate to various audiences, such as users or the financial community. In this process, products are embedded in diverse functional and symbolic hierarchies, defining industries and patterns of usages. We illustrate our argument in sketching the case of Tesla corporation and its potential in disrupting the automotive industry.
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