Corporate Autonomy Research Articles

‘Build the golf course first’ – an organisational and strategic management perspective on UK defence reviews

ABSTRACT UK defence reviews have generated a flourishing academic debate for the past one-and-a-half decades. Still, the scholarship has hardly applied organisation and strategic management concepts regarding these reviews and therefore omits relevant insights to understand the outcomes arising from these important strategic documents. This article proposes the organisation and strategic management scholarship can contribute significantly to explaining the dynamics of strategy-making and implementation of the UK’s previous and forthcoming defence reviews. The avoidance of budgetary losses and maintenance of corporate autonomy by any formal organisation – including the UK Ministry of Defence – are particularly powerful concepts for explaining the dynamics of strategy-making and implementation. These concepts are critical for understanding how the UK defence budget is actually spent and how its defence reviews are developed and implemented.

Vaccinating capitalism: racialised value in the COVID-19 economy

ABSTRACT This article reflects on the concept of necropolitics and its usefulness for understanding the state response to COVID-19, and its unequal political and economic consequences. Focusing on the British state, the paper seeks to explore and explain the dominant forms of government intervention and regulation that sought to ameliorate the crisis and shows how this response was shaped by a set of racialised capitalist social relations. The article argues that whilst the concept allows us to grasp the racialised vulnerability to death contained within the COVID-19 response, this needs to be understood within the wider context of the extraction of value in three key instances: firstly, in terms of creating a regime that would protect corporate autonomy; secondly, in terms of a racialised division of labour within states and finally in the context of a global imperialism which marginalises and racialises those states outside of the imperial core. It uses those three instances to explore how racist necropolitics is always underpinned processes of value-in-motion that maintain corporate profitability.

Board of Directors System of Limited Liability Companies in China: Realistic Problems and Reform Trend

As an integral part of corporate governance, the system of the board of directors has been improved in China with the development of history. Up against in-depth China’s market-oriented reform, there are some problems in the board of directors system of the limited liability company in the Corporate Law. On the one hand, the board of directors of limited liability companies under the Positivist Jurisprudence is faced with defects, including the vague distribution of powers between shareholders and board of directors, power of the board of directors plundered by managers, and serious impact of the legal representative system on the position of the board of directors. On the other hand, due to the contradiction between corporate autonomy and state compulsory force, the system of the board of directors is also facing a huge shock from business practice. In this regard, there are two theoretical solutions, that is, “reservation theory” and “abolition theory”. However, both of them have their own imperfections. Limited liability companies should be given the right to choose whether to set up a board of directors and improve the linkage design of the corresponding corporate governance system.

What the DAO?

Abstract Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) are the current “new thing” in the world of crypto but this does not mean that they are not here to stay. In fact … they might be the biggest culture change of the modern world in terms of corporate governance, autonomy and transparency.

Strategies to expand corporate autonomy by the tobacco, alcohol and sugar-sweetened beverage industry: a scoping review of reviews

BackgroundNoncommunicable diseases contribute to over 70% of global deaths each year. Efforts to address this epidemic are complicated by the presence of powerful corporate actors. Despite this, few attempts have been made to synthesize existing evidence of the strategies used to advance corporate interests across industries. Given this, our study seeks to answer the questions: 1) Is there an emergent taxonomy of strategies used by the tobacco, alcohol and sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) industries to expand corporate autonomy? 2) How are these strategies similar and how are they different?MethodsUnder the guidance of a framework developed by Arksey and O’Malley, a scoping review was carried out whereby six databases were searched in June 2021 to identify relevant peer-reviewed literature. To be included in this review, studies had to explicitly discuss the strategies used by the tobacco, alcohol, and/or sugar-sweetened beverage multinational corporations and be considered review articles aimed to synthesize existing evidence from at least one of the three industries. Eight hundred and fifty-eight articles were selected for full review and 59 articles were retained for extraction, analysis, and categorization.ResultsResults identified six key strategies the industries used: 1) influencing government policy making and implementation, 2) challenging unfavorable science, 3) creating a positive image, 4) manipulating markets, 5) mounting legal challenges, and 6) anticipating future scenarios. Despite these similarities, there are few but important differences. Under the strategy of influencing government policy making and implementation, for example, literature showed that the alcohol and SSB industries have been “privileged with high levels of participation” within international public health organizations.ConclusionsUnderstanding how industries resist efforts to control them is important for public health advocates working to reduce consumption of and death and diseases resulting from harmful commodities. Moreover, there is a greater need for the public health community to generate consensus about how to ethically engage or not engage with industries that produce unhealthy commodities. More studies are also needed to build the evidence base of industry tactics to resist regulation, particularly in the case of SSB, and in low-and middle-income countries.

Business Firms as Moral Agents: A Kantian Response to the Corporate Autonomy Problem

Business Firms as Moral Agents: A Kantian Response to the Corporate Autonomy Problem

Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651–1825 by Aviva Ben-Ur (review)

Reviewed by: Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651–1825 by Aviva Ben-Ur Stanley Mirvis Aviva Ben-Ur. Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651–1825. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 392 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000258 Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society heralds the emancipation of the Caribbean experience from the margins of early American Jewish history. Aviva Ben-Ur is the leading voice in a chorus of scholars dedicated to contextualizing Jewish history within the methodological framework of Atlantic studies and "creating a paradigm for Jewish Atlantic history that combines comparison, connection, and localism" (255). She has more than succeeded in achieving this goal. Through a comprehensive investigation of archival sources, particularly the extensive Surinamese Jewish communal records at the National Archives of the Netherlands, Ben-Ur challenges some of the most canonical assumptions of Jewish history. These include religious tolerance as the primary motivation for early American migration, the Jewish desire for emancipation, and the Jewish trend to acculturate "upward." She demonstrates that these historiographic dogmas don't apply to Suriname. As much as it was entangled in the web of [End Page 461] the Atlantic world, Jewish life in Suriname was a singularity that defies categorization using traditional models. Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society powerfully contributes to the legacy of Salo W. Baron's antilachrymose model of Jewish history. Ben-Ur reconsiders the ubiquity of premodern Jewish subalterity. In Suriname, Jews held an unparalleled degree of corporate autonomy and were empowered through their mastery over an enslaved majority. She further reminds us that by the end of the eighteenth century, Jews made up two-thirds of the non-African descendent population of Suriname. Among Ben-Ur's boldest antilachrymose rebukes is her challenge to the narrative of religious tolerance as the primary motivation behind Jewish migration. She attributes this persistent view to the skewed self-presentation of Suriname's Portuguese elites, like David Nassy, who portrayed themselves as belonging to a community of refugees empowered by the liberties of their colonial haven. They also sought to propagate an illusion of wealth (47). Ben-Ur demonstrates that Jews in Suriname were overwhelmingly poor, and it was poverty that brought them to the colony. Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society is informed by a trend in early modern Portuguese diaspora studies to deemphasize a traditional bom Judesmo approach—highlighting nobility, wealth, and restraint—and instead focusing on indigent and itinerate social welfare recipients. Ben-Ur characterizes Jodensavanne as a paupers' town (54) in defiance of the more standard depiction of the town's wealth and privilege—which might have been the case for only a few Sabbath vacationers from surrounding plantations (61). Instead, she recalibrates the discussion to focus on the mechanics of the despachado system bringing poor Jews to the colony (116–17). Rather than a proto-Zionist promised land, Ben-Ur's Jodensavanne is a nonheroic site of violence, dislocation, and poverty (74). The book's title alludes to the elusive concept of Jewish self-rule, one of the colony's most conspicuous singularities. Ben-Ur finds the closest Jewish parallel in early modern Livorno as well as makes local comparisons to Suriname's Maroon and Indian populations. Autonomy, however, was not synonymous with liberty. Ben-Ur argues that autonomy cast a shadow of tyranny in the way it mandated Jewishness (93) and empowered elite Portuguese over the poor, Ashkenazim, and Jews of color (110). Autonomy was not what all of the Jews of the colony wanted. Jewish autonomy in Suriname translated into a codification of Portuguese ethnic supremacy (62–63). Ben-Ur reexamines some of Jewish history's most sacred ideals about emancipation, the process of acquiring legal parity with white Christians, which occurred in Suriname in 1825. Whereas emancipation is typically portrayed as a Jewish aspiration, in Suriname Jewish leaders swam against the tides of change by clinging to their corporate autonomy (227). Furthermore, Ben-Ur argues that Surinamese emancipation was only a "legal fiction" (254). Emancipation simply transformed the legal definitions of Surinamese Jews from an incorporated ethnic group to a religious community. Analyses of acculturation and emancipation go hand...

Do economic institutions matter for trade liberalization? Evidence from China’s Open Door Policy

Trade liberalization can promote export by inducing better resource allocation and more advanced technologies. Although the literature emphasizes the mechanism of geographic proximity, this paper identifies an institutional effect. Using infant mortality rate as an instrument that is irrelevant to export and geographic effects, we confirm that the openness due to China’s Open Door Policy promotes firm exports. We further document that the positive relationship between openness and firm exports is mediated by property rights protection and corporate autonomy, either of which reflects institutional quality at the constraint on the government’s strategic behavior. In particular, our estimates are robust to different samples, different estimation methods, and endogeneity bias.

A Liberal before Liberalism: Karl Hermann Scheidler and the New Hegelians

This paper is the first substantial investigation in English or German of the work and career of the student of Jacob Fries, leader of theBurschenschaften, educational reformer, and professor of philosophy and law Karl Hermann Scheidler. It examines Scheidler's interventions into political and constitutional debates during the GermanVormärzand argues that he developed a unique brand of liberal corporatism that has been overlooked or misunderstood by intellectual historians—one that attempts to bridge the gap between eighteenth-century natural law and nineteenth-century political nationalism by defending the corporate autonomy of the churches and universities, and by promoting a combination of public virtue and moral perfection that he dubbed “political Protestantism.” It emphasizes Scheidler's polemical articles against the “Hegel school” and the “New Hegelians” in Rotteck's and Welcker'sStaats-Lexikon. It proposes that a detailed examination of Scheidler's work provides a clearer understanding of how liberalism emerged as a distinct political ideology during theVormärzand how one strand of German liberalism defined itself against Hegelianism.

No reflective loss: The English approach reconsidered

A company shareholder should have no difficulty in commencing a claim to recover the loss suffered due to a wrong done to their personal property. The right to the protection of property is a fundamental human right in English law. A wronged person whose property right is infringed will have the right to commence legal proceedings against wrongdoers. However, in the company context, the exercise of a shareholder’s right of action may conflict with the company’s right of action where the loss sought is reflective. The English company law’s arrangement has been that a shareholder’s action is exceptional beyond which it will routinely be barred through the principle of the ‘no reflective loss’. Where company’s loss and the shareholders’ loss are reflectively linked, then the company’s action prevails against the shareholder action. This paper argues that the two actions should swap places in law. Shareholder action should be recognised as a general principle of law while it is barred exceptionally in circumstances where stronger policy considerations such as the observation of the corporate autonomy are to be prioritised. This article refers to company law in the UK.

The Rise of Hostile Takeovers and Defensive Measures in China: Comparative and Empirical Perspectives

As the ongoing shareholding structure reform continues to reduce the level of ownership concentration of Chinese listed companies, hostile takeovers have been on the rise in China, so has the use of takeover defences. The recent high-profile case of Vanke vs Baoneng has generated an intensive social debate on the use of takeover defences and their regulation in China. This paper undertakes an in-depth study of the Chinese regime for takeover defences both in the books and in practice. From a comparative perspective, it reveals that Chinese law is a mixture of experiences transplanted from overseas jurisdictions, but functions differently due to the unique local conditions in China. It then empirically examines how takeover defences are used in practice, finding that takeover defences, particularly ex ante defences, are widely adopted by Chinese listed companies. This is a matter of concern given that takeovers have important economic functions particularly at the present stage of China’s economic development. In spite of this, the paper refutes the idea of a blanket ban on the use of takeover defences, because takeover defences have both beneficial and detrimental effects. In regulating takeover defences, there needs to be a delicate balance between allowing the use of takeover defences and protecting shareholders’ rights. It is submitted that the primary power to decide on the use of takeover defences should be vested in the hands of shareholders. Considering the local situation in China where the main agency problem of corporate governance is between majority and minority shareholders, it is further argued that the issue of takeover defences should not be left entirely to shareholders in the name of corporate autonomy, but rather need to have some legal intervention to protect the rights of shareholders, particularly minority shareholders, in relation to the use of takeover defences.

북한 경제의 변화 : 시장, ‘돈주’, 그리고 국가의 재등장

Observations have recently been made that the North Korean economy is recovering. We are paying attention to the ‘marketization’ and Donju that is showing its real strength in the market for recovery of the North Korean economy. However, it is still unclear the proportion of the North Korean economy and its role, although the Donju is an important actor.<BR> At the same time, the North Korean regime has been actively pursuing the recovery of the North Korean economy. The company is carrying out ‘Socialist Enterprise Responsibility Management System’ and ‘Garden Production Responsibility System’ that strengthens its independence beyond corporate autonomy and decentralization. In addition, North Korean corporations can borrow money from banks, that is, from the state, and financially through Donju. ‘Donju’ is expanding its activities to manufacturing, service, trade, construction, exchange and remittance by using legalized authority. However, if the recent changes in the financial system that North Korea is pursuing, i.e, commercial banking, will enable, it is doubtful Donju can compete with the state. Still, it should be seen that the Donju is on the border of control and market in the dominance of the overwhelming power of the state. It seems that the expectation of a Donju as a capitalist in North Korea seems to be a problem for a while.

Corporate Autonomy: Law, Constitutional Democracy, and the Rights of Big Business

Corporate Autonomy: Law, Constitutional Democracy, and the Rights of Big Business

State control and doctors’ abuse of clinical autonomy: An empirical analysis of doctors’ clinical practice in Chinese public hospitals

Medical doctors enjoy a high degree of professional autonomy because they own and apply professional knowledge in helping patients. Therefore, laymen are unable to evaluate doctors’ clinical practices. For this reason, how to exert effective social control over doctors’ work has been a significant question in the sociology of professions. Based on fieldwork in Beijing, government statistics, and others’ research findings, this paper analyzes the working conditions and clinical practices of Chinese urban doctors. I find that medical professionals are still dependent upon public hospitals that continue dominating the healthcare delivery system, and thus they lack corporate autonomy and are incapable of negotiating working arrangements, payment for their services and their incomes with the state. This condition generates a distortion in doctors’ labor value. However, also because of the domination of the healthcare delivery system, public hospitals and their doctors have gained ‘dual dominance’ over both patients and pharmaceutical enterprises, by which doctors transform their rights of prescription into economic benefits. This informal income, including hongbao (red envelopes containing money) and kickbacks, compensates for doctors’ relatively low formal incomes resulting from the state’s control. However, doctors abuse clinical autonomy constantly and pervasively, by which they transform their monopolies of medical expertise into economic benefits. This also means that the regulation and supervision of health administration is unsuccessful, as is the profession’s self-regulation. Hence, this paper suggests that if the medical profession can effectively participate in health policy-making, medical professionals be given the right of free practice, and non-public medical institutions given the same status and policy treatments as public hospitals, these problems in the current healthcare system will be relieved or solved.

Should Corporations Have the Right to Vote? A Paradox in the Theory of Corporate Moral Agency

In his 2007 Ethics article, “Responsibility Incorporated,” Philip Pettit argued that corporations qualify as morally responsible agents because they possess autonomy, normative judgment, and the capacity for self-control. Although there is ongoing debate over whether corporations have these capacities, both proponents and opponents of corporate moral agency appear to agree that Pettit correctly identified the requirements for moral agency. In this article, I do not take issue with either the claim that autonomy, normative judgment, and self-control are the requirements for moral agency or the claim that corporations possess them. I claim that if both of these claims are correct, then corporate moral agency entails that, in a liberal democracy, corporations should have the right to vote. I show that under the conception of democracy supported by most liberal political theorists, all parties subject to the law are entitled to the right to vote, and all parties that possess autonomy, normative judgment, and self-control are subject to the law. Therefore, if the proponents of corporate moral agency are correct, then corporations satisfy the requirements for the right to vote. I then consider potential objections to this argument. I show that the strongest objection to the corporate right to vote is undermined by Pettit’s own argument for corporate autonomy. I then show that objections derived from other arguments for limiting the rights of corporations are equally unavailing. I conclude with some observations about the implications of my argument for the question of corporate speech rights.

Juan de Segovia and the Fight for Peace: Christians and Muslims in the Fifteenth Century by Anne Marie Wolf (review)

Reviewed by: Juan de Segovia and the Fight for Peace: Christians and Muslims in the Fifteenth Century by Anne Marie Wolf Takashi Shogimen Wolf, Anne Marie, Juan de Segovia and the Fight for Peace: Christians and Muslims in the Fifteenth Century (History, Languages, and Cultures of the Spanish and Portuguese Worlds), Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 2014; paperback; pp. xi, 375; R.R.P. US $45.00; ISBN 9780268044251. The fifteenth-century Spanish theologian, Juan de Segovia, is well known to everyone who is interested in the conciliar movement, especially at the Council of Basel. In the Anglophone world, this is due to the work of Antony Black and his classic Council and Commune (Burns & Oates, 1979), which first systematically highlighted Juan’s contributions to Basel conciliarism. Although Jesse D. Mann produced a series of important articles in the 1990s, [End Page 284] it is clear that there has been a lull in the research on the Spanish conciliarist for the last couple of decades. Anne Marie Wolf’s new book is a much-needed study that approaches Juan from a fresh perspective. As the subtitle suggests, the book’s main focus is Juan’s discussion of the relationship between Christians and Muslims. The main aim of the book is to demonstrate how Juan’s approach to the question of Christian – Muslim relations ‘intersects both with his other endeavours, especially church reform and the Council of Basel’s discussions with the Hussites, and with cultural and intellectual movements at play in the fifteenth century’. Wolf’s contribution does not merely shed light on a hitherto underexplored aspect of Juan’s thought; it also reveals the connections between his discussions of Christian – Muslim relations and his ecclesiological views. She accomplishes this successfully. Wolf narrates various stages of Juan’s life and thought by delineating the wide range of communications and conversations that took place between Juan and his contemporaries. Packed with rich biographical details excavated from various manuscript sources, the book at times reads like an intellectual biography. Emphasis is given to demonstrate that Juan ‘was remarkably consistent in his pattern of thought and the positions he argued’ (p. 10). Thus, early chapters argue with considerable success that seminal ideas, which he developed in later years, were found in his early works. Chapter 1 discusses Juan’s scholarly and administrative activities at the University of Salamanca during and shortly after the time of the Council of Constance. One of the problems Wolf tackles is the authorial intention of Repetitio de superioritate (1426). The work has long puzzled modern historians because Juan, who is known for his later adherence to conciliarism, presents a pro-papal claim in that work. Wolf’s careful contextualisation reveals that Repetitio’s pro-papal stance was intended to defend the autonomy of the University of Salamanca from the powerful influence of the Archbishop of Santiago, Lope de Mendoza. Despite its ostensible ‘papalist’ claim, Wolf argues that Juan’s defence of the corporate autonomy of the university shows greater affinity with his future conciliar principles. Likewise, Chapter 2 examines Juan’s early encounters with Muslims in Castile in the 1420s, in which Wolf traces the origin of Juan’s future commitment to conversion of Muslims through dialogue. Juan’s actual conversations with Muslims made him aware of their prevalent misunderstanding of Christianity. Juan’s conviction with dialogical engagement with the religious ‘other’ is also at the root of his successful negotiations with the Hussites, which is the focus of Chapter 3: conversion of heretics through dialogue provided a model for his later negotiations with Muslims. Thus, Juan’s peace plan for the conflict with Islam, Wolf shows in the remainder of the book, derives not only from his learning but also from his life experience. [End Page 285] Wolf insists that Juan de Segovia deserves to be known much better. While his thought, which remains to be discovered more fully, may be ‘bold and provocative’ (p. 231), one might wonder why such an original thinker fell into oblivion for centuries immediately after his lifetime. Wolf’s close focus on Juan’s contemporary contexts beautifully shows Juan’s originality, putting in sharp relief the contrast between him...

How Autonomous Are Collective Agents? Corporate Rights and Normative Individualism

Corporate responsibility requires a conception of collective agency on which collective agents are able to form moral judgments and act on them. In spite of claims to the contrary, existing accounts of collective agency fall short of this kind of corporate autonomy, as they fail to explain how collective agents might be responsive to moral reasons. I discuss how a recently proposed conception of shared valuing can be used for developing a solution to this problem. Although the resulting conception of corporate autonomy is useful for making sense of corporate responsibility, it also gives rise to what I call ‘the Corporate Autonomy Problem’. Autonomous collective agents are in principle entitled to the same rights as autonomous individual agents. However, at least some individual rights, such as the right to vote, the right to life, and the right not to be enslaved cannot plausibly be attributed to collective agents. This intuition is supported by normative individualism, the position according to which corporate agents are not entitled to non-derivative rights at all. I argue that without a proper solution to this problem—I sketch the available options—saving corporate responsibility requires giving up on normative individualism.

O empreendedorismo e suas determinantes: oportunidade ou necessidade?

No âmbito da teoria institucional de North (1990, 2005), o objetivo deste trabalho passa pela análise do impacto de fatores económicos e institucionais, formais e não formais, na atividade empreendedora das nações, designadamente no indicador Total Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA). De forma a avaliar a influência simultânea dos fatores económicos e institucionais na atividade empreendedora de um conjunto de países, através de uma regressão linear múltipla, optou-se pela estimação de um modelo cross-section. Os resultados evidenciam uma relação inversa, expectável, entre a TEA, o PIB per capitae a carga burocrática (número de dias para formalizar a entrada de uma nova empresa no negócio) e uma relação inversa, não expectável, entre a TEAe a liberdade fiscal. Os resultados mostram ainda uma relação direta, expectável, entre a TEAe a autonomia/liberdade empresarial face aos gastos do estado.Globalmente, pela relação inversa entre o PIB per capita e a TEA, os resultados evidenciam a prevalência do empreendedorismo por necessidade.

Corporate Autonomy and Buyer–Supplier Relationships: The Case of Unsafe Mattel Toys

This article analyses supplier–buyer relationships where the suppliers adapt to the buyers’ needs and expectations to gain mutual advantages. In some cases, such closely knit relationships lead to violations of the autonomy of one or both partners. A concept of corporate autonomy (CA) is developed to analyze this problem. Three different facets can be distinguished: rule autonomy, executive autonomy, and control autonomy. A case study of Mattel’s problems with lead-contaminated toys produced in China shows that the CA of buyer and supplier can be restricted as a result of a dysfunctional partnership involving a moral dilemma.

Endangering social and economic sustainability: supplier management in the automobile industry

During the last ten years, the automobile industry compensated its economic deficiencies by outsourcing costs towards suppliers. A case study on a German automotive supplier illustrates to what extent the focus on low costs limits the supplier's corporate autonomy, in particular its ability to run its business according to its own rules, and reveals how an increasing loss of independency in buyer-supplier-relationships endangers the suppliers' contribution to social and economic sustainability. Current layoffs and bankruptcy in the automotive supply industry are not only caused by world economic crisis but also a direct result of unsustainable sourcing policy of the big car manufacturers employing problematic and illegitimate practices.