Notes on Chapter One of The Corporation by Joel Bakan: The Corporation's Rise to Dominance
By Richard Eriksson on May 10, 2004 - 2:55pm
The following is part of chapter notes to The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power by Joel Bakan, the book selected for One Book, One Vancouver.
Bakan sets out a brief history of the form of the public corporation and how it emerged from its early beginnings in the mid-1500s where travelling salesmen would sell stock in fictitious companies trying to take advantage of speculators in London England. Scandal plagued the corporate form in the early 1700s, when it was banned by politicians after stock in the South Sea Company collapsed. Bakan then discusses the corporation as having the same legal rights as a person, and how it took advantage of the 14th Amendment, designed to protect the rights of former slaves in America, to enforce those rights. Bakan briefly mentions the New Deal after public legitimacy of corporations was at a low end, and notes that only after the 1970s did corporations recover their political strength with the election of Ronald Reagan as President of the United States and Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister of England.
Bakan on the power corporations exert in society:
Corporations now govern society, perhaps more than governments themselves do; yet ironically, it is their very power, muchof hich they ahve gained through economic globalization, that makes them vulnerable. As is true of any ruling institution, the corporation now attracts mistrust, fear, and demands for accountability from an increasingly anxious public.
Corporations are using various strategies—lumped into the term "branding"—to re-legitimize themselves in the eyes of the public.
