Urban Vancouver

Notes on Chapter Two of The Corporation by Joel Bakan: Business as Usual

By Richard Eriksson on May 12, 2004 - 7:51pm

Chapter Two of The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power by Joel Bakan discusses the legal imperative for the corporation to make a profit with some of the case law behind it. Bakan argues that because executives do not own the profits, they must act in the interest of the shareholders or the executives will find themselves sued by the shareholders. This was not always so: Bakan quotes Henry Ford in 1919 as saying "I do not believe that we should make such awful profits on our cars. A reasonable profit is right, but not too much."

The principal characters of Chapter Two are Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman; Noam Chomsky, who, perhaps remarkably, agrees with Friedman that corporations have a duty to its owners and not the outsite community; John Browne, head of BP; Norma Kassi, an activist in the Gwinch'in Nation arguing against BP drilling near her nation's villages; Hank McKinnel, CEO of Pfizer, who revitalized a neighbourhood in New York City as well as a company-sponsored school; Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop, who found out it was more difficult than she imagined to integrate her personal beliefs in her own publicly-traded company; the remarkable Marc Berry, a corporate espionage expert (one that practices in the trade); and Dr. Robert Hare, professor emeritus at UBC. (Hare recently consulted for the FBI on a report about the Columbine shootings.)

Berry was prominent in the movie, as was Hare's diagnosis of the corporation in its Anglo-American publicly-traded form, as psychopathic. Corporations fit the Hare's checklist of a psychopath. They are, says Hare: they are singularly self-interested; are irresponsible, try to manipulate everything; are grandiose; lack empathy and have ascocial tendencies; refuse to accept responsibility; are unable to feel remorse and finally relate to others superficially. (The previous sentence contains the italicized words between pp. 56-7 of the book.) The problem I had with the way it was done in the movie, and to a lesser extent in the book, is that they seem to take a checklist and see if any of the items apply it to an entity, rather than, in the words of a friend, "judge the work on its total merit, not on one single or small set of attributes".