"The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power" (January 2007) Online Copy
In The Corporation – the companion to the similarly-named 2003 documentary – Joel Bakan tries to write up a diagnosis of the corporate institution.
He moves through the psychiatric checklist: they’re selfish – dumping externalities on outside parties, they’re immoral – basing all their actions on profitability, they’re antisocial – habitually undermining law and regulation.
Bakan tries to justify this anthropomorphism by explaining the origin of the corporate business form. While beginning inauspiciously in the 16th century as joint-stock companies, the corporation was transmogrified into a human-like legal entity in 19th century American court rulings. By using the 14th amendment – passed after the civil war to protect freed slaves – corporations were allowed due process and equal protection under the law. Via limited liability for shareholders and managers, the corporation itself became the responsible legal entity. Bakan cites more court decisions into the 20th century that demanded that a corporation’s sole purpose – and its managers’ and directors’ aims, too – must be to make profit for investors.
Through interview and, often disturbing and horrifying case examples, Bakan says that if corporations are viewed as people, then they are pathological people. These psychos are capable and expected to do things like choose fatality lawsuit settlements over product recalls (GM) or to sell computers to a genocidal government (IBM and the Nazis).
And yet, in personifying this historical institution, Bakan confuses the literal and the metaphorical. He doesn’t extend his idea and ask how one would cure a pathological person, or how court rulings should address this behavior. Bakan’s best medicine is when he evokes the overlooked idea that corporations are legally born – and can be legally destroyed with charter revocation. But, overall, while the examples are frightening, the history astute, Bakan uses pathology as a gimmick, as a confused analogy for an unruly social institution, for something not quite so human.