The East India Company (1661–1698): Territorial Acquisition and the ‘Amsterdam of Liberty’

The final chapter highlights the differences in global corporate governance, providing a case study of how differing governing models could ensure corporate success rather than failure. It continues the story of the EIC’s evolving religious governance in the second half of the century. It investigates how, following the acquisition of Bombay in the 1660s, company leaders such as Strenysham Master, Gerald Aungier and Josiah Child, developed the company’s religious governance to deal with administrating over a variety of peoples and faiths. Following 1662, in the post-Braganza era of the EIC, the flexibility of the corporate form was accentuated because of its adoption of an ecumenically broad form of governance, which allowed it to establish government over not only English Protestants but also Catholics, Armenians, Hindus, Muslims and Jews. The chapter also investigates the role of passive evangelism in the EIC’s religious governance as a way to encourage conversion. In doing so, the company hoped to bring local Indians not only into the Protestant faith, but under the English government.

Corporate Personality

This chapter discusses how separate legal personality can be explained as a solution developed by company law to address the problem that organizations are social rather than brute facts. For a company to come into existence, certain documents need to be registered. These contain information that facilitates the interaction between the company and third parties. Registration as a company then gives an organization a public legal manifestation. The Companies Act does not limit the corporate form to organizational action. The corporate form can therefore be used for other purposes and organizational boundaries do not align with legal personality. But this does not undermine the observation that company law is designed for the operation of organizations.

Limited Liability

This chapter analyses rules that remove limited liability for shareholders and directors as well as for companies. While separate legal personality is immovably robust, limited liability is a more nuanced concept. It is worth stressing from the outset that the Companies Act permits veil piercing, if at all, then only in extremely rare cases. These are now referred to as evasion cases. But the courts have used the common law and legislation to identify instances in which shareholders or directors as well as the companies they control share liability. Abuses of the corporate form are addressed through the modification of the limited liability principle rather than through a rule removing the separate legal personality of the company on an ad hoc basis.

Dynastic aura: Proximity to the powerful and its promise in corporate South Korea

This article discusses the experiences of high-level managers at a South Korean conglomerate named ‘Sangdo’ who worked within the corporate group’s head office under the owner-executive family. These highly credentialled professionals were attracted to the idea of working directly under or alongside an elite, wealthy corporate dynasty who both owned the conglomerate and were its top executives. Rather than seeing this as a site of inherent conflict between the familial and the professional, I describe how the idea of working alongside and for such elites was enhanced by a ‘dynastic aura’. Through the concept of dynastic aura, I highlight how, in South Korea, families that own business groups are objects of public fascination, particularly as indicators of the future of the economy. In the context of Sangdo, I describe how managers were drawn to the potential of working with a new generation of Sangdo ownership, who sought to centralize and systematize expertise within a holding company. I show how this aura figuratively wore off for managers as they came to understand that ownership was just as entangled in the corporate form – not necessarily above or outside of it – as they were. The article highlights how certain aspects of kinship (such as dynasties and generational succession) still animate capitalist labour, even for non-family members. Additionally, the article calls attention to the way that actors engage with and understand powerful actors in their own right, going beyond accounts of anthropologists’ own direct encounters with the powerful.

Human Rights and Corporate Reinsurance: From Ensuring Rights to Insuring Risks

With the aimof grounding the analysis of private transnational human rights governance, the article examines how a European reinsurance company links its human rights policy to its core business of underwriting risks in the case of Belo Monte, a large hydroelectric dam in the Brazilian Amazon. Based on the current international regulatory framework, the global political economy of reinsurance is becoming a constitutive element of human rights governance. Conceptualising underwriting as a social practice, we observe how human rights norms are translated into the corporate form of risks. This process goes beyond questions of norm compliance and involves practices of valuation and boundary-drawing based on the underwriter’s competences and background knowledgeabout reinsurance markets, value chains and corporate hierarchies. We conclude with a critique of private governance as an institutional pillar of the human rights system that rests on business rationales rather than lending institutional power to rights-holders.

International Law, Corporate Law, and Governance Gaps

This chapter explains how domestic US corporate law ignores human rights considerations and contributes to governance gaps. It offers an overview of the conceptual foundations of the corporate form that serve to place rights at risk. It argues that voluntary corporate social responsibility initiatives, leadership on the part of management, and more inclusive configurations of corporate governance can contribute to creating better business practices consistent with respect for human rights. This chapter also explains how international human rights law is inadequate to address human rights abuses where corporate actors are implicated. It offers an overview of the conceptual foundations of international law that render global business enterprises difficult to regulate and hold to account for alleged abuses. It argues that a wide array of actors beyond states must be recognized as possessing the potential to participate in the creation of policies to regulate business practices with respect to human rights.

THEORETICAL DISCOURSE OF CORPORATE DEVELOPMENT IN THE XXI CENTURY

Background. Development of the theoretical concept of corporate entrepreneurship is determined by the intensification of research in modern conditions. The main subject of scientific research is the analysis of the evolution of corporate relations, their organi­zational forms and interaction ways of the main subjects, i.e. owners, managers and the state, as well as the relationship of corporations structural elements. The lack of a holistic concept of corporations’ role substantiation in modern system of economic relations and the scien­tific significance of this issue have led to the relevance of the article. The analysis of recent research and publications shows that theoretical matrix of corporate entrepreneurship research is at the stage of active transformation of its research field. The aim of the article is to systematize and generalize theoretical approaches to the analysis of corporate development vectors in the XXI century and also to identify the latest institutional determinants of their functioning. Materials and methods. The works of Ukrainian and foreign scientists are the theo­retical and methodological basis of the article. The institutional and evolutionary approach is methodological basis of the paper. General scientific research methods such as abstract­tion, analysis and synthesis, systematization, analytical, logical and historical generaliza­tions were also used. Results. Corporate enterprises in modern conditions of civilizational development are the basis of economic activity, which is based on the use of market relations. It involves the continuous accumulation of extremely large amounts of capital to finance programs and develop technical and technological basis of their operation. Modern corporation is a specific form of organization of economic activity and economic agent, a separate format of social nature of economic relations, which provides deepening social division of labor through horizontal and vertical integration, reproduction of capital, formation of stable integration network relations and institutionalizes socio-economic relations in all dimensions. Conclusion. The main advantages of the corporate form of entrepreneurship are wide opportunities to attract financial resources, implementation of innovative projects, etc. Corporations are hierarchical network meta-organizations, a form of institutional support for systemic competitiveness and innovative development of the socio-economic system with an integrated model of capital reproduction into organizational terms. Corporation is a social institution of collective action into institutional terms. The corporate form of entre­preneurship makes it possible to increase international competitiveness of the national economy and creates a basis for its development on the basis of neo-industrialization in the context of effective public, social and collective institutions.

How Organization Models Impact the Governing of Industrial Symbiosis in Public Wastewater Management. An Explorative Study in Sweden

The industrial symbiosis (IS) landscape is evolving rapidly. While previous studies have argued for the importance of municipalities participating in the governing of IS, research on the implications of different forms of municipal organization is still lacking. This paper aims to investigate how municipal administration and municipally-owned corporations, as two forms of organization, impact the governing of IS in the water and sewage sector. This is explored in relation to the Swedish municipality Simrishamn, which recently underwent changes in the form of organization. Results show that municipal administration contributes to a more inclusive process where many actors can influence and bring ideas and perspectives on how to develop an IS. The risk, however, is that other issues within the municipality are seen as more pressing and, therefore, get prioritized before IS. In corporate form, the development of IS becomes more business-like as the focus is kept on core business. Technology development is strengthened as skills and competencies are promoted through the expertise of the employees. Drawbacks include processes becoming less transparent and political goals, such as citizen welfare not receiving the same level of priority as within municipal administration. There is also a risk that fewer perspectives are included in the process of developing IS, which may inhibit innovation, even if the results also indicate that an increased business focus of the corporate form strengthens the innovation capacity.