Can the Market Control the Public Corporation?

Joel Bakan’s The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power shines a bright light on the nature, costs, benefits and behaviour of a curious creation of the 20th century— the modern, for-profit public shareholding company. Even if we do not buy into the by now notorious central metaphor of the book—of the corporation as a psychopathic personality—we are still led by Bakan’s examples and the tenacity of his gaze to new insights about the strange ways in which responsibility travels in the social realm. And even if one does not quite wish to appoint the government as the chief clinical consultant to rein in the destructive impulses of the psychopath, one nevertheless is led to ponder new ways in which the social and environmental ills associated with large corporations—such as environmental destruction and child labour—can be stopped, perhaps by methods employed by corporations themselves to do that which they do so...