Joel Bakan: Corporation

Joel Bakan is Canadian writer, musician, filmmaker and legal scholar. Explore interesting quotes on corporation.

Joel Bakan: 30 quotes1 like

“A century and a half after its birth, the modern business corporation, an artificial person made in the image of a human psychopath, now is seeking to remake real people in its image.”

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 5, Corporations Unlimited, p. 135

“As the corporation's size and power grew, so did the need to assuage people's fears of it. The corporation suffered its first full-blown legitimacy crisis in the wake of the early-twentieth-century merger movement, when, for the first time, many Americans realized that corporations, now turned behemoths, threatened to overwhelm their social institutions and governments.”

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 1, The Corporation's Rise To Dominance, p. 17

“The corporation, like the psychopathic personality it resembles, is programmed to exploit others for profit.”

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 3, The Externalizing Machines, p. 69

“The corporation is not an independent "person" with its own rights, needs, and desires that regulators must respect. It is a state created tool for advancing social and economic policy.”

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 6, Reckoning, p. 158

“The genius of the corporation as a business form, and the reason for its remarkable rise over the last three centuries, was - and is - its capacity to combine the capital, and thus the economic power, of unlimited numbers of people.”

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 1, The Corporation's Rise To Dominance, p. 8

“Dodge v. Ford still stands for the legal principal that managers and directors have a legal duty to put the shareholders' interests above all others and no legal authority to serve any other interests - what has come to be known as "the best interests of the corporation" principal.”

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 2, Business As Usual, p. 36

“As a psychopathic creature, the corporation can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others.”

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 3, The Externalizing Machines, p. 60

“The corporation was originally conceived as a public institution whose purpose was to serve national interests and advance the public good.”

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 6, Reckoning, p. 153

“Corporations now govern society, perhaps more than governments themselves do; yet ironically, it is their very power, much of which they have gained through economic globalization, that makes them vulnerable.”

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 1, The Corporation's Rise To Dominance, p. 25

“By leveraging their freedom from the bonds of location, corporations could now dictate the economic policy of governments.”

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 1, The Corporation's Rise To Dominance, p. 22

“The corporation's legally defined mandates to pursue, relentlessly and without exception, its own self interest, regardless of the often harmful consequences it might cause to others. As a result, I argue, the corporation is a pathological institution, a dangerous possessor of the great power it wields over people and societies.”

Introduction, p. 2
The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004)

“As institutional psychopaths, corporations are wont to remove obstacles that get into their way.”

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 4, Democracy Ltd., p. 85

“Deregulation freed corporations from legal constraints, and privatization empowered them to govern areas of society from which they had been previously been excluded. By the end of the century, the corporation had become the world's dominant institution.
Yet history humbles dominant institutions.”

Source: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (2004), Chapter 6, Reckoning, p. 139