Joel Bakan: Institution

Joel Bakan is Canadian writer, musician, filmmaker and legal scholar. Explore interesting quotes on institution.
Joel Bakan: 30   quotes 0   likes

“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.”

Joel Bakan

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

People , Fear , Suffering , Time

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

Joel Bakan

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

“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.”

Joel Bakan

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

People

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

Joel Bakan

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

Way

“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.”

Joel Bakan

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

World , History