A citizens’ movement in Berlin advocates for the expropriation of housing corporations and has won a significant majority in a popular referendum in September 2021. Building on this proposal, this ...paper develops a general account of expropriation as a measure for corporate reform and thereby contributes to the ongoing debate on the democratic accountability of business corporations. It argues that expropriation is a valuable tool for intervention in a dire situation in some economic sector to enable a re-structuring of the governance of the assets in question. Compared with other tools available, expropriation is a more forward-looking, genuinely political measure that does not depend on the legal assignment of guilt but rather proceeds in a pragmatic and problem-oriented manner. It also allows us to reconsider in how far the market mechanism should be employed in the administration of assets. Objections from private property rights against expropriation fail as corporations generally are privileged, quasi-public institutions that can justifiably be subject to democratic interventions. Expropriation is thus an important addition to the arsenal of corporate reform proposals, especially for those concerned with a broad democratization of the corporation.
Rethinking Private Authorityexamines the role of non-state actors in global environmental politics, arguing that a fuller understanding of their role requires a new way of conceptualizing private ...authority. Jessica Green identifies two distinct forms of private authority--one in which states delegate authority to private actors, and another in which entrepreneurial actors generate their own rules, persuading others to adopt them.
Drawing on a wealth of empirical evidence spanning a century of environmental rule making, Green shows how the delegation of authority to private actors has played a small but consistent role in multilateral environmental agreements over the past fifty years, largely in the area of treaty implementation. This contrasts with entrepreneurial authority, where most private environmental rules have been created in the past two decades. Green traces how this dynamic and fast-growing form of private authority is becoming increasingly common in areas ranging from organic food to green building practices to sustainable tourism. She persuasively argues that the configuration of state preferences and the existing institutional landscape are paramount to explaining why private authority emerges and assumes the form that it does. In-depth cases on climate change provide evidence for her arguments.
Groundbreaking in scope,Rethinking Private Authoritydemonstrates that authority in world politics is diffused across multiple levels and diverse actors, and it offers a more complete picture of how private actors are helping to shape our response to today's most pressing environmental problems
Political theory today has expanded its scope to debate business corporations, conceiving of them as political actors, not (just) private actors in the market place. This article shows the continuing ...relevance of Thomas Hobbes’s work for this debate. Hobbes is commonly treated as a defender of the so-called concession theory, which traces the legitimacy of corporations to their being chartered by sovereign state authorities for public purposes. This theory is widely judged to be anachronistic for contemporary business corporations, because these can now be freely formed, on the basis of private initiative. However, a close reading of the crucial passages in Hobbes’s work reveals a more subtle view, which rejects this private/public dualism. Hobbes’s reflections on the companies of merchants of his day provide room for business corporations’ pursuit of private purposes, while keeping them embedded in a public framework of authority. Moreover, by criticizing the monopoly status of these companies, he opens up a way to integrate market failure arguments from modern economics into concession theory. The “neo-Hobbesian concession theory” emerging from this analysis shows how concession theory can accommodate private initiative and economic analysis, and thus be a relevant position in the debate about the modern business corporation.
Before the seventeenth century, trade across Eurasia was mostly conducted in short segments along the Silk Route and Indian Ocean. Business was organized in family firms, merchant networks, and ...state-owned enterprises, and dominated by Chinese, Indian, and Arabic traders. However, around 1600 the first two joint-stock corporations, the English and Dutch East India Companies, were established. Going the Distance tells the story of overland and maritime trade without Europeans, of European Cape Route trade without corporations, and of how new, large-scale, and impersonal organizations arose in Europe to control long-distance trade for more than three centuries.
Ron Harris shows that by 1700, the scene and methods for global trade had dramatically changed: Dutch and English merchants shepherded goods directly from China and India to northwestern Europe. To understand this transformation, Harris compares the organizational forms used in four major regions: China, India, the Middle East, and Western Europe. The English and Dutch were the last to leap into Eurasian trade, and they innovated in order to compete. They raised capital from passive investors through impersonal stock markets and their joint-stock corporations deployed more capital, ships, and agents to deliver goods from their origins to consumers.
Going the Distance explores the history behind a cornerstone of the modern economy, and how this organizational revolution contributed to the formation of global trade and the creation of the business corporation as a key factor in Europe’s economic rise.
STRATEGIES FOR TROUBLED TIMES, AGAIN Steeves, Christopher J; Walker, Kathryn
Canadian tax journal,
01/2021, Volume:
69, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This article addresses income tax issues associated with the various strategies that corporations can employ in response to economic difficulties, focusing on debtrestructuring techniques and tax ...consequences for debtors. First, the article discusses the tax effects of the most fundamental debt-restructuring issues-interest deductibility and the deductibility of planning costs. Second, considering the out-of-court approaches to debt restructuring, the article examines the tax consequences that may arise where a debtor company and its creditors are able to agree on accommodations that will provide some financial relief for the debtor. Third, the article comments on the potential for the debt-parking rules to apply in the context of the assignment of debt by a creditor. Fourth, the article examines the tax implications of a debt-for-equity exchange, pursuant to which an outstanding debt is exchanged for shares in the debtor corporation. Fifth, the article presents the key tax issues that emerge where a debtor corporation sells assets as a way to mitigate debt pressure. Finally, the article considers tax questions relevant to the statutory (in-court) debt-restructuring options offered by corporate-law statutes, such as the Canada Business Corporations Act, and insolvency statutes, such as the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act.
Prior research suggests that board diversity, especially in terms of gender, potentially enhances its effectiveness. However, as a construct, diversity extends beyond gender to encompass board ...members’ other demographic attributes as well as cognitive features such as attitudes, values, beliefs, knowledge, skills and capabilities. We expect these two sides of diversity, which we label demographic and cognitive, to play a critical role in determining a firm’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure. For our purpose, CSR performance and disclosure comprise environmental and social dimensions. Our results show that social performance exhibits a positive relation to a board’s demographic and cognitive diversities, while environmental performance relates to cognitive diversity, but not demographic diversity. Moreover, both forms of diversity mediate the positive relationship between social performance and social disclosure quality, while only demographic diversity mediates the positive relationship between environmental performance and environmental disclosure quality.
Businesses promote their environmental awareness through green buildings, eco-labels, sustainability reports, industry pledges and clean technologies. When are these symbols wasteful corporate spin, ...and when do they signal authentic environmental improvements? Based on twenty years of research, three rich case studies, a strong theoretical model and a range of practical applications, this book provides the first systematic analysis of the drivers and consequences of symbolic corporate environmentalism. It addresses the indirect cost of companies' symbolic actions and develops a new concept of the 'social energy penalty' - the cost to society when powerful corporate actors limit the social conversation on environmental problems and their solutions. This thoughtful book develops a set of tools for researchers, regulators and managers to separate useful environmental information from empty corporate spin, and will appeal to researchers and students of corporate responsibility, corporate environmental strategy and sustainable business, as well as environmental practitioners.
Inequality and taxation are fundamental problems of modern times. How and when can democracies tax economic elites? This book develops a theoretical framework that refines and integrates the classic ...concepts of business's instrumental (political) power and structural (investment) power to explain the scope and fate of tax initiatives targeting economic elites in Latin America after economic liberalization. In Chile, business's multiple sources of instrumental power, including cohesion and ties to right parties, kept substantial tax increases off the agenda. In Argentina, weaker business power facilitated significant reform, although specific sectors, including finance and agriculture, occasionally had instrumental and/or structural power to defend their interests. In Bolivia, popular mobilization counterbalanced the power of economic elites, who were much stronger than in Argentina but weaker than in Chile. The book's in-depth, medium-N case analysis and close attention to policymaking processes contribute insights on business power and prospects for redistribution in unequal democracies.
Both advocates of corporate regulation and its opponents tend to depict regulation as restrictive—a policy option that limits freedom in the name of welfare or other social goods. Against this ...framing, I suggest we can understand regulation in enabling terms. If well designed and properly enforced, regulation enables companies to operate in ways that are acceptable to society as a whole. This paper argues for this enabling character by considering some wider questions about responsibility and the sharing of responsibility. Agents who are less able or willing to act well are obviously more likely to face criticism, mistrust, and adverse responses. It will be more difficult to hold those agents responsible, especially so when there are many who fail in their responsibilities or where there are wide-reaching disagreements about those responsibilities. Regulatory standards, like other norms and ways of defining responsibilities, address these problems: by restricting, they also enable social cooperation. Like other forms of holding responsible, ways of enforcing those standards against recalcitrant agents, or encouraging conformity to them, may also seem restrictive. Again, however, these practices play an important role in enabling responsible agency. This is partly because they can bolster readiness to act well in agents who experience or witness such responses. It is also because they free other agents to exercise initiative and commitment in defining their individual responsibilities in line with higher standards.
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