The Company-State rethinks the nature of the early English East India Company as a form of polity and corporate sovereign well before its supposed transformation into a state and empire in the ...mid-eighteenth century. Taking seriously the politics and political thought of the early Company on their own terms, it explores the Company's political and legal constitution as an overseas corporation and the political institutions and behaviors that followed from it, from tax collection and public health to warmaking and colonial plantation. Tracing the ideological foundations of those institutions and behaviors, this book reveals how Company leadership wrestled not simply with the bottom line but with typically early modern problems of governance, such as: the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers; the relationship between law, economy, and sound civil and colonial society; and the nature of jurisdiction and sovereignty over people, commerce, religion, territory, and the sea. The Company-State thus reframes some of the most fundamental narratives in the history of the British Empire, questioning traditional distinctions between public and private bodies, "commercial" and "imperial" eras in British India, a colonial Atlantic and a "trading world" of Asia, European and Asian political cultures, and the English and their European rivals in the East Indies. At its core, The Company-State offers a view of early modern Europe and Asia, and especially the colonial world that connected them, as resting in composite, diffuse, hybrid, and overlapping notions of sovereignty that only later gave way to more modern singular, centralized, and territorially- and nationally-bounded definitions of political community. Given growing questions about the fate of the nation-state and of national borders in an age of "globalization," this study offers a perspective on the vitality of non-state and corporate political power perhaps as relevant today as it was in the seventeenth century. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/history/9780195393736/toc.html
The people are the company. This study aims to examine the structure of relationships between company culture, performance, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and reputation, as seen from the ...employee's perspective, to determine which company culture factors most influence CSR practice and, as a result, sustain a company's development and improve its performance. To accomplish this goal, we conducted a survey among employees of Polish construction companies regarding CSR practices in their organizations. We applied a structural equation model based on 539 individual cases. For a better understanding of the employee's perception of CSR practice, the model included control variables such as company size and position in the company. Our findings suggest that company reputation is a strong mediator of the CSR practice and company performance relationship, and the cultural dimension of long‐term orientation has the greatest influence on CSR practice. The study advances the knowledge on the subject using a microlevel approach to stakeholders' engagement in CSR by exploring the personalized employee‐centric view of organizational culture, CSR practice, and company reputation to sustain a company's development and improve its performance.
The 1909 Companies Act was known as the “Transvaal Act”. After South Africa was established as a Union, each province had its own Companies Act. There is no indication that the 1909 Act was amended ...on provincial level. Later on, a new Act was written, namely the “1926 Companies Act”, and it was based upon the 1909 Act. Most South African textbooks cite only the 1926 and 1973 Companies Act, without any reference to the 1909 Act. This historic legislation is however relevant to fully understand the background to South African company law. Furthermore, the 1909 Act contains more than 26 definitions, such as: a special resolution, private company, debenture, director, share and prospectus. Most of these concepts are still relevant today, 110 years later.
Historians of British colonial rule in India have noted both the place of military might and the imposition of new cultural categories in the making of Empire, but Bhavani Raman, in Document Raj, ...uncovers a lesser-known story of power: the power of bureaucracy. Drawing on extensive archival research in the files of the East India Company's administrative offices in Madras, she tells the story of a bureaucracy gone awry in a fever of documentation practices that grew ever more abstract—and the power, both economic and cultural, this created. In order to assert its legitimacy and value within the British Empire, the East India Company was diligent about record keeping. Raman shows, however, that the sheer volume of their document production allowed colonial managers to subtly but substantively manipulate records for their own ends, increasingly drawing the real and the recorded further apart. While this administrative sleight of hand increased the company's reach and power within the Empire, it also bolstered profoundly new orientations to language, writing, memory, and pedagogy for the officers and Indian subordinates involved. Immersed in a subterranean world of delinquent scribes, translators, village accountants, and entrepreneurial fixers, Document Raj maps the shifting boundaries of the legible and illegible, the legal and illegitimate, that would usher India into the modern world.
′Alan Bryman has expanded on his well-known work on Disney and Disneyization to create a fascinating, highly readable book... This is an important book about a significant social process. And, it ...manages to be fun, as well!′ - George Ritzer, author of McDonalidization and Professor of Sociology, University of Maryland.
One of the world’s largest sellers of footwear, the Bata Company of Zlín, Moravia has a remarkable history that touches on crucial aspects of what made the world modern. In the twilight of the ...Habsburg Empire, the company Americanized its production model while also trying to Americanize its workforce. It promised a technocratic form of governance in the chaos of postwar Czechoslovakia, and during the Roaring Twenties, it became synonymous with rationalization across Europe and thus a flashpoint for a continent-wide debate. While other companies contracted in response to the Great Depression, Bata did the opposite, becoming the first shoe company to unlock the potential of globalization.
As Bata expanded worldwide, it became an example of corporate national indifference, where company personnel were trained to be able to slip into and out of national identifications with ease. Such indifference, however, was seriously challenged by the geopolitical crisis of the 1930s, and by the cusp of the Second World War, Bata management had turned nationalist, even fascist.
In the Kingdom of Shoes unravels the way the Bata project swept away tradition and enmeshed the lives of thousands of people around the world in the industrial production of shoes. Using a rich array of archival materials from two continents, the book answers how Bata’s rise to the world’s largest producer of shoes challenged the nation-state, democracy, and Americanization.
A thriving company culture is the foundation on which a company’s success is built. Company leaders are the guardians of this culture with the crucial responsibility to maintain and evolve the ...culture and values to meet the company’s needs as it scales. Current research touches on the importance of company culture, but there is little in the existing literature that describes how to lead amid times of scaling a business when the culture needs to evolve. In this article, we draw from our own leadership experiences, as well as the experiences of employees at scaling companies, to provide a framework for leaders on how to build, maintain, and adapt a positive company culture during different stages of company growth. The goal is to minimize the growing pains associated with the inevitable changes that occur during the scaling process.
The article examines the understanding of the principle of non-split-ting, showcasing the historical and comparative equivalence of the German and Polish legal systems. It concerns the non-splitting ...of shares in Polish and German law, as applied to the limited liability company and the non-public joint-stock company. It is aimed at conceptualizing in a comparative manner the theoretical model of non-splitting, and encompasses discussions about its nature, content, and normative bases for its binding force. Under Polish law two different understandings of the principle of non-splitting of shares are distinguished: the principle of non-splitting in the strict sense, and the principle of non-splitting in the broad sense. It is argued that German law uses the concept of prohibition of splitting, while in the Polish legal system this concept has been further developed and is to be perceived as a principle of non-splitting of shares that is to be classified as general principle of company law.
