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The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, by Joel Bakan
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New Edition What would the world be like if its ruling elite was insane? The most powerful class of institution on earth, the corporation, is by any reasonable measure hopelessly and unavoidably demented. The corporation lies, steals and kills without remorse and without hesitation when it serves the interests of its shareholders to do so. It obeys the law only when the costs of crime exceed the profits. Corporate social responsibility is impossible except insofar as it is insincere. At once a diagnosis and a course of treatment, The Corporation is essential reading for those who want to understand the nature of the modern business system. It is a sober and careful attempt to describe the world as it is, rather than as corporate public relations departments would have us believe it to be. It reveals a world more exotic and more terrifying than any of us could have imagined. And although a billion dollar industry is trying to convince you otherwise, the corporations that surround us are not our friends. Charming and plausible though they are, they can only ever see us as resources to be used. This is the real world, not science fiction, and it really is us or them.
- Sales Rank: #915090 in Books
- Published on: 2005-06-23
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.76" h x .67" w x 5.16" l, .42 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 272 pages
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Bakan, an internationally recognized legal scholar and professor of law at the University of British Columbia, takes a powerful stab at the most influential institution of our time, the corporation. As a legal entity, a corporation has as its edict one and only one goal, to create profits for its shareholders, without legal or moral obligation to the welfare of workers, the environment, or the well-being of society as a whole. Corporations have successfully hijacked governments, promoting free-market solutions to virtually all of the concerns of human endeavor. Competition and self-interest dominate, and other aspects of human nature, such as creativity, empathy, and the ability to live in harmony with the earth, are suppressed and even ridiculed. Bakan believes that, like Communism, this ideological order cannot last and that corporate rule must be challenged to bring balance and revive the values of democracy, social justice, equality, and compassion. This eye-opening look at a system "programmed to exploit others for profit" has been made into a provocative film documentary that could be the next Bowling for Columbine. David Siegfried
Copyright � American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
The Corporation is Farenheit 9/11 for people who think. The Independent This fine book was virtually begging to be written. With lucidity and verve, Joel Bakan unveils the history and the character of a devilish instrument that has been created and is nurtured by powerful modern states. -- Noam Chomsky ..one of those rare books that opens up a new world. It's message is compelling-- and more important now than ever. -- Robert Monks
About the Author
Joel Bakan is professor of law at the University of British Columbia. A Rhodes Scholar and former law clerk to Chief Justice Brian Dickson of the Supreme Court of Canada, he holds law degrees from Oxford, Harvard and Dalhousie Universities. An internationally renowned legal authority, Bakan has written widely on law and its social and economic impact.
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Corporations may cause the extinction of the human species.
By Robert G. Boyd
This is the most important book I have read during my lifetime. The content of the book has been well described in other reviews. I just want to add one observation. Fossil fuel corporations will maximize their profits by extracting all the accessible carbon buried in the earth and putting it into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas). This is no doubt an interesting experiment, since this is something that has never happened before since life began on this planet billions of years ago. But I really do not want to find out what will happen. The planet Venus is much like our planet, except that its atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide and it is hot enough at the surface to melt lead. Venus is a good illustration of a runaway greenhouse effect. It may not get that bad here, but certainly industrial civilization will collapse, and there will be mass famine and mass migrations as people travel north to get away from tropical heat. We are living through the sixth mass extinction since the beginning of life on earth, Usually the dominant species becomes extinct. We are the dominant species.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Good intentions, infeasible suggestions
By Leon Lam
This book is an evaluation of corporation in contemporary society. Bakan provides a critical but convincing analysis of the profound influence of corporations in the world. His criticism of company as selfish, immoral profit-maximizing creature is accurate and sound. Corporate social responsibility, as he described, is a public relations strategy to cover the unpleasant core of corporation. The pursuit of financial returns has indeed led to environmental and social damages and drastically reshaped the political landscape. I largely agree with Bakan's observation but remain skeptical to his suggestions. His call for return to New Deal-era regulations is not very applicable to 21st-century America, as most of the multinationals have become stronger than any single state. He also emphasized collective action among citizens and cooperation among states. Both of them are easier said than done. In general, Bakan's work is a pleasant reading and raises important issues concerning the corporation. The policies he proposed are more debatable. As we can see, government oversight over financial activities remains inadequate after 2008. That any particular government can unilaterally better its control of corporations does not match with reality.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Greed is not good
By Walter E. Kurtz
This book here argues that the modern corporation, despite doing some good, is basically a force of evil. I know that it sounds melodramatic to call corporations a force of “evil,” but how would you call the very opposite of a force of goodness? The reason why corporations are so bad is because they are greedy, completely amoral, totally ruthless and too powerful.
The author starts with describing how corporations came to be. They have their beginnings as early as the 16th century. Back then they were created either through a direct act of government of with government’s tacit approval. They came into being to run large scale business enterprises that individual businessmen could never finance and run. Corporations had a very bad opinion back then and were seen as a dirty but necessary evil. They were plagued by corruption and scandals and many eventually collapsed due to their own shady dealings, pulling down the economy in the process and forcing the government to come in and clean up their mess. (Sounds familiar?)
As world trade and infrastructure grew, the number and size of corporations also grew. They often came into being to construct such things as canals, bridges and roads. But they really took off in later half of 19th century with the rise of the railroads and the industrial revolution. All this time the corporations chafed and struggled against the laws and regulations put on the by governments. Through a number of (back then) controversial judicial decisions they were eventually granted personhood. Nowadays, according to the law they are a person like you and me and they have all the same rights (but few of the duties).
Aside for the obvious fact that it is ridiculous to treat an organization exactly like a human being, the problem here is that corporations act like psychopaths. A corporation is required by law to exist for one and only one purpose, and that is to make money, make more money and make even more money. Corporations must seek profits any way they can and the profits must always grow.
To some extent this is only to be expected. A corporation has a lot of expenses and it must make enough money to cover them or it will go bankrupt. Naturally, earning enough to cover the expenses is not enough. Everyone who runs any kind of business wants to be able to pay all the expenses and make a little bit of profit on top of that. But corporations don’t want to make just a little bit of profit. They want (must) make as much profit as they can and keep doing it over and over again.
Isn’t that the very definition of greed?
If corporations were greedy and nothing else, it would have been very bad but not dangerous. But corporations pose a danger to human society by being completely ruthless in their pursuit of greed. They violate laws whenever they believe that they can get away with it. They lobby governments to weaken regulations that protect people. They poison and destroy the ecosystem. They brutally exploit employees and discard them when they are no longer needed. The examples of corporate abuses, scandals and crimes are countless. This book was written somewhere around 2004 or 2005 (I don’t recall exactly) and it talks a lot about Enron.
Enron was a respected, gigantic energy company that claimed to be nothing but a concerned, responsible “citizen” all the while it was orchestrating electricity blackouts in order to raise prices of electricity and reap record profits. It was its own greed and lack of morality that shattered it.
Corporations are not sadistic. They do not hurt other people because they like it, but it is part of doing business. Any corporate manager who is putting the interests of someone or something else above the interests of his corporations is failing in his legal duties and can be fired or sued by the shareholders.
If you were to meet an individual who cares only about making money, who has no honor, morals or integrity and who is ready and willing to hurt, abuse and even kill others for money so long as he thinks that he can get away with it, what would you think of him? But corporations are not people. They are organizations composed of thousands of people. How can these people commit such wicked deeds and sleep at night? They can’t be all psychopaths, can’t they?
No, they are not psychopaths. The vast majority of corporate managers are decent, good people. In the book we meet some of them who openly admit that what they do is immoral, but they justify themselves by saying that this is only a job and what matters is being a decent human being in private life.
Sadly, in my other readings (and even in real life) I have encountered this way of thinking. It is a form of mentality and philosophy that is utterly incomprehensible to me. I guess that it is better to be a bad person only from 9 to 5 rather than 24/7, but in the end you are still hurting other people and making the world a bad place. Try to imagine yourself at the receiving end of this philosophy. Imagine that someone hurts you and when you confront them about it they say: “Look. It was just part of my job. I am not a bad person. When I go home, I am a really decent guy. What I did to you, that was not personal.” Would you accept this is a justification?
But most corporate people do think even in this way. The people quoted above at least recognize that what they do from 9 to 5 is bad. The majority of corporate people see absolutely nothing wrong with what they do from 9 to 5. The most likely reason for that is that they are educated and raised to think that what corporations do is perfectly normal. Quite often they are born into corporate families, they go to business schools where corporate philosophy is drilled into them and when they get a job in some corporation, they are surrounded by people who think just like them. Why would they question their life?
Another reason is that corporate people rarely, if ever, see the effects of their destructive policies. For example, corporations have outsourced most of their manufacturing to Third World countries where workers are treated like dogs and paid less than dogs. And if the workers ever rebel, the corporations bribe the local generalissimo to send his thugs to put them down. But the corporate managers simply never see the despair and suffering of those workers. They sit in their posh offices in New York, London or Tokyo and read reposts about productivity and profits coming from these factories, but the reports say nothing about the human suffering that goes into obtaining this productivity and profits. And even if the company president goes to those countries to visit one of these factories, these are highly controlled visits where the local management shows him what they want him to see.
If you have been paying attention to the news and/or reading other books about the recent (2008) financial crisis, none of this will be surprising to you. For decades banks have been lobbying for financial deregulation. Eventually they finally got it and they started immediately investing in risky, shoddy business ventures that were unsafe in the long run but they brought in high profits in the short run. There were people in and outside of the financial establishment warning against it, but they were ignored. The pressure to seek profits wherever possible proved so strong and irresistible that the management chose to invest in these risky ventures anyway. As a result, they nearly destroyed their own companies. Had it not been for the massive (the biggest in history, in fact) government intervention, all of the world’s major financial institutions would have been wiped out.
The danger that the corporations pose to human society is enormous, but also insidious and difficult to notice. Corporations are hurting people through their unhealthy and dangerous practices. They poison and destroy the environment. They are also afraid of popular resistance so they influence governments to crush it and persecute activists. They oppose any form of political and social progress that is perceived as threatening their profits. They fight and often defeat organizations like labor unions or environment protection groups. But the worst thing in my opinion is that they want to create a society where people are interested only in consuming and buying. When people think that buying things is the purpose of life, they are going to spend more money. And the more money they spent, the more money the corporations are going to make.
The power and influence of the corporations is tremendous, but the author does not give in to despair. He believes that corporations can be defeated through activism and popular resistance. It is already happening. Why do you think the corporations pretend to be so charitable and eco friendly? It is because of the popular pressure. Nowadays, a corporation who openly declares that it cares about nothing else than profit and gives nothing to charitable causes will not do business for long.
In the past centuries the power of the Church and feudal aristocracy was tremendous. The Church and the feudal system were so ingrained into the society that most people could not even conceive a world without them. And just like corporations today, the Church and the aristocracy claimed that their role is essential and the world cannot go on without them.
And where are those feudal lords and the all-powerful Church today? Corporations have not always been there and they don’t have to be there forever.
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