Maha Rafi Atal (Copenhagen Business School)
Company Rule: How Corporate Ideology Shapes Private Governance
Abstract
Corporations today serve as political authorities. They provide public services, maintain public order, and exercise control over the lives of employees and residents in the areas where they operate. Contemporary social science often treats this governance role as a product of globalization and deterritorialization, and as evidence of state weakness or retreat. This paper argues that that these frames arise from a state-centric conception of political authority which conceptualizes corporations as devoid of ideology. Drawing on historical and contemporary cases from colonial trading companies to contemporary company towns, this paper argues that when corporations govern, they make ideological choices: what subjects to teach in company schools, what diseases to treat in company hospitals and what family structures to permit in company housing. These choices are moral judgments about how people should behave and how society should be organized, a corporate ideology. This paper argues that such ideology is central to both how companies govern and how that governance is legitimated. When put into practice, corporate ideology shapes not only the economic relations between the company and its stakeholders, but social and political relations throughout the community. To analyze this ideology, and how it shapes the nature of Company Rule, I advance an alternative, pluralistic and relational, conception of political authority, derived from Nicholas Onuf’s theory of rule, and outline how it can be applied as a framework to sharpen our understanding of corporate power.