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Institutions are collective responses to collective concerns, with the underlying link between concern and response being the purpose of the institution. With this conceptual lens, we analyze the history of the Aktiengesellschaft (AG), which emerged in Austria and Germany around 1800. While any analysis of the organizational features of the form would have diagnosed marked stability over the past two centuries, our historical study reveals significant shifts of the AG’s purpose and meaning: from a vehicle in the service of the public interest, shareholders, and employees to a persona with legitimate self-interests and the will to survive. We suggest to regard such purpose drifts as distinct variant of institutional change. In addition, we conclude that the AG’s essentially political actorhood institutionalizes the ever fragile and delicate quest for a balance between the different legitimate interests on whose behalf a corporation acts (including those of the self). Such a view, we argue, can offer a future for the corporation as organizational form.

This study aims to explore the evolutionary trajectory of American corporations and their governance over the past few centuries, using a multidisciplinary investigative approach. The research focuses on the American business landscape because it has played a pivotal role in shaping the field of corporate governance theory and practice.

The author thoroughly investigates archival records, legal documents, academic publications, reputable databases and pertinent literature to unearth valuable insights into the key events that have influenced the evolutionary path of American corporations and their governance throughout history.

Delving into the evolutionary journey of American corporations and their governance reveals a multifaceted narrative, enhancing our comprehension of the impact of the external socio-economic environment, and the effectiveness and limitations of established corporate governance paradigms in addressing such transformations. This introspection establishes the groundwork for ongoing discussions concerning how corporate governance should adapt to meet the evolving needs and expectations of stakeholders and society as a whole, with a specific focus on the pivotal role that boardrooms could play in this regard.

The insights gained from this analysis offer practitioners a foundational resource to understand corporate governance in a complex business landscape. Armed with this understanding, practitioners can better align governance strategies with both historical context and contemporary requirements.

The research has significant social implications in the sense that history highlights the importance of the society in influencing corporate governance practices. It specifically emphasizes the need for the board of directors to consider both shareholder value and social responsibility, while also fostering public trust and confidence.

Many corporate governance concepts are often used with limited understanding of their initial intent, resulting in their unquestioned adoption. In this paper, the author offers a contextual exploration of historical events that have contributed to the development of these diverse corporate perspectives. To the best of the author’s knowledge, there are exceedingly few, if any, papers that present comparably insightful and multidisciplinary insights into the evolutionary path of corporations and their governance, especially within a dynamic and influential market like that of the USA.

This chapter squarely attributes DEI responsibility to powerful corporations that have historically benefitted from a history of discrimination against people of color and recommends a path forward that embraces DEI-PR-CSR intersections by placing DEI within a CSR office rather than in HR.

Business corporations (and unincorporated joint-stock companies) formed in Britain and the United States in the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century were lightly regulated by today’s standards and, as startups, sold equity directly to investors without the aid of intermediaries, yet they suffered relatively few governance breakdowns. That is because republican government-style checks against the arbitrary power of any group of stakeholders (managers, blockholders, directors) suffused their founding documents (charters/constitutions, articles of agreement, bylaws), raising the expected costs of defalcation above the expected benefits. Over the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, the original checks disintegrated. They were functionally replaced twice, first by financial capitalism a la J. P. Morgan, then by corporate raiders and takeover specialists like KKR, but politicians neutralized the first and managers (and judges) the second, leaving many widely held corporations today under the control of CEOs/Board Chairmen who can self-deal with near impunity and have apparent incentives to do so. A return to the precepts of the republican model could help to improve governance outcomes in the future.

German legal historians of nineteenth and twentieth centuries defined the main characteristics of the corporations and believed that one renaissance institution, the Casa di San Giorgio at Genoa (1407–1805), was similar to the corporations of later centuries. This paper proposes to reverse this perspective: did the founders of early modern corporations know the financial model of the fifteenth century Casa di San Giorgio? The research shows the connection between the model of the Casa di San Giorgio and the Mississippi Company of John Law (1720), the famous financial scheme and bubble. The history of the Casa di San Giorgio was mainly transmitted through a passage of Machiavelli’s History of Florence (VIII, 29). The paper offers new biographical evidence that Law had been to Genoa and introduces sources connecting the genesis of Law’s scheme for the Mississippi Company in France with the model of the Casa di San Giorgio.

Architectonics is proposed as a dialogic theory and method to research three discursive spheres: McDonald's corporation, McDonaldization, and McDonaldland.

Bakhtin proposed architectonics as a new method for the human sciences, one that interanimates cognitive with ethical and aesthetic systemness. This essay develops architectonics further, and applies it to the study of globalization and localization of the McDonald's and Wal‐Mart corporations, which now cohabits with each other in New Mexico (and elsewhere).

A general inquiry system is suggested as a framework to analyze the architectonics of other organizations, in future international studies.

Through the application of the notion of architectonics to the McDonald's and Wal‐Mart corporations the authors develop an innovative approach to understanding organizations.

History shows a repetitive cycle of corporations over‐reaching their boundaries and causing social turmoil. Governments are faced with the task of reining them in by enacting regulations. Investors are faced with the task of preserving their individual assets. Corporate governance remains the core issue in these battles. This paper examines the origins of corporate governance and the events during the twentieth century that have failed to align the interests of management and shareholders.

The unprecedented economic development and increase in the number of global corporations in the Greater China region, comprising the Chinese mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong, have led to more emphasis on corporate leader-stakeholder communication. Bilingual web-based messages posted on corporate websites, which aim to strategically cultivate positive relationships between leaders and stakeholders, have emerged as a primary mode of communication for Chinese corporations. However, a research study investigating the prominent themes and underlying cultural values depicted in leaders’ messages intended for different groups of stakeholders is lacking. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the themes and cultural values expressed through corporate leaders’ web-based messages in a non-western context.

Using an inductive approach, open coding and a categorization system, this study analyzed the web-based messages of leading corporations with WordSmith 6.0.

Six prominent themes in leaders’ communication were identified. These themes included, in order of importance: company development, operating philosophy, company profile, business environment, performance, and products and services. It was found that leaders strategically selected certain themes such as focusing on progress and the business environment but omitted others depending on how they wanted to strategically influence their stakeholders’ attitudes. Differences between the cultural values depicted in Chinese and the corresponding English messages could be attributed to leaders’ cultural adaptation of the messages intended for non-domestic stakeholders.

Since this study provides insights into the major themes preferred by leaders of corporations operating in Greater China, it will enable existing stakeholders to understand the main business focus of leaders and offer leaders more information about commonly accepted themes. These possibilities for enhanced knowledge on the part of stakeholders and business leaders, in turn, may potentially increase academic appreciation of the complexities involved in corporate communication. It also informs stakeholders about the variations in the values reflected in the English and Chinese messages of leaders, and, therefore, has a potential to offer value to academics and practitioners.

Many jurisdictions fine illegal cartels using penalty guidelines that presume an arbitrary 10% overcharge. This article surveys more than 700 published economic studies and judicial decisions that contain 2,041 quantitative estimates of overcharges of hard-core cartels. The primary findings are: (1) the median average long-run overcharge for all types of cartels over all time periods is 23.0%; (2) the mean average is at least 49%; (3) overcharges reached their zenith in 1891–1945 and have trended downward ever since; (4) 6% of the cartel episodes are zero; (5) median overcharges of international-membership cartels are 38% higher than those of domestic cartels; (6) convicted cartels are on average 19% more effective at raising prices as unpunished cartels; (7) bid-rigging conduct displays 25% lower markups than price-fixing cartels; (8) contemporary cartels targeted by class actions have higher overcharges; and (9) when cartels operate at peak effectiveness, price changes are 60–80% higher than the whole episode. Historical penalty guidelines aimed at optimally deterring cartels are likely to be too low.

This article examines the construction of systems of meaning at two levels: the writing of the history of the corporation; and the role of annual reports in constructing a system of meaning about the experiences of individual corporations.We argue that the transaction cost explanation of corporate history, which stresses the formative roles of technological and market forces, and management's quest for efficiency, serves to legitimate the modern corporate form and oligopolistic market structures. We provide an alternative, critical framework, which emphasises the importance of conflict over the distribution of income and wealth to our understanding of the emergence of modern corporate structures, strategies and accounting information systems.This alternative approach is illustrated through the history of General Motors' (GM) relations with the US State. The annual reports of the company are used as the primary, although not exclusive, source of data. We show that these documents represent history and current events in a partisan manner that makes them weapons in distributional conflicts.