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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.

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.

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.

Although the topics of business ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) are not new, this article focuses on the changing role of both subjects in the current business world. Having heard much about CSR in the past, the authors were under the impression that it had taken hold as a movement and more and more corporations were leaning toward ethical business practices and social responsibility. Media attention on the shocking revelations of the tobacco industry stimulated their interest in investigating this impression. Their research indicates that, although some corporations are still practicing unethical behavior, many more indicated that they have a social responsibility to their stakeholders.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how social power and pressures over the past century have shifted the audience towards which organizations find themselves accountable, as reflected in their social responsibility reporting.

The authors use historical analysis to analyze qualitatively the annual reports of prominent US organizations between the 1900s to the early 2000s. Adopting an integrationist perspective, the authors ground their research in stakeholder theory and reviewed passages in annual reports identifying the audiences of socially responsible organizational initiatives.

The study revealed that the degree and focus of corporate accountability shifted over the course of the 1900s, and that this change was due to shifts in influence and power stemming from different stakeholders. During the early 1900s, organizations were more concerned with pleasing internal stakeholders (i.e. employees); however, economic and social events shifted this attention towards external stakeholder groups (i.e. the environment) during the latter part of the century. More recent events fueled social pressures, resulting in legislation and social reporting guidelines during the first decade of the twenty‐first century.

Organizations will continue to be held accountable as new stakeholder groups emerge and different social movements and economic changes transpire, exerting more pressure on organizations to be socially responsible. Furthermore, organizations need to remain current on social reporting guidelines, as these increasingly become the means of communication with multiple stakeholder groups. In summary, findings suggest that organizations would benefit by staying abreast of economic and social cues when developing their socially responsible initiatives and reporting.

The unique contribution of this paper is to identify how economic and social events place pressure on organizations and shift organizational attention through an accountability mechanism, resulting in changes in the focus of social responsibility reporting.

Allyn Young′s lectures, as recorded by the young Nicholas Kaldor, survey the historical roots of the subject from Aristotle through to the modern neo‐classical writers. The focus throughout is on the conditions making for economic progress, with stress on the institutional developments that extend and are extended by the size of the market. Organisational changes that promote the division of labour and specialisation within and between firms and industries, and which promote competition and mobility, are seen as the vital factors in growth. In the absence of new markets, inventions as such play only a minor role. The economic system is an inter‐related whole, or a living “organon”. It is from this perspective that micro‐economic relations are analysed, and this helps expose certain fallacies of composition associated with the marginal productivity theory of production and distribution. Factors are paid not because they are productive but because they are scarce. Likewise he shows why Marshallian supply and demand schedules, based on the “one thing at a time” approach, cannot adequately describe the dynamic growth properties of the system. Supply and demand cannot be simply integrated to arrive at a picture of the whole economy. These notes are complemented by eleven articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica which were published shortly after Young′s sudden death in 1929.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a biographical sketch of Pauline Arnold focusing on her pioneering contributions to the field of market research.

Archival source material included the Pauline Arnold Collection at the University of Minnesota and the Lucy Sallick Papers including correspondence, unpublished documents, and the transcript of a 1995 oral history interview with Matilda White Riley, who was Pauline Arnold's stepdaughter. Primary historical source material includes the scholarship, both published and unpublished, of the subject. An important primary, published source for this study is the periodical, Market Research, to which Arnold contributed under the auspices of the Market Research Corporation of America from 1934 through to 1938.

Pauline Arnold's contributions to the field of market research are documented.

Pauline Arnold has been cited as having made important but neglected contributions to market research, including her advocating an understanding of customers' motives, needs, and wants. However, there is no published account of Arnold's life and work.

Despite interest in management’s evolution, the discipline is devoid of systematic frameworks addressing historiography. Hence, Hirst’s (1965) theory of “forms of knowledge” is applied to demonstrate that management history satisfies his four criteria and qualifies as a valuable research domain. Hirst’s first criterion states that there must be certain central concepts that are distinctive to the subject. Management historians fulfill this criterion by investigating not only specific people, events and trends, but also topics such as motives and linguistics. Second, Hirst suggests that the discipline must offer distinctive ways of relating concepts. Management historians follow a unique investigatory process using three steps: investigation, synthesis, and interpretation. Third, there must be characteristic ways of adducing evidence in support of propositions. Historians define and refine by the available facts. The fourth criterion states that there be utilization of characteristic techniques for conducting investigations. Example methodologies include biographies and oral history. A fifth criterion, examining history’s pragmatic utility, is then advanced.