Scaling the Corporate World

The unifying principle of the anthology appears to be an elaboration of modern economic theory in connection with prevailing and/or controversial perceptions of how the form and substance of corporate structure should be understood. The corporate entity is analyzed from a variety of perspectives: in terms of the business environment in general and in the interpenetration of business and government; in terms of moral and ethical issues arising out of the social role or position of corporate enterprise; in terms of management issues and policies; and in terms of the consequences of corporate behavior to the society in which a corporation functions. The role of theory is therefore instrumental, meant to serve as a mechanism for explaining what the corporate culture is and how it came to be constituted as it is, with a view toward usefully projecting what its highest and best future expression should be. A foundational essay in this regard is Coase's description of the nature of the firm; Coase is cited by many subsequent commentators as delimiting the elements of corporate structure in the modern peri

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ural encounters between the West and Japan have had a spotty record of mutual satisfaction. From Taka's realistic appraisal of why cultural encounter can leave participants unsatisfied, Scaling the Corporate Wall next turns to a commonsense appraisal of why theory can leave practitioners unsatisfied. Bratton essentially counsels against the temptation to make too much of the science or study of management as distinct from a philosophy of management that is programmatically imbued with or responding to the consequences of action. From ethics to economics to contracts to corporate law, the real action in any theory of the corporate firm takes place, not in the realm of legal academic theoretical discussion but rather in the real-world realm. The interplay of competing real-world forces that make up the structure of a firm reveal firm/corporate theory; theory does not reveal how a firm is or even should be structured. Indeed, to structure a corporation to fit a given theory (as is a pastime of contractual legal theory that points toward the Firm as ideal form) is to make theory paramount and to diminish the importance of the facts of the corporate culture case itself. Thus wherever the dependent variable is human behavior, we must lo
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Approximate Word count = 3105
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)