The purpose of this research is to examine articles in the first four sections of Scaling the Corporate Wall: Readings in Business and Society, edited by Sethi, Steidlmeier, and Falbe. The plan of the research will be to set forth the scope of issue coverage in the sections of the book under review and then to review the principal themes and issue patterns emerging in the articles.
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 period. At the core of Coase's discussion is the role of the creative manager, which is to say the entrepreneur who organizes, experiments with, or otherwise "directs" (1997, pp. 3-4) the disposition of scarce resources to be used in the formation of the firm. This is an influential issue because it goes to ratios of human behavior, particularly management behavior, within the corporate context, that is the subject of so much subsequent commentary and theorizing.
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