ABSTRACT
The foregoing argument poses important questions for the now fashionable concept of ‘stakeholding’, for the reform of British company law and for a reexamination of employee protection. These are all issues which are extensively dealt with elsewhere in this book by John Parkinson. The way my overall argument embraces those issues needs briefly to be outlined. First, it is important to remind ourselves about the larger concerns which give rise to speculation about these areas of our ‘social’ life. Cole again provides the continuity. Although status meant, for very long periods of English history, marked inequalities, nevertheless, the privileged aspired to a loose, political enfranchisement reflected in distinctly ‘political’ arrangements buttressed by degrees of autonomy within a number of distinct ‘social’ spheres. But times change:
In other words, there was a long-standing assumption of participation in the social enterprise, represented for some little time by the guilds which were not confined to the economic sphere but were ‘the common form of popular association’.42 Industrialisation saw the relative decline of genuine participation in social organisation. There was a democratic commitment to ‘grand’ politics, whose forms and institutions, were, unfortunately, not updated to honour the sentiments underlying that commitment.43 The market came to be regarded as the economic equivalent of the democratic political process. Although, at its best, the market can make a genuine commitment to personal liberation, it is often not at its best. It can become dominated by
private fiefdoms which have little pretension to anything other than profit maximisation. To quote Cole for the last time:
Quite aside from the force of this argument in itself, it needs to be observed that socio-industrial organisations are often State-dependent, workerdependent and, indeed, dependent on a raft of institutions of civil society to which they often pay scant democratic respect, pleading instead the legitimacy of the market. Hence, the resurgence of the ‘stakeholder’ concept. For example, it is widely accepted that governments increasingly provide ‘public goods’, such as education and training, in which industry is often too short-sighted to invest. Not only are such goods increasingly important in the new technological revolution, but an insight into our proper priorities is afforded when skills and education are often described as ‘human capital’, for this makes it clear that it is human needs which must be respected, rather than man-made institutions which are the product of history and accident as well as of genuine desiderata.45
