ABSTRACT
Since its inception, the corporation has undergone a series of fundamental changes – in fact, complete metamorphoses – in its nature, legal status, institutional purpose, economic and social rationale, functional logic, and organisational structure, all as part of a dynamic and incessant process of corporate evolution that extends for more than four centuries. From the first joint-stock companies that started to emerge in the 16th century in England, beginning with the Company of the Mines Royal created in 1564 and the Company of Mineral and Battery Works constituted in 1565, corporations evolved into the more elaborate moulds of the large trading companies established in the 17th and 18th centuries, with the English East India Company, the Dutch West India Company, the Royal African Company and the Hudson Bay Company among the most important. These were the forerunners of the modern international enterprises that became a major symbol of the emerging industrial society of the 19th century, which in turn hatched what came to be the top economic icon of the 20th century, the multinational corporation. Multinational corporations (MNCs) started to take shape in 1914 and entered their maturation phase in the 1970s and 1980s (Gabel and Bruner 2003).
