ABSTRACT

The scale and scope of modern integrated business enterprise that emerged in the late nineteenth century required distinctive professional management skills and huge capital investments that often necessitated risk sharing through dispersed stock ownership. Under something like the property conception, an active market for corporate control might exist to discipline and remove inefficient corporate management. One would think that whether the corporation law endorses the property conception or the social entity conception would have important consequences. But the ever-emergent quality of law suggests that the resolution of the conceptual conflict that was reached in the late 1980s by the endorsement of the entity concept, will not be a final answer to the question, what is a corporation. For most of the century the lack of agreement on the ultimate nature and purpose of the business corporation has not generated intense conflict.