ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author argues that the corporation is a pathological institution, a dangerous possessor of the great power it wields over people and societies. By revealing the institutional imperatives common to all corporations and their implications for society, he hope to provide a crucial and missing link in people’s attempts to understand and do something about some of the most pressing issues of our time. The corporation’s dramatic rise to dominance is one of the remarkable events of modern history, not least because of the institution’s inauspicious beginnings. The corporation, Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means argued, was “potentially the dominant institution of the modern world”; its managers had becomes “princes of industry,” their companies akin to feudal fiefdoms. Business people should therefore take some comfort from their ability to compartmentalize the contradictory moral demands of their corporate and non-corporate lives, for it is precisely this “schizophrenia,” as Anita Roddick calls it that saves them from becoming psychopaths.
