ABSTRACT
When Adam Smith envisaged the invisible hand working for the greater good through the single-minded pursuit of profit he did so from a perspective that could not conceive of the modern industrial nation state and its welfare provision, the untrammelled rise of the corporation2 to become the dominant economic unit, including its ability to decouple ownership from management of the often grim reality of production, or, modern ‘hyper-globalisation’ facilitated by technological advances such as the internet and containerisation. His was a conception of a market economy wrought in the mercantile era.
